By David Riley, Chief Adviser Psychological Services
New Zealand, like other countries such as the United States, is faced with mounting numbers of offenders who are serving prison terms or community-based sentences. Against this gloomy picture, it is noteworthy that re-offending rates for some offences are actually falling.
In a recent paper, Leslie Helmus and colleagues1 discuss the phenomenon of declining rates of sexual re-offending, which appear to have peaked in the early 1990s and have been declining since that time. They note that this downward trend has also been found for other violent offenders and property offenders in Canada and the United States.
The paper draws upon recent studies which have been carried out in North America, Continental Europe, and one New Zealand study. All these pieces of work attest to the declining rates of sexual re-offending which appear to be only two-thirds of the level in the early 1990s.
Declining sexual re-offending rates have been observed for both rapists and sexual offenders against children, and this picture is confirmed
by official criminal statistics and a variety of victimisation studies.
While the causes of this decline are still unclear, several plausible reasons include demographic changes in the population, the possible impact on sex drive of antidepressant medication, rising public awareness and associated vigilance, longer prison sentences and the increasing use of indeterminate sentences, improved management of such offenders following release from prison, and the cumulative effect of sexual offender treatment programmes which have been progressively introduced over the last two decades.
Certainly, in New Zealand, the increase in use of sentences of preventive detention for sexual offenders, a sharper focus on the management of sexual offenders on parole or on extended supervision orders, and the very significant numbers of child sex offenders who have gone through Corrections’ two Special Treatment Units all seem likely to have helped lessen sexual re-offending.
This finding has some implications for us in New Zealand. We will need to take into account the falling rates when we assess an offender’s risk of sexual re-offending and when we evaluate our programmes for sexual offenders. We need to ensure we do not make overly optimistic assessments of the effectiveness of our programmes, or overly pessimistic judgements about an individual’s risk of re-offending.
Footnote: 1 Helmus, L., Hanson, K., & Thornton, D. (2009). Reporting Static-99 in light of new research on recidivism norms. ATSA Forum XXI(1).
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