The specific program he entered, how he performed and whether he was seen as a high risk for re-offending, though, are all confidential under Ohio law.

Whatever treatment Golsby received, police say it didn’t stop him from the Feb. 8 abduction, rape and slaying of Reagan Tokes, a 21-year-old Ohio State University student. Golsby has been linked to the crime through DNA that was on file from his previous conviction.

Tokes’ death occurred three months after Golsby, 29, was released from prison for that 2011 attack, in which he was accused of forcing a woman to perform oral sex at knifepoint in a Grove City parking lot.

The Golsby case represents the public’s worst fears about convicted sex offenders — that they don’t respond to treatment and will strike again if released.

But those are myths, reinforced whenever such cases get extensive media coverage, said Melissa Hamilton, a law professor who has written extensively about sex offenders.

“These incredibly horrible stories occur, the media picks them up and the public reacts,” she said. “It stokes fears of sex offenders as people who are likely to re-offend. But the statistics don’t support it.”

Hamilton, a visiting criminal-law scholar at the University of Houston Law Center, said one of the most comprehensive studies on sex offenders was issued by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2003. It tracked more than 9,000 sex offenders released from prisons in 15 states, including Ohio, in 1994. Three years after their release, 5.3 percent of the offenders had been arrested for another sex crime.

“I wouldn’t characterize that as high-risk,” Hamilton said.

The sex offenders who were most likely to offend again were men whose victims were boys, not adults, the study found.

Two years ago, Ohio prison statistics showed that 11 percent of released sex offenders returned to prison on sex charges, compared with a recidivism rate of 28.7 percent for all inmates.

The Justice Department study made a similar finding: “Sex offenders in the study had a lower overall re-arrest rate than non-sex offenders.”

Please continue reading in The Columbus Dispatch

Cases like this might seem to argue for even tougher controls on ex-offenders convicted of sex crimes. But new research indicates that the existing sex-offense regime in the US actually may be making repeat sex crimes more likely.

Since the mid-1990s, legislators have devised increasingly byzantine rules for those who have been punished. Those include sending out postcards when an offender moves to a neighborhood, placing warning signs outside offenders’ homes, setting restrictions on what offenders can do on Halloween, and devising “presence” restrictions banning them from places like parks, malls, and museums where children might be present. That ever-tightening leash has produced unintended outcomes with an almost mechanical predictability. Many cities have devised new no-go zones that keep them from living near places like school, parks, and daycares and have seen their homelessness rates spike as a result.

California passed a law in Nov. 2006 forbidding parolees who’d committed a sex crime from living within 2,000 feet of schools or parks. Less than five years later, the number of them who were homeless had risen from 88 to almost 2,000. In Oct. 2014, Milwaukee passed an ordinance banning many registrants from living within 2,000 ft of schools, parks, day cares, recreational trails, and playgrounds. The number of homeless registrants promptly soared from 15 to 230 in less than two years, according to an analysis in Oct. 2016 by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Now, new research suggests making it harder for offenders to find a place to live might increase reoffending. In a study released in July 2016, researchers from the California and Canadian justice departments looked at more than 1,600 California sex offenders on probation or parole. Overall, the group’s sex-crime recidivism rates were low–less than 5% during the five-year follow-up period. But those who were homeless were over four times more likely to commit a repeat sex crime than those who weren’t. “Collectively, transient status seems to be associated with higher sexual recidivism rates,” the researchers concluded. That’s likely because those who lack stable homes, jobs, and social connections are more prone to reoffend.

Please read the rest of Steven’s article courtesy of Quartz.

Turner was only sentenced to six months in jail; the leniency of the sentence has led to an effort to recall the judge. Being placed on a list seems like a small punishment in comparison to a prison term. But sex offender registries were never meant to be a punishment—and since they were introduced in the mid-1990s, they have proven to be both ineffective and often unjust.

The original goal of registries was not to provide restitution, but to protect communities. Reading the victim’s statement, it’s easy to see why sex offender registries seem like a reasonable and necessary response to crimes like Turner’s. Following a party, Turner dragged the victim behind a dumpster and penetrated her with his fingers. He was only stopped when two Swedish students physically chased him away, and then captured him. In response to his conviction, he has blamed a culture of drinking and partying on campus, rather than taking responsibility for his own violence.

Given the horrific nature of his actions, and his effort to shift blame, some might argue there’s a risk he could victimize others. Placing him on the sex offender registry, in theory, should warn communities of a potential threat. As one recent pro-registry editorial argued, “the rights of the victims, and the protection thereof, outweigh any perceived infringement of the rights of the criminals.”

The truth, though, is that there’s very little evidence that sex offender registries increase safety in any material way. A 2014 study conducted by Purdue University economics professor Jillian B. Carr of people on the North Carolina sex offender registry found that being on the registry had no effect on recidivism. That’s consistent with a 2007 report by Human Rights Watch, which looked at various studies and concluded that sex offender registries did little to prevent sexual violence. (Read the rest of the article online at Quartz)

Under G.S. 164-47, the Sentencing Commission and DAC must jointly report to the General Assembly on the recidivism rates of prisoners and probationers every other year. The report defines recidivism as an arrest, conviction, or subsequent incarceration during a two-year period after being placed on probation or released from imprisonment. The report sample included over 35,000 probationers and nearly 14,000 inmates released from prison.

The report slices and dices the recidivism rates for probationers and prisoners in many ways—by gender, race, age, and marital status, among other personal characteristics. I encourage anyone interested in the particulars to read the full report. There are a few things I wanted to highlight in today’s post. (See highlighted items at North Carolina Criminal Law Blog)

“I actually met with a group of people in New Jersey and sat across from Megan Kanka’s grandfather,” Longo said.

The 1994 murder of 7-year-old Kanka gave rise to the public disclosure of sexual offender registries through what are commonly known as Megan’s laws.

“I told the grandfather of the young girl, Megan Kanka, who was raped and murdered, that I appreciate what happened to his granddaughter but this law is not going to make people safe,” Longo added. “Those laws did nothing. It didn’t prevent anything.”

That has not stopped an article he co-wrote in Psychology Today 30 years ago from being used to uphold and provide evidence for the “public’s need” for the registries.

“I just think it’s unfortunate,” Longo said. “What can I say?

“People use statistics and they will twist statistics,” he added. “People are going to take anything that works to their advantage, or twist a quote, to make it work to their advantage and I just think it’s unfortunate.”

Article

An anecdotal quip of Longo’s from the March 1986 article, that up to 80 percent of untreated sexual offenders go on to commit more sexual crimes, has helped shape the modern view of these offenders as being immutable. This is a view that Longo opposes, and he has spent roughly four decades treating and rehabilitating these very same offenders.

“With treatment we were getting these people down to recidivism rates of 20 percent and below,” Longo said. “My belief then, as is my belief now, is that treatment should be mandated for these people because we can treat them and treat them successfully, and reduce the amount of sex crimes in America.”

The Psychology Today article was the sole reference in a 1988 U.S. Department of Justice field practitioner’s guide for treating incarcerated sexual offenders cited by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in a 2002 opinion upholding compelled treatment based in part on the “frightening and high” re-offense rate of up to 80 percent for sexual offenders, according to Ira Ellman, a professor of Law at Arizona State University who first noted the connection to Longo’s writing in a recent Constitutional Commentary article.

In the same article, in which Longo touted a treatment program he headed at the time to rehabilitate incarcerated sexual offenders at the Oregon State Hospital, he wrote that re-offense rates for untreated sexual offenders could be anywhere from 35 to 80 percent.

Kennedy again referenced the “frightening and high” re-offense rate a year later when the court upheld an Alaska law that subjected offenders who had been convicted prior to the sexual offender registry’s creation to placement on the registry.

“Alaska could conclude that a conviction for a sex offense provides evidence of substantial risk of recidivism,” Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion for Smith v. Doe. “The legislature’s findings are consistent with grave concerns over the high rate of recidivism among convicted sex offenders and their dangerousness as a class.”

The U.S. Department of Justice now states on its website that the rate at which released sexual offenders are rearrested for new sexual offenses is as low as 3 to 10 percent.

Both of the opinions penned by Kennedy overturned lower court decisions opposing the state laws, according to Ellman.

In the Smith decision, the two individuals bringing suit were released from prison in 1990, remained offense-free for more than a decade, and one had been given custody of his daughter after being deemed rehabilitated by the courts, Ellman wrote.

A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court declined comment, stating only that “as a rule, the Justices do not elaborate upon or discuss the opinions of the Court, which speak for themselves.”

Statistics

As Ellman points out, Psychology Today is not an academic journal and is written for a lay-audience. As such, Longo’s article does not provide any citations regarding where the information came from.

“Anything I would have said would have been based on the science at that time and things that were factual and not my opinion,” Longo said. “… That statistic, at that point in time, was the best statistic we had at that point in time in the history of the field. That recidivism rate is probably higher than we would say today. I don’t think the recidivism rate for untreated sex offenders is necessarily 80 percent. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I would say that’s a very high estimate.”

So, how does this article make its way to be one of the linchpin facts in two Supreme Court cases?

The simplest answer is that the courts just assumed it was true.

“I don’t think (the Supreme Court) knew that’s where it came from,” Ellman said. “The solicitor general filed an amicus brief saying there was an 80 percent re-offense rate and cited a justice department manual. I suspect that Justice Kennedy and the clerks never went beyond that.

“The (solicitor general) has a lot of credibility and he’s citing a justice department manual, which you might assume has credibility,” he added. “I think they just burrowed the reference from the amicus brief.”

Ellman, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, said the court staff likely only looked to see if the information was stated in the cited manual, and never checked the veracity of the underlying claim.

“In this case, if you went to the justice department manual … the justice department manual does say that,” he said. “My guess is a clerk checked it that far, but just because the justice department manual said that, the justice department didn’t do any independent research on its own.”

The editor of the field manual herself, Barbara K. Schwartz, has rebuked the current policies and use of public registries.

In a 2010 essay titled “No More Victims,” which Schwartz used as the preface to an updated “Handbook of Sexual Offender Treatment,” she called the current public policies “very expensive” and “ineffective at preventing sexual assault.”

Schwartz wrote that the policies, like public registries, are counter-intuitive and interfere with the factors known to reduce re-offense rate.

“Having worked in the field of sex offender treatment since 1971, I now feel that I have fallen down the ‘the rabbit hole’ and am watching the Red Queen scream, ‘Off with their head,’” Schwartz wrote. “Is there no end to the counterproductive response to sex offenders and the problem of sexual assault … If individuals who found inappropriate ways to achieve basic human needs before they committed a sexual assault cannot fulfill their needs after they have offended, is that a setup for reoffending?”  (republished from The Sentinel)