America's unsubstantiated fear--convicted sex
offenders who don't respond to treatment and are released from prison to offend
again, reported the Columbus Dispatch.
The myth is reinforced whenever cases go bad and get
extensive media coverage, said Melissa Hamilton, a law professor who has
written extensively about sex offenders.
"These incredibly horrible stories occur, the
media picks them up and the public reacts," she said. "It stokes
fears of sex offenders as people who are likely to re-offend. But the
statistics don't support it."
Hamilton, a visiting criminal-law scholar at the
University of Houston Law Center, said one of the most comprehensive studies on
sex offenders was issued by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2003. It tracked
more than 9,000 sex offenders released from prisons in 15 states, including
Ohio, in 1994. Three years after their release, 5.3 percent of the
offenders had been arrested for another sex crime.
"I wouldn't characterize that as
high-risk," Hamilton said.
The sex offenders who were most likely to offend
again were men whose victims were boys, not adults, the study found.
Two years ago, Ohio prison statistics showed that 11
percent of released sex offenders returned to prison on sex charges, compared
with a recidivism rate of 28.7 percent for all inmates.
The Justice Department study made a similar finding:
"Sex offenders in the study had a lower overall re-arrest rate than
non-sex offenders."
But Scott Matson, acting deputy director of the
Justice Department's Sex-Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending,
Registering and Tracking office, cautioned that recidivism is hard to measure
because so many sex crimes go unreported.
"We don't know the true recidivism rate,"
Matson said.
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