A company that provides training to police officers and private-security personnel is now offering its services to schools. Illustration by Richie Pope

About a year and a half ago, Jessica Schneider was handed a flyer by one of her colleagues in the child-advocacy community. It advertised a training session, offered under the auspices of the Illinois Principals Association (I.P.A.), in how to interrogate students. Specifically, teachers and school administrators would be taught an abbreviated version of the Reid Technique, which is used across the country by police officers, private-security personnel, insurance-fraud investigators, and other people for whom getting at the truth is part of the job. Schneider, who is a staff attorney at the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, was alarmed. She knew that some psychologists and jurists have characterized the technique as coercive and liable to produce false confessions—especially when used with juveniles, who are highly suggestible. When she expressed her concerns to Brian Schwartz, the I.P.A.’s general counsel, he said that the association had been offering Reid training for many years and found it both popular and benign. To prove it, he invited Schneider to attend a session in January of 2015.

The training was led by Joseph Buckley, the president of John E. Reid and Associates, which is based in Chicago. Like the adult version of the Reid Technique, the school version involves three basic parts: an investigative component, in which you gather evidence; a behavioral analysis, in which you interview a suspect to determine whether he or she is lying; and a nine-step interrogation, a nonviolent but psychologically rigorous process that is designed, according to Reid’s workbook, “to obtain an admission of guilt.” Most of the I.P.A. session, Schneider told me, focussed on behavioral analysis. Buckley described to trainees how patterns of body language—including slumping, failing to look directly at the interviewer, offering “evasive” responses, and showing generally “guarded” behaviors—could supposedly reveal whether a suspect was lying. (Some of the cues were downright mythological—like, for instance, the idea that individuals look left when recalling the truth and right when trying to fabricate.) Several times during the session, Buckley showed videos of interrogations involving serious crimes, such as murder, theft, and rape. None of the videos portrayed young people being questioned for typical school misbehavior, nor did any of the Reid teaching materials refer to “students” or “kids.” They were always “suspects” or “subjects.”

Laura Nirider, a professor of law at Northwestern University and the project director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth, attended the same session as Schneider. She told me that about sixty people were there. “Everybody was on the edge of their seat: ‘So this is how we can learn to get the drop on little Billy for writing graffiti on the underside of the lunchroom table,’” she said. One vice-principal told Nirider that the first thing he does when he interrogates students is take away their cell phones, “so they can’t call their mothers.”

The training included tricks to provoke a response that might indicate guilt. One was the punishment question: “What do you think should happen to the person who did this?” Schneider recorded in her notes that an innocent person will give a draconian answer, such as, “They should be suspended/expelled/fired.” A deceptive person will equivocate: “That depends on why they did it.” Another question involves baiting the subject with supposedly incriminating evidence. For example, you might falsely suggest that the school had surveillance cameras at the scene of the infraction and see how the student reacts. At one point in the workbook, the phrase “Handling tears” appears, with a blank space underneath for trainees to take down Buckley’s dictation. “Don’t stop,” Schneider wrote in her notes. “Tears are the beginning of a confession. Use congratulatory statement—‘Glad to see those tears, because it tells me that you’re sorry, aren’t you?’ ” Buckley’s only caveat during the session, according to Nirider and Schneider, was that children under the age of ten should not be interrogated. “It was pretty horrifying,” Schneider told me.

John E. Reid and Associates has been marketing its methods to school systems for several years. According to the firm’s Web site, it has offered training sessions to educators in eight states. Ed Leaders Network, a professional-development organization with affiliates around the country, offers Reid training as one of its webinars. Wendy Zdeb, the executive director of one of those affiliates, the Michigan Association of Secondary School Principals, told me that her group is preparing to host its twentieth Reid seminar in the past eleven years, all taught by Buckley. “Our feedback has always been incredibly positive,” she said. “They habitually sell out, year after year.” Zdeb added that the fear that Reid training will distort her colleagues’ judgment is unwarranted: their educational background enables them to filter what they learn and to implement it appropriately. The training, she said, primes them to interview students (and teachers, if necessary) in a more conscious and organized way.

Other parties, though, have raised concerns about Reid-style interrogations in schools. By now, it’s well known that the brains of young people are not fully developed, especially in regard to executive function. Young people tend to be impulsive, suggestible, poor at risk assessment, and lacking an appreciation for long-term consequences—characteristics that make them vulnerable to false confession. For that reason, the International Association of Chiefs of Police warns against using even mildly coercive tactics with children. In its 2012 guide to interviewing juveniles, the association—without specifically naming Reid—decries several of the company’s common practices, including using body language as a clue to deception. Children and teen-agers “may commonly slouch, avoid eye contact, and exhibit similar behaviors,” the guide says. “Officers should not interpret these everyday teenage mannerisms as indicators of deception.”

This misinterpretation of cues may contribute to the relatively high proportion of juveniles who confess to crimes that they did not commit. In the largest and most recent study of its kind, Samuel R. Gross, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and the editor of the National Registry of Exonerations, examined the cases of eight hundred and seventy-three people who were exonerated between 1989 and 2012. Among the cases that Gross surveyed, forty-two per cent of the juveniles who were exonerated had falsely confessed, compared with only eight per cent of adults. Nearly twice as many eleven- to fourteen-year-olds falsely confessed as did fifteen- to seventeen-year-olds.

Other research has shown that Reid training influences the perception of juveniles by the people who use it. In 2009, Jessica Kostelnik and N. Dickon Reppucci, psychologists at the University of Virginia, found that Reid-trained police were less aware of the developmental differences between adolescents and adults than police who did not receive the training. The researchers sent questionnaires to more than eighteen hundred officers in ten agencies throughout the country, asking their attitudes about the competence of young people to face interrogation. About a third of the police had received Reid training. While both groups understood that children under fifteen are highly suggestible, a smaller proportion of the Reid-trained group felt that way about adolescents, meaning those aged fifteen to seventeen. The Reid-trained officers also tended to believe that adolescents were just as capable as adults of withstanding psychologically coercive questioning, including deceit.

Things get especially complicated when interrogations take place in school, where students have fewer legal rights than in a police station. School officials do not need a warrant or probable cause to search a student’s locker or backpack, nor are they required to give a Miranda warning prior to an interrogation, no matter how severe the offense. According to Barry Feld, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School and a specialist in juvenile law, the power differential between students and administrators has a significant effect. “All these kids are thinking is, ‘How do I get out of here without my parents finding out?’ ” Feld said.