Recidivism In Prisons

Controversial questions swirl around the correctional system 's management of sex offenders: How long should they be incarcerated for their crimes of forcing sex acts on adults or children? How should they be monitored following release? Does psychological treatment in prison actually affect the risk of committing further offenses? And how can courts balance offenders ' potential for rehabilitation with a community 's need to protect its citizens?

Responses to these questions have varied over the years, and, accordingly, so has policy-making by the states and the federal government. Recent policies have been trending toward longer prison sentences and more restrictive after-release monitoring, stemming in part from a dismal view of

"In the 1980s, American states made the decision that sex offenders were not sick; they were bad," LaFond says. "Some states decided to offer treatment, but there wasn 't much hope that it would work. Now, however, there 's an emerging optimism that psychologists can deal with these people and offer alternatives to continued incarceration."

Some of that optimism comes from a meta-analysis on the effectiveness of treatment for sex offenders published in Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment (Vol. 14, No. 2) in 2002. That analysis showed for the first time a significant difference between recidivism rates for sex offenders who were treated and those who were not, says psychologist R. Karl Hanson, PhD, lead author of the study and senior researcher for the Solicitor General Canada--the government agency that manages Canadian courts and corrections.

The study revealed, among the most recent research samples, sexual recidivism rates of 17.3 percent for untreated offenders, compared with 9.9 percent for treated offenders. Though that 's not a large reduction, the large sample size and widely agreed-upon research methods make it statistically reliable and of practical significance, Hanson

"Through anecdotal evidence, we know that modern treatment lowers recidivism, and the meta-analysis backs that up now," Prentky says. "We are unlikely to find a large treatment effect as long as the re-offense rates for untreated sex offenders are relatively low, for example, around 15 percent."

Assessing dangerousness

Psychologists have gleaned a number of important treatment insights in their research--the most basic of which is one size does not fit all.

"A large part of the challenge to managing this group is educating the courts that sex offenders are a highly heterogeneous population and not all of them are at high-risk for re-offending," says psychologist Moss Aubrey, PhD, who does private assessment of male sex offenders in New Mexico.

People commit sexual crimes for different reasons, Aubrey says. "Some are highly predatory, highly psychopathic and have repeated offenses, making them more likely to re-offend," he explains.

In the last 10 years, psychologists have made substantial advances in clearly identifying factors that increase an offender 's risk of committing an offense after release, Hanson says. These factors include the number of offenses, intimacy deficits, sexual