See comment about recidivism quote which is likely in error.2-2-2010 Maryland:
Pending expansions will increase number to be monitored
In Maryland, Thomas Leggs lived with his parents on a quiet street in Salisbury.
In Delaware, he served time for raping a teenage girl on the Rehoboth Beach boardwalk.
Now, he is charged with kidnapping and is under investigation for killing an 11-year-old girl whose body was found in a field outside Delmar on Christmas Day.
His case, which shocked and horrified many on the Eastern Shore and beyond, is partly a reflection of the complicated job of tracking and monitoring rapists and child molesters after they're released, some observers say.
And despite proposals unveiled last week in Maryland to change the way the state tracks some sex offenders, experts warn that such moves may actually overwhelm the criminal justice system -- increasing the chances that the worst of the worst may fall through the cracks, particularly as they move between states.
"It only takes a couple minutes for me to get into my car, go across the bridge and rape and kill a girl and come back," said Keith Durkin, a criminologist with Ohio Northern University. "You don't have to be off their radar screen very long to do that."
By the end of the year, when a national sex-offender registry is put in place, the process of tracking offenders will have changed across the country. Many states are now working to comply with the new regulations.
But Durkin and others who study sex offenders say the broad classifications used nationally and in states including Delaware may actually make it harder for law enforcement agencies and the courts to zero in on the people most likely to commit sex crimes again and again.
"You've got a small group of offenders who commit lots of new offenses," said Chrysanthi Leon, a University of Delaware assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice. "We need to do a better job of distinguishing among the bigger group of offenders, and dedicate more of our resources on this smaller group of high-risk offenders."
The case of Leggs, convicted of sex offenses in two states, has drawn renewed attention to repeat sex offenders, the registration of those offenders and how states deal with convicted criminals who move easily across borders.
Research on sex offenders who commit new sex crimes is scattered and spotty at best, Durkin and Leon agree. But two long-term studies involving offenders who admitted committing new crimes after their release put the most conservative baseline for repeat offenses at 52 percent -- more than half of offenders, Durkin said.
If Durkin is quoting a Prentkey study then he doesn't realize there is an error in it. See Misquoting and Misapplying Prentky Statistics. Prentky said "We would like to conclude with two important caveats. The obvious, marked heterogeneity of sexual offenders precludes automatic generalization of the rates reported here to other samples." The apparent reason was, those stats pertained to folks in civil commitment, all who already were recidivists. The stats were NOT the result of a study of ALL sex offenders, the study was of ONLY recidivists.
Note: Notice also that the comment about recidivism is made by Durkin and not Leon. The journalist has poorly worded this which makes it look like she said this also, which she did not say.
But even those studies are somewhat flawed, he said, because they group nonviolent offenders such as flashers with violent child molesters, for example.
Authorities in Delaware and Maryland say they communicate regularly, almost daily, about the status of offenders who move, take up new jobs or are rumored to be living where they're not supposed to be. But even they acknowledge it's a challenge.
Interstate movement "is very difficult for states to deal with," said David Wolinski, who oversees Maryland's sex-offender registration unit.
For example, Delaware residents who commit sex crimes in Maryland would have to report their plans to Maryland authorities upon their release. If a person decides to return to Delaware, Maryland would then pass the information on to Delaware officials to put in their registry, said Sgt. Walter Newton of the Delaware State Police.
There also can be confusion about the way states classify offenders. For example, Leggs was designated a "high-risk" offender in Delaware, but not in Maryland.
That doesn't mean he fell through the cracks, Wolinski said. It's simply that Maryland doesn't assign risk levels the same way the First State does.
Currently, when dealing with someone convicted in another state, registration officials have to dig through the other state's statutes and try to figure out what the corresponding crime would be in their own state, and then assign a classification. That can be complicated, Wolinski said. "There's different terminology used in just about every state," he said.
New federal regulations
The Adam Walsh Act, signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2006, goes into effect later this year and aims in part to smooth out some of those issues by applying a uniform national classification system and implementing a national registry.
Delaware is one of the first to meet the standards of the new law, and will soon be seeking certification from the U.S. Department of Justice, Attorney General Beau Biden said.
"Our work protecting Delaware's children is never done," he said.
The bills proposed last week by Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley would reform an advisory board on sex offenders, make possession of child pornography a registerable offense, require juvenile offenders to register if convicted in an adult court, reclassify offense categories and require lifetime supervision for some serious sex offenses and repeat offenders.
"There should be absolutely no mercy shown to anyone who harms a child in our state, and our legislation serves to impose the strictest standards of supervision to ensure that Maryland's children are protected," O'Malley said.
Some observers argue that while one-size-fits-all penalties and overly broad classifications may sound good politically, they're not truly effective in preventing recidivism.
Instead of looking at offense-based criteria, Leon said, the ideal classification system would involve individual assessments of each offender for factors that can increase the potential for repeat offenses.
Those factors include whether force was used, how the offender manipulated his or her victims and the age of the victims, Durkin said.
The current system, he said, leads to police and probation officers getting overwhelmed by the sheer volume of offenders to monitor.
"They're really trying," he said. "But they've got this huge caseload." ..Source.. DAN SHORTRIDGE • The News Journal
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