Prison Policy Initiative: by Wendy Sawyer, June 6, 2019
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A new government report reinforces harmful misconceptions about people convicted of sex offenses. Here’s our take on how to parse the data.
By now, most people who pay any attention to criminal justice reform know better than to label people convicted of drug offenses “drug offenders,” a dehumanizing label that presumes that these individuals will be criminals for life. But we continue to label people “sex offenders” – implying that people convicted of sex offenses are somehow different.
A new report released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics should put an end to this misconception: The report, Recidivism of Sex Offenders Released from State Prison: A 9-Year Follow-Up (2005-2014), shows that people convicted of sex offenses are actually much less likely than people convicted of other offenses to be rearrested or to go back to prison.
But you wouldn’t know this by looking at the report’s press release and certain parts of the report itself, which reinforce inaccurate and harmful depictions of people convicted of sex offenses as uniquely dangerous career criminals. The press release and report both emphasize what appears to be the central finding: “Released sex offenders were three times as likely as other released prisoners to be re-arrested for a sex offense.” That was the headline of the press release. The report itself re-states this finding three different ways, using similar mathematical comparisons, in a single paragraph.
Unfortunately, this BJS report is a good example of how our perception of sex offenses is distorted by alarmist framing, which in turn contributes to bad policy.
Read the entire article by clicking on the link below:
SOURCE: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2019/06/06/sexoffenses/
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