Debunking The Myths
All of these facts can be verified thorugh various government doucments
A Bureau of Justice Statistics report provides the first comprehensive national data on prisoner recidivism in more than a decade.1 Researchers following a cohort of state prison inmates released in 1994 found that 67.5% of those discharged were rearrested within three years. This represents an increase of 5% over a similar study of prisoners released in 1983. Additionally, 46.9% of released prisoners were reconvicted for a new crime within three years and 51.8% were reincarcerated, either serving a new sentence or having committed a technical violation of their parole conditions. The decreasing emphasis on prison programs intended to provide skills training and counseling for prisoners for their eventual reentry into the community is leaving released inmates largely unprepared to successfully reintegrate into society.
In contract the Bureau of Justice study Recidivism of Sex Offenders Released from Prison in 1994, shows that only 3.5% of sex offenders released from prison in 1994 were rearrested for a new sex crime within the first three years. It is generally agreed that the first three years after release would tend to be the riskiest years for a new offense.
The risk assessments done by the California Department of Mental Health rely upon data that was collected, primarily, prior to 1992, in Canada and Great Britain. Since that time United States has experienceds a 40% decline in cases of sustainable child sexual abuse, as well as similar declines in rape and other violent crime. These trends seem to exist whether or not a particular jurisdiction has SVP or Three Strikes type of laws. While the reason for these declines are unknown, there is not serious dispute that they exist.
The most recent United Nations studies on crime show that rape occurs at about 2.5 times the rate in Canada as the United States. Additionally, figures from The Sentencing Project indicate that the United States, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world, has about 8 times the incarceration of Canada. California has the highest incarceration rate in the United States.
Predictions of future sexual violence in California are being made based upon data which is out of date and comes from countries with substantially differing offense demographics.
Recent reports in the Sacramento Bee newspaper suggest that state evaluators in California have a false positive rate of up to 95% which means the state is spending over $128,000.00 per year, plus legal and ancillary medical costs, per inmate, to civilly commit a group where only 5 out of 100 will actually reoffend.
It has been estimated that the cost of annual monitoring of individuals in the community would be less than $10,000.00 per year.
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or Mail To
Michael J. Aye
Attorney at law
117 J Street, Suite 202
Sacramento, CA 95814-2212
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(916) 447-1278