On Thursday, November 20, 2014, at the Bornstein Amphitheater at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, CLBB and the Boston Society for Neurology and Psychiatry co-sponsored a talk by Steven Pinker, renowned Harvard cognitive psychologist, linguist, and popular author, to discuss his most recent book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. Video of the event is included below in its entirety and at our Vimeo page. Continue reading »

While we may believe that we choose and direct our movements consciously, the physiology of human motor control provides compelling evidence that this sense of conscious decision – free will – is a perception only.

On Thursday, October 2, 2014, at the Bornstein Amphitheater at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, CLBB and the Boston Society for Neurology and Psychiatry co-sponsored an event exploring how an understanding of human motor control can contribute to the question of free will. Video of the event is included below in its entirety and at our Vimeo page. Continue reading »

On September 12-14, 2014, the Atlanta Neuroethics Consortium was held at Georgia State University. The topic, Neuro-Interventions and the Law: Regulating Human Mental Capacity, brought together leading scholars on philosophy, neuroscience, law, cognitive and clinical psychology, psychiatry, and bioethics. The participants included Judge Andre Davis, Nita Farahany, Stephen Morse, Francis Shen, Walter Sinnot-Armstrong, Nicole Vincent, and Paul Root Wolpe. The conference panels, talks, and keynotes addressed pressing issues about managing and appropriately utilizing novel neuroscientific technologies as they relate to legal issues. Continue reading »

In the second digital edition of Mindscapes: Inside Mass General Psychiatry, Mass General Giving highlighted the work of the CLBB NeuroLaw Library and its growing impact across the legal and policy landscape.

By Kelsey Abbruzzese, October 14, 2024

Massachusetts General Hospital’s Center for Law, Brain & Behavior (CLBB) operates at the intersection of law and medicine, working to ensure that the most accurate and actionable neuroscience is present in courtrooms across the globe. Now, thanks to a generous gift from The Tow Foundation and with backing from other supporters, CLBB has launched its latest resource in those efforts: the NeuroLaw Library, a first-of-its kind database that collects all the expert research from CLBB’s team of legal and medical experts. This free, open access resource contains journal articles, amicus briefs and affidavits focused on neuroscience, along with educational videos, a neurolaw dictionary and toolkits for attorneys and incarcerated persons.

“In the legal field, better science leads to better outcomes,” says Judith G. Edersheim, JD, MD, who with Bruce H. Price, MD, is co-founder and director of the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior. “With the NeuroLaw Library, we’re leveling the playing field when it comes to informing the justice system about neuroscience.”

“A lot of people don’t have access to neuroscience resources that can help their case,” adds Library Director Stephanie Tabashneck, PsyD, JD. “The idea behind the NeuroLaw Library is that they can get in and get what they need.”

Since its founding in 2008, CLBB has become a leader in providing neuroscience research to inform juvenile and young adult justice, aging and elder fraud prevention, criminal sentencing and memory in eyewitness testimony. CLBB’s small but mighty team has educated legislators and judges about brain science, written legal briefs on the latest findings and testified as expert witnesses. But, as Dr. Edersheim puts it, the team couldn’t be everywhere at once, so they wanted a way to share this knowledge with as many people as possible.

“Think about the neuroscience of substance use disorders,” Dr. Edersheim says. “The law had thought of these as character flaws, and those misconceptions led to vicious cycles of incarceration and relapse. But the brain science of addiction is incredibly useful to drive better outcomes. All of that knowledge is actionable, and it’s leading people to rethink the conditions of parole and expansions of treatments within correctional facilities. For us, the question was, how do we get it to more people?”

Enter the NeuroLaw Library. With this resource, people across the judicial spectrum—defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges, probation and parole officers, advocates, incarcerated persons and their families—can search for information about how the brain works and what that means for the justice system. For example, a user can type in “solitary confinement” or “substance use” and find a treasure trove of legal knowledge in those matters.

“The CLBB NeuroLaw Library aligns powerfully with our core mission to make ‘accurate and actionable’ neuroscience broadly accessible to inform and reform law and public policy,” says CLBB Executive Director Robert Kinscherff, PhD, JD. “Each module added over time will bring neuroscience and related behavioral sciences to critical areas of law and policy with impacts across the lifespan, from child well-being to elder protection.”

The first module of the NeuroLaw Library, titled Juvenile and Emerging Adult Justice, is one of five content modules planned, with a staggered release over the next two years. This first module reflects the growing impact of neuroscience research on sentencing reform and sentence mitigation in felony cases involving crimes committed by youth and young adults. Research in adolescent neuroscience shows that most criminal behavior desists after age 19, but sending juvenile offenders to prison increases their risk of continued offenses.

“What we’ve learned about adolescent and young adult brains is that they have an underdeveloped frontal lobe and a hyperdeveloped amygdala, which is like having a Ferrari engine with Smartcar brakes,” Dr. Tabashneck says. “They’re really good at go, but really bad at stop, which translates to making poor decisions in a highly emotional context. Educating judges, policymakers and attorneys on these dynamics is incredibly helpful, because they’re making decisions about community safety and sentencing.”

Future modules—made possible by the generosity of The Tow Foundation, the late Dr. Michael A. Jenike through the David Judah Fund, and Steve and Joan Belkin—will share CLBB’s expertise in substance use, trauma, elder abuse and child protection. The database will also leverage artificial intelligence to adapt complex materials to five different reading levels, starting at the sixth grade. This feature is designed to meet the needs of justice-involved persons restricted in the amount of time they can spend in the prison library or who may have limited educational backgrounds.

Feedback on the library has been overwhelmingly positive, with interest from the Innocence Project, the Sentencing Project, the National Center for Juvenile Justice and the Juvenile Law Center. CLBB is poised to distribute the NeuroLaw Library to every adult correctional institution in Maine, with plans for juvenile centers, and is in talks with technology providers to expand to other institutions throughout the country.

“The impact of the NeuroLaw Library is already being felt across the legal and policy landscape – from incarcerated persons writing their own appeals, to defense attorneys and prosecutors, judicial educators, and legislative staffers,” Dr. Kinscherff says. “Eliminating barriers to accessing reliable science and skillfully developed litigation materials and briefs is the first essential step toward democratizing access to science so it can be applied in legal and policy decision-making.”

Find the full Mindscapes story here.

In July, the Center for Law, Brain, and Behavior lost founding Advisory Board member, Joan Heilig Kahn, after a brief illness. Joan was devoted to CLBB and its mission, offering her wisdom, her energy, and her insight, as well as her home and her vast network of friends and admirers to help us create a more equitable and enlightened justice system. Joan was central to building CLBB and pursuing excellence in our endeavors with her leadership, her philanthropy, and her extraordinary grace. We will miss her terribly, but will carry her spirit with us as we pursue better decisions aligned with neuroscience to create better outcomes aligned with justice. 

October 9, 2024, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM EST

Watch the recording of this event here.

CLBB and the Petrie-Flom Center hosted a thought-provoking discussion on the mass incarceration of children, adolescent neuroscience, and restorative justice. Our distinguished panelists—a judge, a psychologist, and a lawyer rooted in restorative justice—shared their expertise on how we can align justice systems with science and pave the way for more humane and effective pathways forward.

Panelists:

Moderator: Stephanie Tabashneck, PsyD, JD, Senior Fellow of Law and Applied Neuroscience, Center for Law Brain and Behavior at Harvard Medical School and Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School; Licensed Psychologist and Attorney; and Director, CLBB Neurolaw Library

Honorable Nancy Gertner, JD, Senior Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School; Retired Federal Judge; Author; and Managing Director, Center for Law, Brain and Behavior, Mass General Hospital

Melissa Wood Bartholomew, JD, MDiv, MSW, PhD, Associate Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging and Lecturer on Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, Harvard Divinity School; and racial justice and healing practitioner

Robert Kinscherff, PhD, JD, Executive Director, Center for Law, Brain & Behavior; Associate Managing Director, Juvenile and Young Adult Justice Project, Massachusetts General Hospital; and Former Petrie-Flom Senior Fellow

By Dr. Robert Kinscherff, July 19, 2024, 2:30 a.m.

Young adults similar to adolescents, especially in emotionally charged situations

Thank you to Adrian Walker for his column on raising the age for juvenile offenders. I commend Senate President Karen Spilka and Senator Brendan Crighton for their roles in passing an amendment allowing 18-year-olds to be tried as juveniles for most offenses. This legislative decision is aligned with science and forward-thinking people familiar with the issues.

In January, the Supreme Judicial Court decided Commonwealth v. Mattis, banning life without possibility of parole for any crimes committed by individuals ages 18 to 20. The court’s decision and the state’s proposed “Raise the Age” legislation are consistent with the research summarized in a “White Paper on the Science of Late Adolescence, A Guide for Judges, Attorneys, and Policy Makers,” authored by the Center for Law, Brain, and Behavior at Massachusetts General Hospital. This report, which focused on brain development through late adolescence, demonstrates that adolescents and young adults are similar — especially in emotionally charged situations — in acting impulsively, taking risks, seeking immediate rewards, and yielding to peer influence.

Clearly, laws should not be based on outdated information. Hopefully, the Legislature will continue to follow the science in considering criminal justice policy.

Read Dr. Robert Kinscherff’s full Letter to the Editor here.

Digital agency Monogram teamed up with neuroscience researchers on a tool to reduce the number of incarcerated adolescents

By Chloe Aiello, Reporter, Inc., June 14, 2024

There’s a new tool in the fight for juvenile justice: an artificial intelligence-powered library.

Attorneys, judges, and even individuals who are incarcerated can now access the latest neuroscience and social science research at their own reading comprehension level, with the help of design engineering agency Monogram (No. 589 on 2023’s Inc. 5000 list). The Alpharetta, Georgia-based startup teamed up with the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior (CLBB) NeuroLaw Library at Massachusetts General Hospital, which is a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital, to create an AI-powered digital library. The resource is intended to democratize information on adolescent brains and behavior in hopes that it will be a valuable resource for people caught up in, or working in, the juvenile justice system.

“We’re using AI to help Harvard get this information out to as many people as possible,” Monogram co-founder and managing director DJ Patel says. “And if we can get even one person out of jail that doesn’t need to be in jail, we’ve won.”

Users who access the free online library will find articles from academic journals, amicus briefs, affidavits, court cases, as well as educational videos and toolkits all related to juvenile justice. The information is available to anyone, but specifically intended for people who are incarcerated, their legal representation, prosecutors, and other stakeholders in the juvenile justice system. That also includes judges, probation officers, and policymakers. 

Google’s generative AI, Gemini 1.5 Pro, came into play by generating accessible translations of research and legal documents. Users who open a document will see a slider on one side of their screen. Moving the slider to the left adjusts the reading comprehension level in five intervals, with the rightmost option being the paper’s original text and the leftmost a summary at roughly a 6th-grade comprehension level.

Patel imagines a child in jail using the library. Although that person may not understand the original text of a document, Monogram’s slider “can take that document and translate it into whatever you’re capable of understanding,” Patel says.

Monogram is a design engineering agency that partners with companies like Vercel, Algolia, Stripe, and Contentful to design cutting edge websites and branding for clients like GitHub, BigCommerce, Google’s Angular, grocery store chain Hy-Vee, and others. Monogram came to work with Stephanie Tabashneck, the founding director of the CLBB NeuroLaw Library, through a referral from a friend of Tabashneck’s who had worked with Monogram. The company was then selected as a vendor to respond to a request for proposal.

The prompt seemed like a simple one: build a digital library to make the neuroscience research at CLBB widely available. The intention was to “level the playing field, especially for children and late adolescents who were facing serious charges,” says Tabashneck, who is also a forensic psychologist and attorney. The idea originally came from CLBB co-founder Dr. Judith Edersheim, who asked if Tabashneck would direct the library about a year and a half ago. 

“At that time we had no idea what it meant to create a digital library so a lot of this was building the plane while it was flying with half the parts missing or falling off,” Tabashneck says.

Tabashneck says the primary audience for the NeuroLibrary’s research is people working in the legal system or people who are incarcerated, and that it is “not uncommon for defendants to be educating their attorneys,” as people can become “remarkably educated” about the legal system during a long incarceration. The resource is meant to help people understand their legal options, as well as to make sense of their own brain functioning, particularly if they committed a horrific crime when they were younger. Tabashneck also emphasized that while people who are incarcerated may enter the system as juveniles, they may only be eligible for parole when they are adults, so a wide range of age groups would likely use the resource.

Of course, a document being available doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s accessible. Much of the research that could fundamentally change someone’s sentencing-and life-can be found in dense academic texts, kept effectively out of reach due to the time, education level, or technology required to use it. Tabashneck says the team always wanted to include educational training and supplemental information to make the information more accessible, but it was Monogram that dreamed up the idea to use AI. 

“It actually was an ‘aha moment’ that happened during the creative discovery process,” says TJ Kohli, Monogram co-founder and creative director. “Libraries don’t provide context. They provide the content, the data that you’re looking for. In this case, we were able to build a really good library and provide context in addition to that with AI.”

Tabashneck says AI was a “real game changer” for accessibility, given there are roughly 500 different articles in the database. “If you’re including each iteration of reading level, that’s 2,500 different writing products,” she says.

That doesn’t mean people weren’t involved. Generative AI has a reputation for hallucinations, or generating false or misleading information. To solve that problem, the CLBB team tasked research assistants with reading over every AI-mediated translation of every research paper to ensure that there were no inconsistencies.

Tabashneck adds that it wasn’t as simple as prompting the AI to generate grade-level versions of the text because “the translation will make it sound like you’re talking to a kid, and say things like, ‘Isn’t it cool that your brain does this,” which she says may come across as “patronizing.” Kohli adds that labeling on the slider and its various reading levels was left intentionally abstract so as not to “alienate” readers. Beyond that, they also used AI to generate a short summary of a text that gives readers an immediate sense of what they are reading. 

Compared to other work from Monogram, CLBB’s website is pared back and utilitarian, or as Kohli says, “fast, efficient, intuitive” and designed to make every click count. The website, for example, starts loading a page the instant a user hovers over a link.

“If you’re in a correctional facility, and you have 10 minutes to be on a computer, lag time matters,” Tabashneck says. “These are things that we did for accessibility, but contributed to a stronger website overall.”

The NeuroLaw Library is a cutting edge resource to address the ongoing problem of youth incarceration in the U.S. The U.S. leads the industrial world in incarceration of children, according to Human Rights Watch. Estimates on the numbers of people who are incarcerated under the age of 18 vary. A 2021 report from the Sentencing Project tallies roughly 25,000 minors in youth facilities, as well as an additional 2,300 in adult facilities, whereas the American Civil Liberties Union estimates that some 60,000 youth are incarcerated “on any given day” in the United States.

And the “system is very Black and brown,” according to Marsha Levick, chief legal officer and co-founder of the Juvenile Law Center. Black minors are about 4.7 times more likely to be detained as white ones, according to the Sentencing Project. The Juvenile Law Center has a “working relationship,” Levick says, with CLBB, relying on its research to inform cases. The NeuroLaw Library also contains a number of amicus briefs from the Juvenile Law Center and other organizations.

Although Levick says the number of youth who are incarcerated is “still too high,” given the harms of juvenile incarceration, it still represents a substantial decline over the past 15 years. Research on social and behavioral science, psychology, and neuroscience has informed a series of landmark court cases that have, among other actions, eliminated the death penalty for adolescent crimes and found mandatory life-without-parole sentences unconstitutional.

Even if teenagers tend to be impulsive and vulnerable to peer pressure, “this idea that once a bad kid, always a bad kid-or always a bad adult-is not supported by neuroscience,” Tabashneck says.

What research does suggest is that certain structural and functional changes in the brain occur during adolescence, according to a paper published in the Journal of the American Judges Association in 2014 and found on the CLBB NeuroLaw Library. These changes contribute to increased reward-seeking or risk-taking behavior, and lack of impulse control when emotions are high. The paper cites studies that suggest there is no fixed age or timeline when an adolescent brain matures into an adult brain.

“Neurodevelopment and neuroscience really helps to explain the unexplainable,” says Tabashneck. “This information can help shed light on why someone who at 16 did something really terrible may not be still at risk at age 50.”

The website launched on June 10, so it’s too soon for any potential success stories to emerge from the slow-moving justice system. But CLBB demonstrated the resource to organizations including the Juvenile Law Center, the National Center for Juvenile and Family Court Judges, and the Sentencing Project and received “some great feedback,” Tabashneck says. Furthermore, those organizations as well as the ACLU and the Innocence Project are helping to spread the word about the library.

Already, they are seeing major traction. The Maine Department of Corrections says it is currently exploring “widespread implementation” of CLBB’s NeuroLaw Library in both juvenile and adult justice facilities across the state. Tabashneck says that could mean making the content accessible for corrections staff, featuring the resource on the department’s website, and working to potentially make it available on tablets in the juvenile facilities. Implementation could take place as soon as this summer or fall.

Levick, who has been working in the juvenile justice system for decades, says one measure of success for a tool like CLBB would be the extent to which it can “shrink the footprint of the juvenile justice system.”

“It’s critically important to us that however we respond to criminal conduct by children, that we treat kids as kids,” Levick says, “and that we really focus on responses that are designed to rehabilitate them, to restore their interactions, to think about restorative justice between young people and victims and survivors.”

Find the full Inc. article here.