Diversity, "Objective Advocacy," and the Silence of Forensic Psychology

If you would rather hear some of these ideas in a video, you can find that here:

I’ll never forget starting out in forensics, at an early consultation group where I was discussing a case involving a youth of color. The state had petitioned to certify him as an adult and it was my job to complete a risk assessment. I told the group (of much more experienced evaluators) that I was struggling with the racial dynamics. That I didn’t think a White kid would have been arrested under the tenuous circumstances of the petition. I said that even if he had been legitimately arrested (and that's its own conversation), his three prior arrests seemed to involve driving while black. Those three arrests plus the instant offense, which case law commanded that I consider "true" for the purposes of certification, loaded toward risk for future violence. I was aware that if I concluded he was “high risk," (though I don't use summary risk ratings like this now) he would be more likely to be certified. I told my colleagues I was uncomfortable being part of another black youth trapped into a system that we all know is biased. I told my colleagues that this is something I wrestle with under typical circumstances, but under these ones it just felt...wrong. 

Here were the exact words spoken to me that day: “We have to stay in our lane.” To their credit, those words were said, kindly, professionally, and supportively. They were said with empathy, and at least some agreement that I might be right, and this might be wrong. And they were advising me correctly, according to virtually any guiding rubric of forensic psychology.

I stayed in my lane. For that evaluation, and hundreds afterwards.

It wasn’t until I began the process of Board Certification that I found enough confidence to bring this all out again, shake it off, and ask some hard questions about my participation in oppressive systems. There was no way I could do all that reading in preparation for board exams, and not come back to questions about what we're doing, and why. I had the privilege of waiting that long as a White clinician. I got to choose when to come back around again. 

It so happened that I was also working in downtown Minneapolis, out of the very Courthouse that was prosecuting Derek Chauvin, while I studied. But, better late than never, I started to ask what harm I’m responsible for when I “stay in my lane.” I started to ask who that was helping, and who it was hurting. I take responsibility for not being brave enough to ask sooner. But once I returned to these questions, they are a little like a runaway train; the pursuit of one answer mostly leads to ten other questions and twenty other problems about "the system." 

We like to hold forensic psychology up like it’s different. It's separate from the ethical mandates of the wider clinical field (which has it's own cultural responsivity problems most definitely, but in some ways is considerably farther ahead than we are). We say we aren’t activists because it would compromise our objectivity. We don't get into identity politics because we're not focused on identity, at least not more so than justice. We're too savvy to be fooled by sob stories, and our defendants aren't to be trusted anyway. We damn sure aren’t allies, because our allegiance is to the Court. As if we can’t have more than one allegiance at a time. As if navigating neutrality between competing allegiances isn't the defining basis of an expert within an adversarial system. As if allegiance and culture are antithetical. As if any of this justifies Silence.

It doesn’t.

We’re supposed to be “objective” but what that really means is that we’re a certain kind of subjective. A milled, rendered, refined, distilled version of subjective. A proper subjective. A Courtly subjective. But still subjective. We participate in a system that oppresses minorities without acknowledging those inequities, because acknowledging them means stepping out of our lane. We teach (kindly, patiently) young clinicians to follow our lead. The ones that don't, we decide that's a reflection of their value and their work. We are objective and doing the job right. They are not. 

Meanwhile, we don’t interrogate the mandates that shape the very questions we answer, and we hold the questions themselves up as pure and all-knowing. Yes, but is it relevant to Competency? How could racial oppression NOT be relevant to competency?! The relevancy is all around us in the arrest records, the fact that the majority of our defendant's cell block is black and brown. The relevancy is woven through the righteous anger, despair, and the mental health issues of our defendants. How we interrogate and then parse the relevancy of our forensic questions matters. In psychology, our word for this is validity. Are you measuring what you think you're measuring? So the questions matter if the Court sometimes isn't asking the right ones. In the ways those questions need to change, forensic psychologists are responsible to help them.

From this far back, there is little meaningful difference between advocacy, allyship, and activism. Not really. They all mean stepping out of the silent, unhearing system that marches on regardless. Sometimes the answer needs to be, “this lane sucks." Or, "this lane is inequitable." Or even, "this lane is broken.” You can call it whatever you want, but the answer is action. And action is a requirement. Which means that if we’re not part of the discourse, we’re part of the problem. If all you ever do is stay in your lane, you’re part of the problem. I’m part of the problem. We have a serious problem, and the problem is protected by our "objectivity."

I have a course on gender affirming practices where a lot of this stuff is also relevant. I don’t really talk about social justice much in that training, because there's too much other information to try and get to students who need to know how to interact with gender diverse defendants. (Spoiler: we're failing pretty profoundly there, too.) But one of the slides in that training asks participants to consider something that as far as I know, I completely made up, so please don't ask me for a citation. The term I use is: Objective Advocacy. Which I describe as: allegiance, as a field, to promoting equal treatment and social justice within the systems we work in, while attempting to balance neutrality in individual assessments.

It's semantic. Yes. I know that. I came up with this term when wrestling with the great apathy caused by reminding each other to stay in our lane. I wanted a way to reach clinicians - heck, to reach myself - participating in this collective shrug that says that there’s only so much we can do within the proper confines of our role. I wanted a path for myself to break out of doing nothing, to speak to oppression in a way that is relevant to our forensic question. To say to each other: "no, no. It's ok. We're still objective. We have to do what's right." 

Whatever words we use, I am trying to find footing to where we're not bending so far as to compromise individual cases. To figure out how I can recognize systemic inflation of risk without erasing all risk from the individual in front of me. I am convinced that we can consider adjudicative capacities while also recognizing a lifetime of traumatic interaction with the justice system. Because again, if those things aren't relevant, then the problem is the question. The question is the problem.

So, in the middle here, I have more questions and few answers. That is what it means to stagger these few tentative steps outside my lane. To brace for resistance, to absorb and resist temptations to jump back into my safe, comfortable, expected lane where I respond narrowly to the question directly before me and ignore, ever so intentionally, the great wide world around me. And to recognize, even in this, that whatever my newfound resistance here, it doesn't threaten my very life the way it does for the people I evaluate.

I have little faith left in objectivity. Objectivity is subjectivity dressed in Court-appropriate attire. For the first decade of my career, my very striving to be objective ensured that I was not objective. 

Frankly, objectivity is White. Objectivity is straight. Objectivity is male. It wears a dark suit with a crisp white shirt and a blank expression and is called "doctor." Objectivity has no disability, speaks English, has money, an education, and a high status job. Objectivity is not objective. It’s the status quo. We need to be objective advocates, and to push for new lanes. 

Challenging objectivity while also seeking to find our footing in a system that still needs mental health experts is not something one blog post can answer. It’s a sustained practice of reinventing what we think defines a house at the same time we live there. It means tearing something down, and imagining something new, and keeping part of what's old, all at the same time. It requires engaging with discrepancies while sometimes upholding them. It requires admitting that processed subjectivity is not objectivity. As agents of the Court, we will sometimes participate in travesty. We can hold that and believe there is good, too. Maybe there can be balance but first there must be recognition.

Over the last couple of years I’ve tried to be a better objective advocate. That means sometimes stepping into something closer to individual advocacy. Saying, explicitly sometimes, the words between the lines - that I did not rate all three priors toward risk because they are not consistent with the sample that says they are meaningful. That's step 1 in a series of many steps that call into question the instrument itself. To start, if I believe that a trauma history and systemic oppression is relevant to the forensic question, I write about it. More and more, I see that it's relevant. It is up to the Court to decide what to do with my words, to agree or not. It is up to me to write them. It is up to all of us to write them, because no Court ever got there alone. We are the experts on people, on trauma, on contextualized behavior. We must lead. Sometimes that means showing the Court that the question they are asking us is actually three questions, with six answers. One question isn’t the story. They need a new question, a new framework, a new system. And it starts with interrogating "objectivity."