Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Bill (Second sitting)

Ruth Cadbury Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 25th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

Q It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr McCabe, on my first Bill Committee. Mr Dawson, I want to pick up on the length of sentence. You say, in your submission, that merely increasing the length of time that people spend in custody

“risks further alienating them and giving them grounds for grievance against the authorities”.

You are in effect saying that the Bill should include measures to ensure that effective deradicalisation programmes are provided. What would they look like?

Peter Dawson: The Prison Service runs two programmes at the moment. I said earlier that the evidence base for those was small, because it is innovative work, but they are clearly worth while. The most valuable work that is done in prisons in terms of changing people’s attitudes and behaviours is the day-to-day example that is set around them—the supporting of their growing up and giving them reasons that make life worth living that are nothing to do with their ideology. It is an incessant process, a slow process and an uncertain process, but it is about the impact of everybody in prison on that individual.

What people whose lives have changed dramatically would say is this—I can think of someone I know who committed two murders and who would tell this story. Very often, a particular individual, in the course of a sentence, makes a connection and is able to help that person to grow up and see a different future for themselves. The faith that that key person shows will often drive change in behaviour more than any particular programme.

I have said it before, but the one thing that I am absolutely clear about is that I have never seen anybody coerced into rehabilitation. The particular theory that academics talk mostly about now is called desistance theory. It is about what causes people to change their route in life. That rests very heavily on the idea that somebody has to be able to see a better life for themselves in the future. The academic work tends to support that but, I think, so does all our experience. So I would say that we should not look to prison for magic solutions; we should look for the extreme skill among staff of all sorts, and volunteers in prisons too, in establishing relationships that slowly change the way that somebody thinks about their future. When prisoners go out, however, those promises have to be met. That is why we are saying that rehabilitation is what happens after prison, as much as what happens during it.

[Ruth Cadbury]

Q Are there any other measures for the rehabilitation of terrorist offenders that you would like to see in the Bill?

Peter Dawson: I do not think there is anything that I would like to see in the Bill. The question that I hope the Committee will ask is what we do not yet know about the circumstances of the cases that have prompted the Bill. Both the Fishmongers’ Hall attack and the attack in Streatham have been subject to serious case reviews. I certainly have not seen those reviews published.

In both cases, it seems to me that there are questions to ask about whether the existing framework of law would have been adequate had different decisions been taken. That is not to point a finger of blame but simply to say, if we have an existing structure that was not used to best effect, that we should think hard before changing the structure and changing it in a way that raises some of the problems that I have described.

--- Later in debate ---

[Miss Dines]

Q Thank you for your evidence, Professor Grubin. I am interested in your view of how valuable the polygraph test is in assessing an offender’s intention in the long term, in comparison with the other tools available by way of standard psychological testing.

Professor Grubin: It is not valuable at all. You cannot use polygraph testing as a means of testing intentions. The polygraph is looking specifically at behaviours. Your colleague referred to concrete, very narrow questions of the type, “Have you done this?” They can be screening-type questions, or they can be very specific, such as, “Did you rob the bank?”, “Did you shoot the gun?” or whatever. It is not a tool for eliciting intentions or validating responses to those sorts of question.

[Ruth Cadbury]

Q You said that in normal circumstances the test is 80% to 90% accurate. My hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North raised questions about those with mental health problems and the issue of immaturity. I want to ask you about some other categories as to whether there are also concerns about the accuracy or appropriateness of tests: people with learning disabilities; people who are neurodiverse or have personality disorders; and non-English speakers. Are there concerns about the use of polygraph tests for those people and for any other vulnerable people?

Professor Grubin: For people with an intellectual disability, you are absolutely right that the accuracy of the test decreases once IQ drops below a certain level. In the sex offender testing, we will typically test down to 60, but we are much more cautious with the test outcome. It is still valuable, because of the disclosure aspect; you still get information and information gain—the point about information gain is the main one I want to leave you with—from the test, even with someone with an intellectual disability.

Again, examiners need to be trained; they need to address their questions in a different way, one that is much more concrete. The test has to be modified. It has to be shorter because of fatigue and issues such as that. So, you are absolutely right that accuracy decreases, but you must remember that nothing hinges on a test outcome alone. If it is a deceptive response and you have no other concerns, you would still look further. You might say, “We have to be more cautious because of IQ.”

There is no evidence to suggest it works any differently with people with personality disorders from how it works with anybody else. Again, because of misunder- standings about how polygraph works, people think, “It does not work with psychopathic individuals because they don’t feel anxiety.” First, the test is not based on anxiety. Sometimes when we do talks, and we will have an examiner, we can do demonstrations of polygraph testing. We used to like to get a volunteer from the audience who we can hook up. I try to pick somebody who is also a psychopath, so we can kill two birds with one stone. I know that here we would not be able to do that, but in the audiences I speak to there are often one or two psychiatrists who would fit the bill for a psychopath. There has been some testing of personality disorders and there is no evidence that the test itself is any less valuable. Again, part of the training of the examiner is that they need to know how to interview these individuals, because of the challenges that they may present.

I believe the third group you were thinking about was those with neurodevelopmental disorder or autistic spectrum disorder. Again, the evidence is that the test works just as well with them as with anybody else, but you have to make allowances in the interview, because of the concrete nature of a lot of their thinking, language difficulties and so on. You need to take that into account in terms of the interviewing, but there is no evidence to suggest that the test itself works any differently with them from how it works with anybody else.

[Ruth Cadbury]

Q My last question was about non-English speakers.

Professor Grubin: We do test with interpreters, and they seem to work just as well. Again, it does take training for the examiner to know how to work with an interpreter, and the interpreter needs training as well. Certainly, security services in other countries use it with interpreters quite regularly.

[Laura Trott]

Q Professor, you talked about a failure rate of up to 20%. What drives that failure rate? Is it the fact that people are tricking the test or that the examiner is making a mistake? What are the drivers behind that 20%?

Professor Grubin: There is a range of reasons that people can give either false positives or false negatives. Apologies for not looking at you while I am answering. Sometimes it is because the test hasn’t been set out properly, the examinee hasn’t been prepared properly in the pre-test interview or the questions haven’t been formulated well, and so on.

The examinee may have some other experience that is close enough to the way the question is being asked to cause that sort of response. For example, there was a very good study carried out in Israel. I won’t go through all the details of it, but they were able to debrief afterwards as we were with police officers who were applying for promotion. There were two false positives. The ground troops knew that these two people had been telling the truth, but they were said to be lying. One of them had said that he had previously made an insurance claim in Israel. At that time, the insurance companies in Israel would test people making insurance claims to see if they were honest or not. He said that he was being honest, but he was told that he was lying. He couldn’t get that out of his mind during the test. That causes the cognitive processing we were talking about, and it made him respond in that way.

The other person was more interesting. The experiment itself was about a test that the examinees could cheat on. You would know if they cheated or not. The second police officer said that he cheated when he took the test, but there was something wrong when he took it and the examiners had him do the test a second time. When he did it the second time, he said, “I don’t think I had better cheat again,” so he did it honestly. When he was asked if he had cheated on the test the second time, he said that he was thinking about having cheated the first time, which is why he reacted as he did.

There are other reasons as well, but it is hard to explain without going into the details about how polygraph testing works. Basically, you are comparing the relevant questions that you are interested in with so-called comparison questions. If those comparison questions are not evocative enough to elicit a response when a person is telling the truth to the relevant question, or vice versa, when they are too hot and the person is much more concerned about that question than about the relevant one, you can also get mistakes on the test.

The final reason is that sometimes we just don’t know; it just happens.