Effort to prevent sex crimes is misplaced

1-18-2010 Delaware:

The horrible crimes allegedly committed by Dr. Earl Bradley rightly incense us and elicit a passionate desire to do something. State Rep. John C. Atkins has proposed a bill that would require chemical castration, special license plates, and increased penalties for certain sex offenders. While his heart is in the right place, the proposal would not keep our loved ones any safer.

Chemical castration rarely works. Most people who commit sex crimes do so because of a variety of influences on their behavior, including the desire to express anger through violence. The hormones that cause and sustain sex drives may not play any role at all in the urge to commit a sex crime. Even when they do, they are better managed through other techniques, including cognitive behavioral therapy, which teaches offenders to choose different outlets and to avoid triggers. If sex crimes were as easy to control as simply removing the sex drive, we would have solved this problem long ago.

The handful of offenders who may require chemical castration are better selected by correctional professionals than by a broadly applied law. Currently, offenders in the community under supervision can have chemical castration as a condition of their release. Mandating a one-size-fits-all set of restrictions and conditions for a larger category of offenders will not increase our safety.

Special license plates and other restrictions are also useless. No research has shown that communities who keep an eye on known sex offenders are able to protect themselves from future crime.

Numerous recent studies have shown that sex offenders subjected to numerous restrictions on their ability to hold jobs and live in neighborhoods are more likely to abscond, making it impossible to keep track of them.

Convicted sex offenders are the wrong target for our efforts to prevent future sex crime. The people who have already been identified, convicted and sentenced to prison for sexual offenses are very unlikely to commit new crimes upon release. This is in part because Delaware has an excellent system of community supervision in place to keep tabs on known offenders. But it is also a statistical fact: Convicted sex offenders have very low recidivism rates. From 3 percent to 15 percent of such offenders will commit a new sex crime within five years of their release. This is very low compared with other categories of offenders.

Known sex offenders are not going to commit most of the sex crimes that will take place in the next year. Most will be committed by people we know and trust, who have NOT been previously detected. The Bradley case illustrates this. We are better off teaching our children to speak up about harmful behavior than by passing new laws that will focus our already stretched criminal justice resources on the wrong group.

But if we are committed to spending more money on the convicted population, we should invest in smaller probation caseloads and more programs for offenders in prison and in the community. Currently, no sex-offender treatment is available in our prisons and jails, and community resources are not much better. ..Opinion.. of Professor Leon teaches in the Sociology and Criminal Justice department at the University of Delaware, and is the author of the forthcoming book, "Chasing Sex Fiends: Sex Crime, Criminal Justice and Social Change since the 1920s."