Sep 23, 2017 03:44 PM
When Junk Science about Sex Offenders Infects the Supreme Court
Driven by a pervasive fear of sexual predators, and facing no discernible opposition, politicians have become ever more inventive in dreaming up ways to corral and marginalize those forced to register—a category which itself has expanded radically and come to include those convicted of “sexting,” having consensual sex with non-minor teenagers or even urinating in public.
And when these restrictions have been challenged in court, judge after judge has justified them based on a Supreme Court doctrine that allows such restrictions, thanks to the “frightening and high” recidivism rate ascribed to sex offenders—a rate the court pegged “as high as 80 percent.” The problem is this: The 80 percent recidivism rate is an entirely invented number.
As it turns out, the court found that number in a brief signed by Solicitor General Ted Olson. The brief cited a Department of Justice manual, which in turn offered on one source for the 80 percent assertion: a Psychology Today article published in 1986.
That article was written not by a scientist but by a treatment provider who claimed to be able to essentially cure sex offenders though innovative “aversive therapies” including electric shocks and pumping ammonia into offenders’ noses via nasal cannulas. The article offered no backup data, no scientific control group and no real way to fact check any of the assertions made to promote the author’s program.
Nonetheless, because the 80 percent figure suited the government lawyers’ aim of cracking down on sex offenders, Solicitor General Olson cited it, and Justice Anthony Kennedy, seemingly without fact-checking it, adopted the figure in a 2002 opinion that Justices William Regnquist, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined. Their decision blew open the doors to the glut of sex offender restrictions that followed.
But in the 30 years since that Psychology Today article was published, there have been hundreds of evidence-based, scientific studies on the question of recidivism rate for sex offenders. The results of those studies are astonishingly consistent: Convicted sex offenders have among the lowest rates of same-crime recidivism of any category of offender.
Driven by a pervasive fear of sexual predators, and facing no discernible opposition, politicians have become ever more inventive in dreaming up ways to corral and marginalize those forced to register—a category which itself has expanded radically and come to include those convicted of “sexting,” having consensual sex with non-minor teenagers or even urinating in public.
And when these restrictions have been challenged in court, judge after judge has justified them based on a Supreme Court doctrine that allows such restrictions, thanks to the “frightening and high” recidivism rate ascribed to sex offenders—a rate the court pegged “as high as 80 percent.” The problem is this: The 80 percent recidivism rate is an entirely invented number.
As it turns out, the court found that number in a brief signed by Solicitor General Ted Olson. The brief cited a Department of Justice manual, which in turn offered on one source for the 80 percent assertion: a Psychology Today article published in 1986.
That article was written not by a scientist but by a treatment provider who claimed to be able to essentially cure sex offenders though innovative “aversive therapies” including electric shocks and pumping ammonia into offenders’ noses via nasal cannulas. The article offered no backup data, no scientific control group and no real way to fact check any of the assertions made to promote the author’s program.
Nonetheless, because the 80 percent figure suited the government lawyers’ aim of cracking down on sex offenders, Solicitor General Olson cited it, and Justice Anthony Kennedy, seemingly without fact-checking it, adopted the figure in a 2002 opinion that Justices William Regnquist, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined. Their decision blew open the doors to the glut of sex offender restrictions that followed.
But in the 30 years since that Psychology Today article was published, there have been hundreds of evidence-based, scientific studies on the question of recidivism rate for sex offenders. The results of those studies are astonishingly consistent: Convicted sex offenders have among the lowest rates of same-crime recidivism of any category of offender.
