Who will the sex-offenders registry protect?

12-29-2004 Canada:

Society has always held a particular sense of revulsion toward sex offenders. Unfortunately, Canada's government, charged with the duty of protecting its people, is more ambivalent about sexual crimes and, until recently, had done little to diminish the risk sexual offenders pose to society once they are released from custody.

On Dec. 15 -- after more than a decade of lobbying by police officers, the provinces and victims' rights groups -- a national sex offender registration system finally became a reality.

A national database will allow police to track the whereabouts of convicted sex offenders once released from prison. Within 15 days of being released from jail, offenders will be required to provide local police with a current address, phone number, fingerprints, photographs and information on identifying body marks. This information, and their criminal records, will be registered and updated on an annual basis or when they move.

The good news is that this is a significant step forward in enabling police to rapidly locate likely suspects in a specific area when a sex crime has been committed or a child has been abducted. Locating potential offenders quickly is a critical factor when children go missing: It is estimated that 44% of children who are abducted for sexual assault and then killed are dead within one hour, 74% within three hours, and 91% within 24 hours.

The bad news is that the registry may be too little, too late. Because of some inherent flaws, it won't be able to reach its full potential as a tool for public protection.

Underreporting Clouds Attempt to Count Repeat Sex Offenders

January 2008:

Conventional wisdom says people released after serving time for sex crimes are likely to strike again. The numbers aren't as certain.

Among convicted criminals released from prison, sex offenders released from prison are less likely to be arrested for any new crime than most other offenders, with the notable exception of murderers, researchers say. Child molesters' rate of recidivism is at least as low as the group of sex offenders taken as a whole. Abusers of children within their own family have a lower rate still.

"The observed rate of sexual offenders' recidivism is much lower than commonly believed," says R. Karl Hanson, senior research officer at Public Safety Canada, who has studied the issue for decades. When he speaks to groups, including police officers or therapists, and asks them to estimate the observed rate of sex-crime re-offense, he typically hears numbers such as 70% to 90%. But his review of available research in Canada and the U.S. finds the typical rate is 25% to 30% over 20 years.

One reason for the numerical confusion may be that supporters of sex-offender registries who say sex offenders are more likely than not to re-offend are considering the rate of repeat sex offenses of sex criminals compared with the rate of sex offenses of prisoners released for other crimes. Sex criminals are less likely to be arrested for another crime of any type, but they commit more sex crimes than other groups of criminals. (In general, criminals are more likely to commit crimes in their category than are criminals from other categories.)

All these numbers need to be approached with some skepticism. There also are time limitations to many of the studies, which typically stop tracking the rate of repeat offenses after just three to five years. Pooling all sex crimes together also muddles the picture, as different types of criminals -- say, rapists, child molesters, exhibitionists -- show very different behavior after release from prison. And looming over all of this is the unknown of what proportion of sex crimes go unreported -- particularly within families, a major source of child sexual abuse.

Tracking outcomes for years after release is expensive and slow to show results. The Bureau of Justice Statistics has the most thorough recent U.S. study, covering more than 9,000 male sex offenders released in 15 states in 1994. The study found that sex criminals were less likely to be reconvicted over the following three years than the group of all released prisoners -- 24% compared with 47%. Child molesters had a lower rate, of 20.4%.

The study hasn't been updated, says co-author Matthew Durose, a statistician with the bureau, because "given the time required to collect criminal history information from offenders, it's not something that can be done on a more regular basis." As a result, there are little data measuring the effect of the past decade's spate of state measures, such as sex-offender registries and laws keeping convicted sex offenders a certain distance from schools.

Also, a short period of follow-up -- such as the three years of the U.S. government study -- is especially susceptible to unreported crimes, Dr. Hanson says.

Counting crimes that go unreported is, of course, paradoxical. One approach is to extrapolate a true crime rate from victimization surveys and compare that with reported crime, typically finding that roughly 90% of sex crimes go unreported. Some put the estimate even higher.