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Comment by Forbo | Hacker News Reader

"The evidence suggests otherwise. Sex crimes researchers R. Karl Hanson and Kelly E. Morton-Bourgon of Public Safety Canada conducted a large-scale meta-analysis (quantitative review) of recidivism rates among adult sex offenders. They found a rate of 14 percent over a period averaging five to six years. Recidivism rates increased over time, reaching 24 percent by 15 years. The figures are clearly out of alignment with the public’s more dire expectations."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/misunderstood-cri...

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Furthermore, the evidence suggests that the U.S. Supreme Court has made an assumption of extremely high recidivism (as high as 80 percent) based on questionable research:

> And where did the government come up with their numbers? As it turns out, the solicitor’s brief in McKune cited a government manual that in turn cited a single article published in 1986 in Psychology Today, a mass-market magazine aimed at a lay audience. It was there that Ellman found this sentence: “Most untreated sex offenders released from prison go on to commit more offenses—indeed, as many as 80 percent do.” The article did not even pretend to be a scientific study. It offered no hard data, and its author was neither a scientist nor a professor, but rather a man with a degree in counseling who ran a program for sex offenders in an Oregon prison.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudenc...

Sorry but 25% of offenders committing another sex crime in the next 15 years more then enough for me to agree with the fact that they need to be identified and tracked.

And 75% of them learning their lesson should be treated the same as those that don't? Identification and tracking of them is doing nothing to prevent them from re-offending.

It's far below the rate overall, which is 60%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recidivism#Recidivism_rates

There's also the problem that stigmatisation helps more or less no one, because it's unlikely that parents can (or should) effectively supervise their children 24/7. And even if they did, it may protect their children at the cost of others, leaving the overall rate of these crimes unchanged.

To use an example with less emotional baggage: "Watch out for terrorists!" is a similarly useless warning.

Do you support tracking non-sex crime criminals that have been released given they have a higher rate of reconviction than sex offenders?

"Recidivism rates for sex offenders are lower than for the general criminal population. For example, a Bureau of Justice Statistics study of 108,580 non-sex criminals released from prisons in 11 states in 1983 found that nearly 63 percent were rearrested for a non-sexual felony or serious misdemeanor within three years of their release from incarceration; 47 percent were reconvicted; and 41 percent were ultimately returned to prison or jail."[1]

[1] - https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=90200&page=1

>Sorry but treating the system as transactional in the sense that you break the balance by committing a crime then pay it back through slave work in jail is perhaps one of the few ways to make the system even more dysfunctional than it already is.

Sorry, but it isn't enough for me.

> They found a [recidivism] rate of 14 percent over a period averaging five to six years. Recidivism rates increased over time, reaching 24 percent by 15 years

That paragraph supports its own opposite conclusion, and actually makes me reconsider my opposition to sex offender registries.

You are telling me that the subset of the population that has been convicted of a sex crime once has a 1 in 7 chance of doing it again within just a few years, and a 1 in 4 chance within 15 years. And these are probably very conservative numbers - they are the rates for those who are actually caught and convicted again, which is a fraction of those who hurt others again (considered the oft-reported statistics that the vast majority most sex crimes go unreported).

What is the probability of committing a sex crime for adults who have never been convicted of any crime? I suspect it is hundreds of times lower than the rate for adult sex offenders.

EDIT: Wow, way to cherry pick you numbers. The very next paragraph is this:

> ...sex offenders had a total recidivism rate (for both sex crimes and nonsexual violent crimes) of approximately 36 percent over a period of five to six years...The 15-year recidivism rate is 13 percent for incest perpetrators, 24 percent for rapists, and 35 percent for child molesters of boy victims.

And further down:

> When recidivism rates for sex and nonsexual violent crimes were combined, 51 percent of untreated and 32 percent of treated subjects reoffended.

You are extremely dishonest for failing to include this additional data in your post.

And as other posts have pointed out, these numbers are still dramatically lower than the recidivism rate of non-sexual offenders.

I think you're misinterpreting those last quotes. It says that sexual offenders are less likely to reoffend than other violent criminals.

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