Sex Offender Recidivism Analysis

The purpose of this paper is to look at recidivism rates among adult and juvenile sex offenders, and male and female sex offenders, in order to better understand who is likely to recidivate and why. The first article, Sex Offenders and Sex Crime Recidivism, by Kristen Budd and Scott Desmond looks at the relationship between criminal justice sanctions and recidivism among sex offenders. In the United States, the recent trend has been to incarcerate and sentence sex offenders to longer prison terms than in the past. The purpose of this article is to try to determine if these longer and harsher sentences have had any effect on sex offender recidivism. This is particularly important because of the sheer cost of incarceration as well as public

102 were charged with any type of offense during the follow-up period, and of those 102, 62 were for violent offenses. The study also found that over the course of a year, the JSOAP-II significantly predicted recidivism rates in all categories. Youths that were registered sex offenders had lower rates of misdemeanor charges, which is likely due to the fact that the registered offenders were lower risk. The study found few differences between registered and unregistered juvenile sex offenders, meaning that it could not conclude that registration lowers the risk of recidivism. These findings are important because it is useful to know the effects that our policies have. The study found that “specific characteristics of a juvenile sexual offense have not proven to be reliable predictors of future offending (Caldwell, 2009).” It’s important to know this so that if current policies are not effective, we can look at new and possibly more effective ways of handling these types of things that could prove to be more effective. The third article is “Female and Male Sex Offenders: A Comparison of Recidivism Patterns and Risk Factors” by Naomi Freeman. The purpose of the article is to study the differences between male and female sex offenders. The main focuses of the study are on recidivism patterns and risk factors for male and female offenders. It has been asserted that there are vast differences between male and female sex offenders, but almost no studies had been done to prove it, so this article aims to do just