Sex Offenders

Legal Regime

By the early 1990s, at least sixteen states returned to the illness model, adopting sexually violent predator (SVP) laws that civilly commit and treat dangerous sex offenders indefinitely after they have served their prison terms. Every state has adopted a sex-offender registration law, designed to deter sex crimes and help in their investigation, which require most sex offenders to register with the police. Every state has also enacted a community notification law that authorizes the police to warn the public about dangerous sex offenders. These laws assume that sex offenders are more likely than other criminals to commit another crime. They also assume that experts can identify who will reoffend, that treatment reduces sexual recidivism, and that strangers commit most sex crimes.

Social Reality and Assessment

Many of these assumptions are inaccurate. As a group, sex offenders reoffend at a lower rate than do many other violent criminals. A meta-analysis of sex offender recidivism studies showed that about 13 percent of sex offenders committed a new crime within a fourto five-year period. Many other offender categories have higher recidivism rates. However, sex offenders are four times more likely to commit another sex crime than non-sex offenders. A small group of sex offenders is very dangerous. Individuals who know their victims commit most sex crimes; strangers were involved in only 20 percent of sex offenses.

Experts have become more accurate in assessing the risk for sexual reoffending. They use recently developed actuarial risk-assessment instruments, based on identifying characteristics common to sex offenders known to have committed many sex crimes. They consider sex offenders with these characteristics as at high risk of reoffending. Because it is more objective and accurate, actuarial risk assessment has generally replaced clinical risk assessment, which is [Page 1366]subjective and based on the clinical judgment of each evaluator. Actuarial instruments have limits. They can identify a range of risk based only on group characteristics, not which individuals will actually reoffend. Actuarial methods will produce false-positive predictions of sexual recidivism in 20 to 50 percent of cases.

Confinement and Treatment

Although policy makers were skeptical of older treatments based primarily on psychotherapy, newer treatments include cognitive restructuring, social skills development, empathy training, relapse prevention, and pharmacological agents that reduce testosterone. Although these approaches hold great promise, there is insufficient high-quality research to establish that treatment reduces sex offending.

Researchers know less about when officials may safely release sex offenders. As a result, they free few SVPs unconditionally. Consequently, the number of people committed as SVPs continues to increase, greatly exceeding initial estimates. SVP commitment is extremely expensive, costing about $100,000 per year for each SVP, excluding capital construction and legal costs. Although SVP laws protect the community, they confine many offenders whose risk of reoffending is low and at the same time fail to confine many who are very dangerous.

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