Introduction
The federal and state governments have laws which permit for the legal confinement of sex offenders deemed to pose a risk to themselves or others. In Kansas v. Hendricks (1997), the U.S. Supreme Court set forth the following criteria potential offenders must satisfy in order to be civilly committed: 1) a past of committing sexual offenses; 2) a mental disorder or impairment; 3) some form of volitional impairment; and 4) a significant risk of committing a sexual offense in the future. In order to satisfy the fourth criteria, governments have implemented the use of Actuarial Risk Assessment Instruments (ARAIs) such as the Static-99 and the Minnesota Sex Offender Screening Tool-Revised (MnSOST-R) (Miller, Amenta, & Conroy, 2005).
A study by Boccaccini, Murrie, Caperton, and Hawes (2009) examines the reliance upon the STATIC-99 and MnSOST-R during a Texas screening process for sexual offenders to be civilly committed. The study sought to expand upon the minimal knowledge known of the predictive validity of the STATIC-99 and MsSOST-R in determining whether sexual offenders will recidivate upon release from incarceration. Firstly, the study focused on whether scores sex offenders received on the ARAIswere associated with their progress through the state's sexually violent predator civil commitment process: in essence, whether high scores on the ARAIs correlated with the officials’ decision to promote sexual offenders to the next step of the evaluation process.
Second, the researchers inquired into the predictive validity of the ARAIs in determining the rate of recidivism among non-committed offenders who had a minimum of 2.25 years to reoffend. The researchers also investigated the importance of local validity stud...
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... the commitment process cannot rely solely on the scores from these ARAIs when making civil commitment decisions for sexual offenders. Factors such as age and past criminal history must be evaluated alongside these ARAIs to make a final determination. Furthermore, clinicians must create and evaluate local data when interpreting the results of the ARAIs.
Works Cited
Boccaccini, M.T., Murrie, D.C., Caperton, J.D., & Hawes, S.W. (2009). Field validity of the STATIC-99 and MnSOST-R among sex offenders evaluated for civil commitment as sexually violent predators. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 15(4), 278-314. doi: 10.1037/a0017232
Miller, H. A., Amenta, A. E., & Conroy, M. A. (2005). Sexually violent predator evaluations: Empirical evidence, strategies for professionals, and research directions.
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Witt, P., Greenfield, D., & Hiscox, S. (2008). Cognitive/behavioural approaches to the treatment adult sex offenders. Journal of Psychiatry & Law, 36(2), 245-269, retrieved from EBSCOhost
Sex offender notification laws have been among the most widely discussed and debated criminal justice policy issues in recent years. Numerous studies have been conducted on various views of sex offender notification laws. A vast majority of these studies have mixed research, some showing that sex offender notification laws are more beneficial than harmful and should continue, and others showing the exact opposite. Reasons such as public safety, the fear factor, and the hope for future recidivism to go down are some examples of why many believe that sex offender notification laws are beneficial to society. Others believe that such laws are a continuation of punishment for those who were convicted of a sex offense.
In the event that a prisoner (particularly a sex offender) does complete rehabilitation, he carries with him a stigma upon reentering society. People often fear living near a prior drug addict or convicted murderer and the sensational media hype surrounding released felons can ruin a newly released convict’s life before it beings. What with resident notifications, media scare tactics and general concern for safety, a sex offender’s ability to readapt into society is severely hindered (554). This warrants life-skills rehabilitation applied to him useless, as he will be unable to even attempt to make the right decision regarding further crime opportunities.
Yates, P. M. (2005). Pathways to treatment of sexual offenders: Rethinking intervention. Forum on Corrections Research, 17, 1-9.
Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 21(1), 49-66. Levenson, J.S., D’Amora, D.A., & Hern, A.L. (2007). The 'Secondary' of the 'Secondary'. Megan’s Law and its impact on community re-entry for sexual offenders. Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 25(1), 587-602.
The Recidivism Rate of Juvenile Sex Offenders between Uses of Legal Sentencing as Adults or Utilizing Psychological Treatment
Greenfeld, Lawrence A., and Snell, Tracy L. Women Offenders. Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1999.
Pearson, F. S., Lipton, D. S., Clel & Yee, D. S. (2002). The effects of behavioral/cognitive-behavioral programs on recidivism. Crime & delinquency, 48 (3), pp. 476--496.
Vandiver, D. M., & Teske, R. (2006). Juvenile female and male sex offenders a comparison of offender, victim, and judicial processing characteristics. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 50(2), 148-165.
It is a common stereotype that all sex offenders have some form of psychopathy, and therefore they cannot be treated, however most sexual offenders do not have major mental illness or psychological maladjustment (Ward, Polaschek and Busch, 2006), therefore it is not impossible to treat them. Finkelhor’s (1984) precondition model was made with the assumption that the psychopathology of an individual will only take us so far in explaining sexually abusive behaviour, Finkelhor states that 4 stages of preconditions must exist before sexual abuse can take place, these are; Primary motivation to abuse a child sexually, overcoming of internal and external inhibitions and dealing with a child’s resistance to sexual abuse, for each subsequent precondition to occur the previous one must be achieved. Finkelhor argues th...
Sex offender legislation has been encouraged and written to protect the community and the people at large against recidivism and or to help with the reintegration of those released from prison. Nevertheless, a big question has occurred as to if the tough laws created help the community especially to prevent recidivism or make the situation even worse than it already is. Sex offenders are categorized into three levels for example in the case of the state of Massachusetts; in level one the person is not considered dangerous, and chances of him repeating a sexual offense are low thus his details are not made available to the public (Robbers, 2009). In level two chances of reoccurrence are average thus public have access to this level offenders through local police departments in level three risk of reoffense is high, and a substantial public safety interest is served to protect the public from such individuals.
One of the most commonly used classification systems for offenders is the combination of risk assessment and need assessment. The combination of these two systems of classification is rather new. The earliest types of classification focused mainly on offender risks by using custody classification and separating prisoners into minimum, medium, and maximum security (Van Voorhis et al., 2009). Early risks assessments appeared to only focus on historical factors that did not tend to change over time. A supplement of the classification was introduced with the original needs assessment system. The needs assessment was meant to offer information relevant to treatment (Van Voorhis et al., 2009). Unfortunately, the needs assessments were rarely used for the purposes of locating treatment. The introduction of models that combined the two assessments was paramount because it opened assessments up to the idea that factors change over time that influence offenders.
There are several identifiable psychological factors that increase the likelihood an individual will demonstrate deviant sexual behavior. One of the most important contributing factors is physical or sexual abuse endured as a child. According to Becerra-García, García-León and Egan (2012), sex offenders are twice as likely to report being sexually, emotionally, or physically abused as a child in comparison to other offenders. There are also other factors besides abuse that must be taken into consideration. A recent study on female sex offenders by Roe-Sepowitz and Krysik (2008) states, “the data reveal that many of the 118 female juvenile sex offenders came from chaotic and disorganized families and had poor parental supervision and serious school and mental health problems”. As Becerra-García, García-León and Egan (2012) discuss further, there are also personality traits that sex offenders are likely to possess, which makes it possible for psychologists to distinguish general characteristics of sex offenders. These personality traits can be identified using the Five Factor Model, which scales an individual’s level of neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.
Sex offenders have been a serious problem for our legal system at all levels, not to mention those who have been their victims. There are 43,000 inmates in prison for sexual offenses while each year in this country over 510,000 children are sexually assaulted(Oakes 99). The latter statistic, in its context, does not convey the severity of the situation. Each year 510,000 children have their childhood's destroyed, possibly on more than one occasion, and are faced with dealing with the assault for the rest of their lives. Sadly, many of those assaults are perpetrated by people who have already been through the correctional system only to victimize again. Sex offenders, as a class of criminals, are nine times more likely to repeat their crimes(Oakes 99). This presents a
A risk assessment is a structured tool used to analyse young offenders who are aged between 10 to 17 years old. The individuals would have to come into contact with the young offending teams because they would be receiving a final warning, community or custodial sentence in order to get the assessment done. They are used to plan sentences and intervention and used as pre sentence reports. This assessment would determine what level and type of supervision given to the young offender if given a custodial sentence and also the judge would put inconsideration the result the forensic psychologist gives as a result from the score the offender gets. Furthermore it’s used to evaluate their treatment and programmes they will get in order to reduce re offending (Wilson E and Hinks S, 2011). If an individual get a low score on their likely hood of them reoffending the judge might feel inclined to give them a lighter sentence such as community service because giving them a custodial sentence would increase their chance of reoffending because of the acquaintances they would have with offenders who were given a higher score and level of criminal activity significantly increases. In order to find out if a young offender is going reoffend there are two categories of risk factors that need to be put into consideration and they are static and dynamic. The section of risk factors that fall into the category of static risk is their historical which looks at whether there was an onset of violence from a young age and individual factors that increase risk and these are the gender of offender or dispositional in nature situational and other protectiv...