Despite reform efforts by victim's rights organizations and the enactment of new laws and procedures by the House and the Senate, sex crimes continue to rise in the U.S. In recent years, the introduction of the sex offender registry has proven helpful in locating and monitoring sex offenders; however, statistics show it has done little to avert future crimes and prevent convicted offenders from re-offending.
It is time for lawmakers in the United States to re-evaluate the sentencing guidelines for convicted sex offenders. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the average sentence for a convicted rapist is 7.4 years. Other studies suggest that number is somewhat higher, at 11.8 years. Regardless of the actual number, most of the offenders, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, serve as little as 5.4 years of the original sentence before being paroled back into society.
A Bureau of Justice Statistics report, released in 2002, shows that violent offenders accounted for 50 percent of all state prisoners. Among that percentage, 142,000 of those inmates were serving time for rape and other sexual assaults. Fast-forward to 2003, (the most recent statistics available) and that number increases to 148,800. According to the Center for Sex Offender Management (CSOM), the number of imprisoned sex offenders grows by more than 7 percent every year. Some say it is a minimal increase -- a mere 6,800 inmates in the most recent study. However, I think the victims of those 6,800 offenders would strongly disagree.
The recidivism rates of sex offenders remain unclear. Many studies have been conducted over the years; however, none of these studies seem to arrive at the same number. According to CSOM's Web site, "studies on sex offender recidivism vary widely in the quality and rigor of the research design, the sample of sex offenders and behaviors included in the study, the length of follow-up, and the criteria for success or failure. Due to these and other differences, there is often a perceived lack of consistency across studies of sex offender recidivism."
In 1990, W. L. Marshall, D. R. Laws, and H. E. Barbaree released their studies in the Handbook of Sexual Assault. They found that the recidivism rate for specific types of offenders varied. According to their research, incest offenders ranged between 4 and 10 percent, rapists between 7 and 35 percent, child molesters with female victims between 10 and 29 percent, child molesters with male victims between 13 and 40 percent, and exhibitionists between 41 and 71 percent.
In a follow-up study conducted that same year by M. E. Rice, G. T. Harris, and V. L. Quinsey, which was published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, the researchers looked at 54 rapists who had been released from prison. Of those 54 convicts, 28 percent were reconvicted of a sex offense and 43 percent went on to be convicted of a violent offense.
The most recent recidivism study, conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice, was released in 1994. According to that study, 9,691 male sex offenders, including 4,295 child molesters, were tracked for a period of 3 years after their release from prison. The study was, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, the "largest follow-up ever conducted" of released sex offenders.
"Within 3 years following their release, 5.3 percent of sex offenders (men who had committed rape or sexual assault) were rearrested for another sex crime," the study states. "On average, the 9,691 sex offenders served 3 1/2 years of their 8-year sentence. Compared to non-sex offenders released from state prisons, released sex offenders were 4 times more likely to be rearrested for a sex crime."
Unfortunately, that data, based on the three-year length of time the inmates were tracked, is largely unreliable, something that should have been obvious to the project heads, considering CSOM, which is a collaborative effort of the U.S. Office of Justice Programs, the National Institute of Corrections, and the State Justice Institute, state the following on its Web site:
"The longer the follow-up period, the more likely reoffense will occur and a higher rate of recidivism will be observed. Many researchers believe that recidivism studies should ideally include a follow-up period of five years or more."
Apparently, the U.S. Department of Justice did not want to conduct an "ideal" study. Regardless, the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers states on its Web site that official recidivism statistics are "always lower than actual reoffense rates" because many of the crimes go unreported or undetected. The association's Web site further states, "Less than 10 percent of all sex crimes result in a criminal conviction."
Many studies on the treatment of sex offenders have been conducted; however, few seem to agree on how successful the treatment programs are in preventing a sex offender from re-offending. On average, the overall re-arrest rate for treated sex offenders falls within 13 to 17 percent. However, it should be noted that many of the studies were conducted on "control groups" and the average length of study was three years.
The risk of recidivism remains high, and the consistent increase in sex crimes show that the current methods and laws for dealing with sex offenders are doing little to prevent future crimes.
Today, rape remains a crime still punishable by death in some Third World countries. While such a law may not necessarily be appropriate, the United States is far more lenient than it needs to be.