We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

“SEX OFFENDER” BRUSH PAINTS BROADLY, STIGMATIZES TOO MANY, REPORT SAYS

The stigma against sex offenders has created a huge population of people with skills to benefit humanity whose lives and mainstream contributions are seen as forfeit, according to a story in The Crime Report last week.

Rory Fleming, founder of a campaign research services firm for prosecutors, argued that people convicted of sex offenses are statistically unlikely to reoffend, and that “many prosecutors, police officers, corrections professionals, and criminal justice reformers are aware that it is nonsensical to irreparably stigmatize a broad swath of offenders…”

In fact, Fleming writes, the phrase “sex offender” is grossly overbroad, describing any person convicted under a statute requiring sex offender registration. “The registry includes everyone from the mentally ill, remorseful flasher to the sexually-motivated killer, as well as the older party in a high school sweetheart relationship to a dangerous child rapist. There are almost one million Americans on sex offender registries, including people convicted for relatively minor sex crimes as children.”

The extent of institutional bias, let alone the general public’s perceptions, against sex offenders was starkly illustrated in a report published last week in American Criminal Law Reporter. The authors unearthed a 2004-2009 California study of untreated sexually violent offenders showing that while 30% of released offenders were arrested for some offense, only 6.5% were arrested for another sex offense. The study suggested that the actual recidivism rate was much less that the 36% estimated by a personality test California administered to the offenders while they were locked up.

The authors detailed how the California Dept. of Mental Health, which commissioned the study in 2004, killed the study five years once officials learned of the recidivism data. The authors interviewed the psychologist who ran the study, who provided documentation. But when the authors filed a state FOIA request with the DMH for records of the study, the agency denied there had ever been a study, and stonewalled until the authors showed DMH documents obtained from the psychologist proving the study had taken place.

The Crime Report, Why Can’t We Redeem the Sex Offender? (July 16, 2018)

55 American Criminal Law Reporter 705, Assessing the Real Risk of Sexually Violent Predators: Doctor Padilla’s Dangerous Data (July 16, 2018)

– Thomas L. Root