The challenges of connecting sex offense reactions and realities
The always terrific Corrections Sentencing has this great post on how jurisdictions have and should respond to sex offenses and sex offenders. Here are snippets:
At the Friday morning roundtable on sex offender recidivism at the BJS/JRSA conference last week, JRSA Research Director Stan Orchowsky started it off by noting that, of all the gaps between what policymakers do in criminal justice and what we know about offenses, offenders, and how to manage them most effectively, the gap with sex offenses is largest. Then Kim English, the Colorado Statistical Analysis Center director, with the help of very experienced colleagues…described the successful efforts in CO and what the research showed.
[T]he talk on what is effective included no mention of castration (chemical or otherwise, neither of which actually guarantee success ending sexual assaults, which Kim described in ways I won’t detail in a family blog), mandatory minimums (victims and their families will file fewer charges because the offenders are overwhelmingly loved ones), or housing restrictions (let’s create gypsy bands of homeless perverts with no incentive to stay straight, why don’t we?). No, what they described was insightful and practiced, with nary an ounce of touchy-feely, but it took work, patience, vigilance, and tolerance of inevitable human failure (ours, not the sex offender’s).
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