Please join us for an evening of learning and discussion about one of the most controversial issues in America today!
Thirty-two Years in the Trenches: Recollections of a Clinical & Forensic Psychologist Evaluating and Treating Sexual Offenders (and the courtroom battles that followed)
with Dr. Joseph J. Plaud, Ph.D.
Executive Director, Applied Behavioral Consultants, LLC
Monday, September 16 @ 6:30 pm
Cambridge Friends Center
5 Longfellow Park, Cambridge, MA
Dr. Joe Plaud first began working with sexual offenders as a first year graduate student in 1987 at the University of Maine. His focus of clinical training was on the evaluation and treatment of sexual offenders within a behavioral psychology orientation. In this talk Dr. Plaud will share his personal and professional observances and recollections of how public and societal view have changed during the past thirty-plus years, taking into consideration criminal, civil commitment and registration issues. Dr. Plaud will also discuss his work in the courtroom which has been devoted to the accurate dissemination of empirical data concerning sexual offender recidivism. Finally, Dr. Plaud will also offer his own observances about the future of psycho-legal issues involving sexual offenders. Dr. Plaud hopes for didactic audience participation as he charts out his own professional life course in working with this clinical population in a number of different contexts.
Following the talk the floor will be open for questions, answers and comments.
For more information call (617) 623-5288
About Dr. Plaud:
Dr. Joseph J. Plaud, born and raised in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is a clinical and forensic psychologist whose graduate training was primarily focused on behavioral assessment and therapy, with specific emphasis on working with forensic clinical populations. He received his Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) degree in psychology in 1987 from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with High Honors in Psychology. His undergraduate minors were in philosophy and American history. Dr. Plaud then enrolled as a graduate student at the University of Maine, in Orono, Maine, where he received his Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in clinical psychology in 1993, after completing his clinical internship at the University of Mississippi and Jackson Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Centers in Jackson, Mississippi, serving as Chief Psychology Resident. Dr. Plaud then joined the clinical psychology faculty at the University of North Dakota in 1993, where he was actively involved in the training of clinical and experimental psychology graduate students in their Ph.D. programs, as well as pursuing his teaching and research activities in psychology, including behavior analysis, behavior modification and therapy, behavioral assessment, and sexual behavior.
Returning to his native Massachusetts in early 1998, Dr. Plaud served as the Director of Research for the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, and was also appointed a Visiting Scholar of Human Development at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. In 2001 he founded Applied Behavioral Consultants, LLC, and serves as its Executive Director. Dr. Plaud provides clinical and forensic psychological services within the United States and internationally involving clinical and forensic cases, lecturing widely in these areas of psychology and the law. Dr. Plaud is also a Fellow of the American Psychological Association.
Additionally, Dr. Plaud has studied, written and lectured in the philosophical and historical foundations of psychology, with particular interests in the theoretical underpinnings of behaviorism, behavior analysis, and behavior therapy, and the accurate dissemination of behavior analysis in public forums. Dr. Plaud has published and lectured widely in the assessment and treatment of sexual offenders, and his opinion is frequently sought in forensic cases in state and federal courts across the United States.
Dr. Plaud was honorably discharged from the United States Naval Reserve with the rank of Lieutenant Commander in the Medical Service Corps. He further served as a Trustee of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. Between 2002 and 2008 Dr. Plaud founded and administered an American history museum in Worcester, Massachusetts dedicated to the lives and legacies of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Deal. Among Dr. Plaud’s many other personal, professional, and educational interests, he is currently pursuing graduate studies in sacred theology at Saint Joseph’s College in Standish, Maine.
Dr. Plaud and his wife Eve Plaud reside in the Dorchester Neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts in an historic area known as the Polish Triangle. Their home is located where three Neighborhoods of Boston converge: Dorchester, South Boston, and Boston’s South End.
“SVPA laws and practices refer to “mental abnormalities,” which sounds scientific. But the American Psychiatric Association has opposed such laws, citing their abuse of civil liberties and the use of unscientific ‘disorders’ as the basis for punishment. In practice, designation as a sexually violent predator (SVP) is not based on substantial scientific research, and the therapy received by detainees in ‘treatment facilities’ is based more on passing fads than on careful scholarship.”
Despite child sexual abuse declining by 60% between 1992 and 2010, states continue to legislate as if lenient sex offender laws are a national emergency. And, like so many other corners of the criminal justice system, the crackdown hasn’t affected all Americans equally. State registries are disproportionately black and overwhelmingly poor. As demonstrated by the recent case of Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire long accused of molesting underage girls, local prosecutors and judges have wide discretion to overlook wealthy offenders while imposing impossible restrictions on poorer ones.
“Laws punishing sex offenses are still becoming harsher and more exacting, even though reported sex crimes are declining—and in fact were already declining well before these laws were passed. In consequence, the numbers keep climbing: people convicted of sex offenses are a rapidly growing segment of the prison population—up to 30% in some states—while beyond the walls of the prison, additional punishments, provisions, and ‘collateral consequences’ have been added on, virtually all of them based on flawed diagnostics and unsound prognostication.”
“In 2006, advocates with the 
