PROVISIONAL plans by the British government to keep tabs on sex offenders with the help of “lie detector” polygraphs have been roundly condemned by experts in the US. “I think it’s absolute folly,” says Stephen Fienberg of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, chairman of a National Research Council panel that produced a 245-page report on polygraphy in 2002.
The idea in the UK is to use polygraph tests to divine the intentions and histories of sex offenders who have been released back into the community. But Fienberg say that polygraphy has never been properly tested in this sensitive area. “The…
