Leo Carroll: Base sex offender laws on facts rather than myths
Two decades of research regarding the effects of sex offender laws have produced no evidence that such laws achieve their stated purposes. A recent review of research on community notification and residency restriction laws in the Oxford Handbook of Sex Offences and Sex Offenders concludes that such legislation is “misinformed and simply incorrect.”
These laws are knee-jerk reactions to hysteria fueled by media narratives of sensational but exceptional tragedies; they are based on myths rather than facts. The first myth is that sex offenders are strangers, when in fact the overwhelming number of sex offenses are committed by family members, acquaintances or persons in positions of authority whom the victim trusts or relies upon.
The second myth is that sex offenders, particularly rapists and child molesters, chronically reoffend. Factual evidence tells us otherwise. The Bureau of Justice Statistics followed 9,691 sex offenders released from prison in 1994. Only 14 percent had had a prior conviction for a sex crime, and in the three years following their release, only 5 percent were re-arrested for a sex crime and only 3.5 percent were convicted.
A third myth is that sex offenders cannot be treated successfully. The majority of nearly 100 studies conducted since the 1970s finds treatment can reduce sexual recidivism, and any recidivism, by about 25 percent, and the more recent studies find the strongest effects.
Because they are based on myths, laws requiring community notification and restricting residency do nothing to ensure public safety and may in fact be counterproductive. Stigmatizing and isolating offenders may lead many of them to adopt a transient lifestyle that eludes monitoring and deprives them of support and treatment.
Leo Carroll
North Kingstown
The writer is a professor of sociology and a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Rhode Island.
Discover more from Florida Action Committee
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The sex offender cottage “treatment” industry currently in most of the nation operates on JUNK SCIENCE and assumes-wrongly-that every offender released from prison, no matter the level of his or her offense, must submit to “treatment” that the recently incarcerated subject must pay CASH for… Who coming out of a long prison sentence has a lot of cash for ongoing “treatment” and polygraph sessions at $360 a pop?
This “business” incentivizes corruption. THINK about it… A captive clientele held hostage by forensic psychologists who for the most part don’t even have a PHD (doctorate) in the purported skills they are supposed to have, making evaluations about someone’s mental fitness. Running these “groups” day and night… I wonder where all that cash is winding up? Parole and supervisory officers LOVE and swear by these so called forensic psych practitioners. CORRUPTION CITY! eh What?
These people have the power, simply by telling the local probation dept that a particular client is not “responding” to treatment, or is disruptive or rebellious in “Group” and back to prison he or she goes, when his or her original offense might have just been ignorance of the law or basic journalistic curiosity.
Doesn’t “making your head right” fall under the rubric of brainwashing or thought control? Part of such “treatment” involves putting down-in order-ALL the sexual experiences one has ever had. One must not write down ANYTHING other than the INDIVIDUAL ACT itself, and the age of one’s “victim” at the time. (Yes, the built-in assumption IS THERE that everyone that their captive subject has ever been involved with IS A VICTIM.) There must be no CONTEXT, just the SEX ACT ITSELF.
How is that going to read, OR PLAY later on in a courtroom environment in the hands of an ambitious prosecutor looking to punish his convicted victim further for his “uppityness” for non-cooperation in his own further punishing humiliation?
It’s a NARSOL validated fact that MOST SO’s ON THE REGISTRIES ARE THERE FOR NON-CONTACT, NON-VIOLENT OFFENSES. And in “treatment” are at the mercy of those who view themselves as little tin gods who enjoy torturing their “patients” with demeaning scatalogical comments, threats of re-incarceration, and unconscionable invasions of privacy .