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.
