A thought-provoking piece at Slate.com.
The logic behind the past push for registries rested on what seem like common sense assumptions. Among the most prominent were, first, sex offenders were believed to be at a high risk for reoffending—once a sex offender, always a sex offender. Second, it was thought that sex offenses against children were commonly committed by strangers. Taken together, the point was that if the police had a list, and the public could access it, children would be safer.
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The problem, however, is that a mass of empirical research conducted since the passage of Jacob’s Law has cast increasing doubt on all of those premises.
No, “a mass of empirical research conducted since the passage of Jacob’s Law” has not cast doubt on those premises. Research since at least the 1980s has completely failed to support them. It is only popular mythology that has ever supported those claims.
I was lecturing on those very myths (among others) at UNSW in the 1990s. You can see from this CSOM fact sheet that researchers have been trying to get the truth out for a long time. I suspect those who put out the paper you link to were under political pressure to pretend that it is only recent research that has revealed what has been well known for decades.
What’s more, prison based sex offender programs have never been shown to reduce that already relatively small recidivism risk. In fact the evidence suggests they have no impact on the likelihood of reoffending but may increase the chance that future offences will be more violent. Community based programs seem to have a small positive effect with offenders who have the kind of stake in the community (e.g. job, home, family) that is typically destroyed or severely disrupted by prison terms.
For about five years from the late 90s I worked with a group of people who sought to deal with sex offences outside of the criminal justice system. That was in recognition of the fact that the system often re-victimises survivors of sexual assault, that the conviction rate for reported sex offences is very low and that the prison system does not protect the community from crime – in fact it is criminogenic. We used a community conferencing and circle sentencing based approach in which those most directly affected by the offence (including the offender) had the greatest input into how it would be responded to. Although we did not have the resources to do long term follow up of the survivors and offenders we dealt with I think there is good reason to believe our outcomes were better than those of the criminal justice system.
What also needs to be recognised is that most sex offenders are never detected by authorities. In fact most sex offences are never even reported. What that means is that while all of this vigilance and angst is being expended on the small minority who are caught the vast majority of sex offenders are still living alongside us unsuspected and without restrictions on their movement or employment.
The most important things that can be done to reduce sex offences is to increase the reporting rate and to ‘harden the targets’ (i.e. give potential victims better information about how to avoid becoming actual victims). Given that most victims will have a pre-existing and possibly ongoing relationship with the offender it is pretty important that we avoid the sort of draconian, life destroying punishment that will discourage victims from reporting their family members, colleagues, former partners, etc. It’s even more important that we don’t further abuse and humiliate survivors, and in this respect our adversarial trial system serves us very poorly.