An Examination of the Degree to Which Sex Offenders Kill

September 2006:

Abstract:
It seems clear that most of our current sex offender policies and those being proposed for the future are the result of sexually related homicides against children committed by previously convicted sex offenders. Given the enactment of these laws, one implicit legislative assumption emerges: that many, if not most, sex offenders go on to kill.

This study explores the assumption that sex offenders often kill their victims. Specifically, criminal history information from Illinois from 1990 to 1997 is analyzed to examine the degree to which sex offenders are charged with murder in conjunction with a sex crime and the likelihood of arrested sex offenders experiencing a future arrest for homicide.

These results are compared to those found for other types of nonsexual offenders. Findings indicate that sex offenders do not frequently commit murder, nor do they commit homicide at higher rates than other types of offenders.

For the remainder of this paper: by Lisa L. Sample

eAdvocate Note: This paper, published just after Lawmakers were working on enacting the Adam Walsh Act, refutes Lawmakers a major claim used to enact the Adam Walsh Act. i.e., that former sex offenders are more dangerous than other types of offenders.

US: Number of Aging Prisoners Soaring

January 2012:

Aging men and women are the most rapidly growing group in US prisons, and prison officials are hard-pressed to provide them appropriate housing and medical care, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Because of their higher rates of illness and impairments, older prisoners incur medical costs that are three to nine times as high as those for younger prisoners.

The 104-page report, “Old Behind Bars: The Aging Prison Population in the United States,” includes new data Human Rights Watch developed from a variety of federal and state sources that document dramatic increases in the number of older US prisoners.

Human Rights Watch found that the number of sentenced state and federal prisoners age 65 or older grew at 94 times the rate of the overall prison population between 2007 and 2010. The number of sentenced prisoners age 55 or older grew at six times the rate of the overall prison population between 1995 and 2010.

“Prisons were never designed to be geriatric facilities,” said Jamie Fellner, senior adviser to the US Program at Human Rights Watch and author of the report. “Yet US corrections officials now operate old age homes behind bars.”

Long sentences mean that many current prisoners will not leave prison until they become extremely old, if at all. Human Rights Watch found that almost 1 in 10 state prisoners (9.6 percent) is serving a life sentence. An additional 11.2 percent have sentences longer than 20 years.

Human Rights Watch visited nine states and 20 prisons to interview prison officials, corrections and gerontology experts, and prisoners. Human Rights Watch found officials scrambling to respond to the needs and vulnerabilities of older prisoners. They are constrained, however, by straitened budgets, prison architecture not designed for common age-related disabilities, limited medical facilities and staff, lack of planning, lack of support from elected officials, and the press of day-to-day operations.

While serving time in prison can be hard for anyone, it is particularly challenging for the growing number of older prisoners who are frail, have mobility, hearing, and vision impairments, and are suffering chronic, disabling, and terminal illnesses or diminishing cognitive capacities, Human Rights Watch said.

Prison facilities, rules, and customs were created with younger inmates in mind, and they can pose special hardships for those who are well on in years. Walking a long distance to the dining hall, climbing up to a top bunk, or standing for count can be virtually impossible for some older prisoners. Incontinence and dementia impose their own burdens. In the prisons with high proportions of elderly prisoners visited for the report, Human Rights Watch found that staff behavior has had to adapt to the realities of aging bodies and minds.

“Prison staff who work with the elderly know it makes no sense to yell at a prisoner who doesn’t understand what they are saying,” Fellner said. “As one sergeant told me, staff have to give older prisoners ‘a little more leeway’ when it comes to enforcing the rules.”

The number of aging prisoners will continue to grow, Human Rights Watch found, unless there are changes to harsh “tough on crime” policies, such as long mandatory minimum sentences, increasing life sentences, and reduced opportunities for parole. Many older prisoners remain incarcerated even though they are too old and infirm to threaten public safety if released, Human Rights Watch said.

“How are justice and public safety served by the continued incarceration of men and women whose bodies and minds have been whittled away by age?” Fellner said.

Among its recommendations, Human Rights Watch urges state and federal officials to:

Review sentencing and release policies to determine which could be modified to reduce the growing population of older prisoners without risking public safety;

Develop comprehensive plans for housing, medical care, and programs for the current and projected populations of older prisoners; and

Modify prison rules that impose unnecessary hardship on older inmates.

Fact Sheet for “Old Behind Bars: The Aging Prison Population in the United States”

The Prison Population is Aging

• The number of US state and federal prisoners age 65 or over grew at 94 times the rate of the total prison population between 2007 and 2010.
  • The number of prisoners age 65 or older increased by 63 percent. The total prison population increased by 0.7 percent. There are now 26,200 prisoners age 65 or older.
• The number of US state and federal prisoners age 55 or older nearly quadrupled between 1995 and 2010, growing by 282 percent, while total number of prisoners grew by less than half, 42 percent.
  • There are now 124,400 prisoners age 55 or older.
• As of 2010, 8 percent of the prisoner population was 55 or older, compared with 3 percent in 1995.
  • The proportion of prisoners age 55 and over varied among individual states from 4.2 percent in Connecticut to 9.9 percent in Oregon.
  • Fourteen percent of federal prisoners are age 51 or older.

Lengthy Sentences Propel Aging Prisoner Population

• Of state prisoners age 51 or older, 40.6 percent have sentences ranging anywhere between more than 20 years to life.
• One in ten state prisonersis serving a life sentence.
•  Fifteen percent of state prisoners age 61 or older have been in prison more than 20 years.
  • In New York,28 percent of those age 60 or over have been in prison continuously for 20 or more years.
• Eleven percent of federal prisoners age 51 or older are serving sentences ranging from 30 years to life. There is no federal parole.

Much Higher Medical Expenditures for Older Prisoners

• Depending on the state, medical expenditures for older prisoners are three to nine times as high as for other prisoners.
  • In Florida, the 16 percent of the prison population age 50 or over accounts for 40.1 percent of all episodes of medical care and 47.9 percent of all hospital days.
  • In Georgia, incarcerated people age 65 years or older had an average yearly medical cost of $8,565, compared with the average of $961 for those under 65.
  • In Michigan, the average annual health care cost for a prison inmate has been estimated at $5,801; the cost increases with their age, from $11,000 for those age 55-59 to $40,000 for those age 80 or older.
• Number and proportion of older prisoners and their sentences: In addition to national statistics, the report contains data for 24 individual states with particularly detailed information for California, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
• Medical Expenditures for Older Prisoners: The report contains data on prison medical expenditures in California, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Virginia, and Texas

..Source.. by HRW

Why Some Sex Offenders Don't Stop Abusing

January 2012 National:

A new study of single young men finds that 43 percent report pressuring or forcing a woman to do something sexual against her will at least once. But according to the results, there may be differences between those men who are sexually coercive only as teens and those who continue into adulthood.

These factors include personality differences, belief in stereotypes about women and the man's own experience of being an abuse victim.

"We were trying to understand who are the most extreme members of the group, and who might have done this a few times but felt regret or learned [not to behave this way]," said study researcher Antonia Abbey, a psychologist at Wayne State University in Detroit.

The results should help researchers understand how to target the different groups of men with specific anti-sexual assault education.

Coercive sex

An average of 207,754 new victims of sexual assault are reported each year, not including cases under the age of 12, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network. Most of the victims are women, though men are targeted too.

Contrary to common sense, people are actually quite willing to admit to sexual assault in research studies, even acts that would legally meet the definition for rape, as long as researchers ask them about specific behaviors rather than labels. In other words, asking, "Are you a rapist?" is likely to yield few "yeses," but, "Have you ever had sex with an unconscious woman who did not consent?" will trigger some surprisingly honest answers.

Studies like these done with college students suggest that sexually coercive behaviors are common. One of Abbey's earlier studies, for example, found that about 41 percent of her sample of college men admitted to knowingly forcing a woman to have sex or do some other sexual act. A 2004 study conducted by other researchers followed three classes of college men through all four years of school and found that by graduation, 34.5 percent had been sexually coercive.

Not all of these behaviors meet the legal definition for rape, Abbey cautioned. Some do, but others include things like verbal bullying, threats and guilt trips, all of which had a sexual context. Nonetheless, she said, even these legal behaviors can be harmful.

"I think most of us would view it as, 'That's not right, that's not ethical,'" Abbey told LiveScience. "That's not what we want young men and women to feel sexual activity is about."

Profile of sexual aggression

While college rates of these unhealthy patterns of sexuality seem to be high, few people have researched the general community, Abbey said. She and her colleagues conducted phone interviews in the Detroit area to gather single men between the ages of 18 and 35 who had dated women in the past two years. They chose this group because they wanted to find men on the dating scene who were in the "transitioning to adulthood" phase of life.

The men were offered $50 to complete two guided computer surveys one year apart. They were told the study was on dating and sexual experiences. Four hundred and seventy men signed on, and 90 percent completed the follow-up a year later, for a final sample of 425.

The surveys covered everything from personality profiles to a man's sexual history to his attitudes toward women and his beliefs about alcohol. Men were also asked if they had ever been abuse victims.

The results echoed those in college students: Levels of sexual aggression were high. Forty-three percent of the men who participated had perpetrated some sort of sexually aggressive act since age 14. A quarter of participants reported engaging in sexual coercion in the year between the first survey and the second.

In the year between surveys, 8 percent had forced sexual contact upon someone, 10 percent had verbally coerced a woman into sex when they knew she wasn't interested, 1.4 percent had attempted rape, and 5.4 percent had actually raped someone, usually an impaired or unconscious victim, they reported.

Starting and stopping

Abbey and her colleagues were interested in more than raw numbers. They compared the men who had started sexual aggression before the first survey and continued throughout (18 percent of all men in the study) with those who had done something aggressive before the survey but had not done anything in the year between surveys (25 percent) and with those who started acting sexually aggressive between the first and second surveys (7.5 percent).

Unsurprisingly, the persistent sexual offenders were the worst on every risk factor for sexual aggression and mental health variable measured, the researchers report in the January 2012 issue of the journal Psychology of Violence.

"They had more experience of being a victim of some kind of abuse as a child, they tended to have personality traits like being low in empathy toward other people, more risk-taking, more delinquent, more sexual partners," Abbey said. The men also reported more often that they misconstrued women's signals, believing they wanted sex when they didn't. They also believed more strongly in stereotypes about women. [6 Gender Myths Busted]

"On a host of different type of factors that you would think could contribute to someone's willingness to use another person for their purposes, this group scored high," Abbey said. "So it fit a profile that you often see."

The "desistors," or men who had been sexually aggressive in the past but had since stopped, showed a shift over the year-long study period. At the second survey, they reported a drop in sexual partners and said they had fewer misunderstandings about women's sexual intentions. For lack of a better term, Abbey said, they seemed to be "growing up."

"Some adolescents and adults act out in various ways," she said. "But you can kind of grow out of it, you mature. So this is clearly part of you, these people did these things, but on the other hand, it seems to be something where when circumstances change, they change."

The third group, those who started acting sexually aggressive during the study period, seemed to be late bloomers. Over the year-long study, they began drinking more and more often said that they believed alcohol makes people want sex. They also began to misunderstand women's sexual motives more, the opposite of the "desistor" group.

These men may be falling into crowds and situations where alcohol and sex mix, Abbey said.

"With that seems to be this pressure, internal or not, to push sex," she said. "And certainly there's lots of reasons to think that alcohol can allow people to cross a line."

Preventing sexual assault

These three profiles are limited in scope, given that the researchers had only a year's glimpse into these men's lives, Abbey said. But the findings suggest that preventing sexual assault may take a varied approach. Men who are abuse victims in early life, for example, need a different kind of help than men who become sexually pushy as teens and later grow out of it.

"We really need to intervene with children in trouble early, so you don't deepen these negative patterns," Abbey said.

For less-troubled men who may become sexually aggressive as teens or young adults because they see sex as conquest or a way to impress other men, education can help, Abbey said. One school-based program, The Date Safe Project, teaches kids explicitly about healthy relationships and consent, she said. Studies have borne out that exposing middle-school kids to the program decreases future sexual assaults.

Abbey and her colleagues hope to follow up with the same group of Detroit men again to see how their sexual aggression changes over at least another year.

"Clearly, [our study] gives us lots of hints about prevention," Abbey said. "But the more we learn in detail about the pressures people feel at certain ages, the better we can develop these programs." ..Source.. by Stephanie Pappas

The Sentencing Project: Too Good to be True: Private Prisons in America

January 2012 National:

In 2010, private prisons held 128,195 of the 1.6 million state and federal prisoners in the United States, representing eight percent of the total population. For the period 1999-2010, the number of individuals held in private prisons grew by 80 percent, compared to 17 percent for the overall prison population. While both federal and state governments increasingly relied on privatization, the federal prison system’s commitment to privatization grew much more dramatically. The number of federal prisoners held in private prisons rose from 3,828 to 33,830, an increase of 784 percent, while the number of state prisoners incarcerated privately grew by 40 percent, from 67,380 to 94,365. Today, 30 states maintain some level of privatization, with seven states housing more than a quarter of their prison populations privately.1

For the remainder of this report: by The Sentencing Project

ACLU: Improving Budget Analysis of State Criminal Justice Reforms: A Strategy for Better Outcomes and Saving Money

1-13-2012 National:

From the Executive Summary:
Across the nation, state governments are mired in economic crisis. Over 40 states had billions in budget shortfalls last year. With this grave reality in mind, this report, Improving Budget Analysis of State Criminal Justice Reforms, details how a change to the way states perform cost evaluations of legislation could help alleviate the strain. It explains how enacting certain criminal justice reforms will significantly reduce states’ runaway spending on prisons...

Download the Executive Summary »

Download the full Report »