No, I meant that kiddie fuckers are rarely if ever cured and they generally continue to prey on children as long as they are able. For them to be convicted means they need to get CAUGHT first, which isn’t a given.
The missing (undoubtedly dead) girl from North Dakota that’s in the news right now - I had no doubts in my mind it was perpetrated by someone who has a history of that sort of thing, and should never have seen the light of day - and guess what - the guy is a “registered sex offender” who served a sentence and was released in May. We have enough horrific crimes in this country as it is without letting them OUT into society for a double helping. It’s just ridiculous.
My husband currently works in a prison. Not long ago, I asked him about this, and he told me that (at least in his prison) it’s not true. He has never had to remove a child molester from GP simply because of the nature of his crime, nor has he ever heard of one being assaulted or threatened because of it.
Firstly, it’s not like inmates have easy access to the prison records. One can’t stroll down to Records to find out what Inmate Jones did. A child molester can easily tell other inmates that he’s “in” for grand theft auto if he wants to conceal the nature of his crime. (Especially if he’s refused treatment programs.)
Secondly, my husband’s prison has a large percentage of sex offenders. They blend right in.
Thirdly, most inmates simply don’t care. Righteous indignation is not something one commonly sees “on the inside.”
Not that extreme. Louisiana allows the death penalty for people who rape a child under the age of 12. Florida, Tennessee and Mississippi also had similar laws at one point. The idea what pedophiles should be put to death is nothing new.
I don’t condone vigilantes, but when a government refuses to punish its criminals, this is what we can expect. You hurt a kid in this depraved manner, someone’s gonna take care of business if they see that the law won’t.
When I did my law paper this semester I was absolutely floored to find that, in New York, the average prison sentence for a Level Three pedophile (an L3 is one that is a repeat offender and considered most likely to offend again) is FOUR MONTHS, and then 5 years of “probation.”
There’s a reason for this. Molestation is not always a crime which leaves physical evidence, and small children are notoriously poor witnesses. Juries may be reluctant to sentance a man to 25 years based only on the testimony of a confused child.
Often, all a prosecutor can do is try to work out a plea, since they can’t be sure of conviction. Sometimes, it comes down to a choice of some prison time with registration and mandatory treatment, or no prison time at all.
(emph mine)
Wha huh? If my mind doesn’t deceive me, the court of public opinion tried someone else, not too long ago, for another abduction, somewhere in Utah :rolleyes:
This snap to judgement is the first step toward vigilantism.
Where’s the cite? All I see is an assertion and an anecdote drawing on a single point of reference.
You’ve asserted (twice) that the majority of people convicted of molesting children get out and keep molesting children. I’ve provided a link to a study (written by John Ashcroft’s justice department–probably not a “soft on pedophiles” crowd) saying that only 3.3 percent of convicted child molesters are convicted for a sex crime within 3 years of their release.
Can you provide a cite from a reputable (e.g., not “Law & Order: SVU” or “CSI”) source backing up your assertions that:[ul]
[li]Most released child molesters continue to molest children after they are released.[/li][li]Enough incidences of child molestation go uncaught to significantly raise that 3.3% number to something greater then 50%[/li][li]Child molesters are “rarely” cured (I assume you mean “stop molesting children” by “cured”). [/li][/ul]
Just to play devil’s advotcate, the fact that only 3.3 percent were convicted of another offense within three years doesn’t mean that they’re not reoffending.
A staggering amount of sex crimes are never reported. Children are especially vulnerable to manipulation. They can easily be made to feel guilty, and can be convinced the incident is their fault. The molester may tell the child that their parents will no longer love them if they find out what the child did.
Secondly, some parents decline to call the police if their child reports abuse. They believe that the child will more easily forget and recover from the incident if nothing more is said, and that a trial could only be traumatic. If the molester is a family member, they may try to cover up the incident, either out of love for the molester, or out of fear of “shaming” the family. And, sadly, there are some parents who either do not believe the child, or just don’t care.
Third, I don’t know if that statistic covers cases in which the prosecution failed to convict. If the criminal goes through a trial, and is acquitted, does that count? Does the sex criminal have to be re-convicted of the same offense? (Rape versus Gross Sexual Imposition?)
You’ve done exactly what Tedster did: Offered opinions to refute hard statistical evidence from a trustworthy source.
I think it’s reasonable to ask for an actual, honest-to-goodness cite in this case because I think that our perceptions of sex offenders are heavily tainted by sex crimes being massively over-sensationalized by the media. We have highly-rated shows (e.g., “Law and Order: SVU”) that glorify the persecution sex criminals and we have a news media that latches on to highly atypical cases and doesn’t let go.
You say “a staggering amount of sex crimes are never reported”? Prove it. If we have a demonstratable history of erroneously persuing sex crimes, it’s a history of persuing innocent individuals based on “experts” who coerced children into outlandish accusations. Does “McMartin” ring any bells?
The 3.3 percent sex-crime recidivism rate puts the burden of proof on the Maude Flanders of the world. In order to turn that 3.3% into a majority of released sex offenders, you have to show that less then 6.6% of molestations result in a conviction. It’s too powerful a statistic to overcome with hand-waving.
Yes, sex crimes perpetrated against children are a tragedy, but given the stigma our society imposes on the accused, (to be accused of molesting a child is worse then being accused of murder!) I think they deserve a rational examination.
OK. Let’s take the high number from your cite: 80% of molestations go unreported.
About 75% of cases brought to trial result in convictions (I’m assuming that the majority of reported sex crimes go to trial. Hard to find data on this.) Therefore, if we say that 85% of molestations go unpunished, then that 3.3% represents only 15% of the actual number of incidents. This would imply that roughly 22% of the released sex offenders commited another sex crime. You’re still a long way from being able to say that even a simple majority of released sex offenders re-offend.
Someone tell me if I’m lying with statistics–I’m not used to this.
I’m assuming that the majority of reported sex crimes go to trial.
No way, Jose. The majority of pretty much all crimes never go to trial. Usually the DA cuts them a deal and they avoid the jury, because juries are unpredictable. Better to take 10 to 15 from the DA than risk getting in front of the jury with a life sentence on the table.
For run-off-the-mill rapes the percentage that will see trial is about 1-2% (Women’s Sourcebook). A stat I dug up for Florida re: pedophiles is about 3% make it to trial. Kids are very easily intimidated, they are afraid the perp will hurt their family if they testify, so it’s much easier to bargain so the perp can get out as soon as possible and continue.
Sorry. I ment to say “I’m assuming that the majority of the reported sex crimes result in charges being filed”–in other words, the alleged perpetrator wasn’t arrested and released.
The “75%” figure I gave was a combination of pleas and guilty verdicts.
Well, my husband is a former DA and when he was prosecuting, it was nowhere near 75% (CA).
Sex crimes against children are notoriously hard to prove and DAs hate to lose cases that are in the public eye, so many aren’t filed due to evidence problems, witness problems, etc. My husband won one that no-one would take, because it was minor-on-minor with no physical evidence (a 14 yr old boy on a 4 year old female relative- gruesome). Stood up on appeal too, but it could have been overturned if a less careful and dedicated DA had tried it.
My personal, gut-level feeling? Sex crimes against children should be capital crimes.
But I believe that pedophilia is a compulsion crime rather than a free-choice crime, so I beleieve the pedophile can’t help but reoffend. Whether or not they are caught again could be purely chance.
Right. This seems to be the “common wisdom” held by everyone. But do you actually have reputable data to back it up?
The point I’ve been trying to make is that, given only 3.3% of convicted sex offenders are re-convicted within 3 years, the recidivism rates are far lower then most people assert. Yes, not all crimes result in convictions. But in order to really refute that statistic and prove that a majority re-offend, you need to demonstrate (with equally reliable numbers–not anecdotes and beliefs) that something like 46.7 of the released sex offenders (the guys who register, get exposed to Meagan’s law, are monitored by parole officers, etc.) commit sex crimes they are not convicted (either by trial or plea) of.
Your first site (the Canadian one) is misleading because it’s a study of a metric used to evaluate the danger of released sex offenders. The first set of statistics you quoted from it described offenders who had been held in psychiatric instutitions (presumably because they had already been judged high-risk), not just the penal system. The second statistics quoted (which, as noted, has a tiny sample size) doesn’t distinguish between rapists and child molesters (as previously noted, child molesters have a lower recidivism rate then rapists) and doesn’t distinguish between sex crimes and non sex crimes. The study explicitly warns against using it to generalize beyond the scope of the study–and the scope of the study is to evaluate a psychiatric metric for predicting recidivism.
The second quote is about the general re-arrest rate, i.e., it includes non-sex offenses. This doesn’t contradict the US Department of Justice study at all, and it isn’t really relevent to the rate of re-commiting sex offenses.
The first part of the third quote has some problems:
We’re talking about child molesters specifically–they’ve been shown to have a lower recidivism rate then sex offenders has a whole. And even if you take the “2.4” number at face value (and assume the “unofficial” sources are all correct), that raises our number to 2.4 * 3.3 = 7.92, which is still a relatively small number and a long way from a majority.
They’re being extremely selective (to the point of being dishonest) about what they’re choosing to report from the study. Yes, the polygraphs ostensibly showed that imprisoned sex offenders had more victims then stated, but it also showed that parolled sex offenders (e.g., the ones that we’re talking about) didn’t have the same dramatic increase. In other words, they took a study with a tiny sample size and then threw the least damning half away. I don’t trust this source anymore. Here’s a quote from the abstract of the study: “Dramatic increases in the number of admitted victims and offenses were found for inmates, but not for parolees, across each source.”
Actually, the study they’ve cited doesn’t say this–it’s about crossover behaviour (e.g., the prevelance of commiting sex crimes against multiple genders). I went through it several times (they cited slides from a presentation) and didn’t find anything about “16 years.”
The rest of that quote is a huge cut & paste job that goes all over the place–much of it doesn’t seem relevant to what we’re discussing. I feel a bit like someone is trying to drown me in cites that they haven’t bothered to read or scrutinize themselves, and it doesn’t make for an enjoyable debate.
Whether or not they “go to trial” is not relevant- they still are convicted.
Another problem is various types of “sex offenders”. Here in CA, “flashers” are also considered “sex offenders” who have to register- although they are pretty much harmless. However, they will keep doing it. For decades, gay men having sex in cars were also arrested as “sex offenders”. Making a gay man register won’t stop him from being gay, so there’s more redivism there also. :rolleyes:
Then, even amoung Pedophiles, there are child “peepers” (mostly kiddie porno offenses) and “touchers”- those who “touch” but have no sex. Then there is consensual sex by a minor with an adult- (note of course very young children can’t give informed consent). All lumped in as “pedophiles” AND “sex offenders”.
Rare is the “child-rapist”, who actually has intercourse with pre-pubescent children. These few men (nearly always male) are very very sick, and need to be either shot or locked up forever. They will rape again, given the chance- they are not “sane” really.
I think we need to concentrate on that last category- the truely dangerous child rapist. (Note that the “touchers” DO need to be kept away from kids and need psychiatric help also). When we clutter up the stats with the MUCH larger number of “flashers” (yes, they are mentally ill- they are also basicly harmless), we do no one any service.
