From prison overcrowding in Africa to the fight against torture worldwide, from restoring the rule of law to the social scientific work of policing on evidence-based foundations, the series explores how governments and nongovernmental organizations are responding to challenges in times of insecurity and crisis.
Juan E Méndez
“Torture and International Law: The Struggle for Effective Abolition”
Thursday, February 19, 2015
7 p.m., Vollum lecture hall
Juan E. Méndez is professor of human rights law in residence at the American University-Washington College of Law and the UN special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment. He is the author— with Marjorie Wentworth—of Taking a Stand (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, October 2011). He has been an advisor on crime prevention to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, cochair of the Human Rights Institute of the International Bar Association, president of the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), and scholar-in-residence at the Ford Foundation in New York. Concurrent with his duties at ICTJ, he was Kofi Annan’s special advisor on the prevention of genocide. Méndez has taught international law and human rights at Oxford University (UK), Notre Dame Law School, Georgetown, and the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and has worked for Human Rights Watch and as executive director of the Inter-American Institute on Human Rights.
Sponsored by the Munk-Darling Lecture Fund in International Relations.
Andrew Jefferson
“Entangled Encounters with Prisons”
Monday, March 16, 2015
7 p.m., Vollum lecture hall
Andrew M. Jefferson is a prisons researcher at DIGNITY (Danish Institute Against Torture), specializing in the ethnographic study of prisons and prison reform processes in the global south. He works at the intersection between activism and research, seeking out new questions about age-old problems related to justice, human rights, and confinement. Jefferson has a background in psychology but adopts an expansive transdisciplinary approach to make sense of complex social phenomena. He has Masters degrees in psychology and worldview studies, a PhD from the University of Copenhagen, and has just finished a book tentatively titled Prisons and Human Rights: Comparing Institutional Encounters.
Sponsored by the Elizabeth C. Ducey Political Science Lecture Fund.
Saul Kassin
Tuesday, March 17, 2015
4:15: “Why Confessions Trump Innocence: Mechanisms of Influence”
7:30: “Why Innocent People Confess”
Vollum lecture hall
Saul Kassin is a distinguished professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Massachusetts Professor of Psychology at Williams College. Dr. Kassin is one of the nation’s leading experts on criminal interrogation, confession evidence, and the risk of false confessions. He has done extensive research on the “confirmation bias” that a confession introduces into a criminal investigation and also on the impact that confessions have on judges and juries. Dr. Kassin’s visit is cosponsored by Reed’s division of psychology, religion, philosophy, and linguistics and the Oregon Innocence Project.
Sponsored by the Reed College division of psychology, religion, philosophy, and linguistics and the Oregon Innocence Project.
Panel Discussion: Joshua Phillips, Mark Fallon, Christian Meissner, and Steven Kleinman
“Questioning High-Value Suspects: Confronting Torture and Advancing Effective Interrogation”
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
7 p.m., Vollum lecture hall
Joshua E.S. Phillips is the author of None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture (Verso, 2010), which was selected as one of the top books on violence for Five Books. He has reported from Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and South Asia. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Newsweek, The Nation, Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, among other publications. He has produced broadcast features for NPR, the BBC, and Al Jazeera. Phillips won a Heywood Broun Award and Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for excellence in broadcast journalism for his American Radio Works documentary What Killed Sergeant Gray.
Mark Fallon is the director of ClubFed, LLC, providing strategic consulting services on international security matters to clients within the private sector, public sector, and academic research community. He serves as the chair of the US government’s High Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) Research Committee and is the vice chair of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) IMPACT Executive Committee. Fallon has appeared as a subject-matter expert on national security measures on CNN, NBC, Fox News, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, and the BBC, among others. Fallon began his federal law enforcement career as a Deputy US Marshal in 1979 and served as a special agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) for more than 27 years. In 2008, he was appointed to the Senior Executive Service within the Department of Homeland Security. Fallon has been involved in some of the most significant counterterrorism investigations and operations in U.S. history, including the attacks of 9/11, and he was appointed as the special agent in charge of a task force created to specifically investigate the al-Qa’ida terrorist network.
Christian Meissner is professor of psychology at Iowa State University. He holds a PhD in cognitive and behavioral science from Florida State University and conducts empirical studies on the psychological processes underlying investigative interviews, including issues surrounding eyewitness recall and identification, deception detection, and interrogations. For the past five years, he has served as PI for an international research effort aimed at developing evidence-based methods of elicitation and interrogation in support of the US High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG). He has published more than 75 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, and his research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Defense, the US Department of Justice, and the US Department of Homeland Security. From 2010–12, he served as program director of law and social sciences at the National Science Foundation. He is currently president of the Society for Applied Research in Memory & Cognition and is an elected fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Psychonomic Society.
Steven M. Kleinman has 30 years of operational and leadership experience as an intelligence officer with assignments worldwide, including for the Defense Department’s special survival program, the Air Force Special Operations Command, and the US Central Command. He is a decorated veteran of Operation Just Cause, Operation Desert Storm, and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Kleinman has coauthored over two dozen formal papers in the areas of intelligence, the science of interrogation, and the strategy for combatting violent extemism. He was a senior advisor to the US Intelligence Science Board’s groundbreaking study on strategic interrogation and has testified as an expert witness before Senate and House committees. He currently serves on the Science Advisory Committee for the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG). Kleinman holds an MS in strategic intelligence from the National Intelligence University, an MS in forensic sciences from the National University, and a BA in psychology from the University of California, Davis. He retired from the Air Force in 2015 in the rank of full colonel.
Sponsored by the Elizabeth C. Ducey Political Science Lecture Fund.