The following was submitted to [email protected] and we wanted to share it with our members:

Hello,

I am a Political Science PhD student at Florida State University and last night read an article about Circles of Support & Accountability and decided to look into Florida policy. We don’t seem to have any good, evidence-based treatment programs – everything from Florida seemed to talk about the Florida Civil Commitment Center and increasingly harsh, fear-based policy toward sex-offender rehabilitation in Florida.
That led me to the Sun-Sentinel report on “Sex Predators Unleashed” that raised all sorts of alarmism about 594 sex offenders who were screened for the program, released, and later committed crimes. I was looking at their statistics and thought they seemed silly, but now I found that those statistics were already responded to in a report. I estimated based on the ~3,000 sex offenders screened in 2012 that about 40,000 were screened over 14 years. According to the DCF report, it was actually 31,626. The DCF report actually uses an inflated measure of recidivism: 1,384 offenders who were screened were later charged with future sex crimes. Removing the estimated 1,500 who were recommended for further treatment and the 71 re-offenders who were recommended for further treatment, you get a 4.4% re-offense rate among offenders not recommended for further treatment and a 4.7% re-offense rate among those referred for further treatment at the initial step. In the Sun-Sentinel report they only discuss the sex offenders who were referred for screening and convicted of crimes later on. Of the ones who were released by DCF, 562 were convicted of subsequent crimes, or 1.9%. The DCF report also points out that only 144 of the subsequent convictions were for rape or sexual murder, indicating very low rates of those worst crimes. However, even worse, of the 1,500 recommended for treatment by the DCF, half were released by the courts, 750, and of those 750, 32 were convicted of subsequent sex crimes. That’s a rate of only 4.3%, which isn’t particularly high. So say the courts have some discriminatory power and the people who were committed as of 2013 would have had a new conviction rate of 10%… that’s still 75 offenses averted by locking up 675 innocent people. At a cost of $6 million per offense prevented, based on their $450 million estimated cost of the program. And a lot of these wouldn’t be particularly serious offenses. Only 2.3% of the offenses that occurred were sexual murders, so say 10% of the offenses that were avoided would have been sexual murders, that’s a cost of $60 million per life saved. It seems like a very ineffective use of resources, even if you believe the system is doing a pretty good job identifying dangerous offenders, unless you believe they are much more accurate than I am estimating. And the fact that the courts are disagreeing with the psychologists so often and getting it right so often suggests that it is not doing a great job identifying dangerous offenders. And that doesn’t consider the harm of wrongfully imprisoning hundreds of people for crimes that they are not going to commit.

It’s outrageous that our state is treating people this way and that the response to this is to move to civilly commit hundreds more people.