Reply #24: I'm not sure. Couple problems, though.

[varkam]

Here's a paragraph describing the graph:

Conversely, Prentky, Lee, Knight, and Cerce (1997) found that over a 25-year period, child molesters had higher rates of reoffense than rapists. In this study, recidivism was operationalized as a failure rate and calculated as the proportion of individuals who were rearrested using survival analysis (which takes into account the amount of time each offender has been at risk in the community). Results show that over longer periods of time, child molesters have a higher failure rate—thus, a higher rate of rearrest—than rapists (52 percent versus 39 percent over 25 years).

I'm not sure what the rationale is behind a 25-year follow-up, but I'll have to look into that. But the first thing that jumps out at me is how they operationalize recidivism. I'm assuming that they are focusing on sex crimes and not on any type of crime (it would of been nice if that were spelled out explicitly). Additionally, I'm not sure how the application of survival analysis affected the results. Also, it seems that they are focusing on re-arrest and not on convictions - so it is likely that there are at least a few false positives in the data. Another issue is the number of subjects. I'm not sure what conclusions that you could draw from this given that there were relatively few people in each category (though it would be nice if we had larger studies focusing on these types of follow-ups).

And, finally, there is no differentiation within groups. It would be much more useful if we could see the rates for say intrafamilial offenders or for offenders who had a same-sex victim. Without those things, I'm just not sure how useful it is.

Undoubedtly, though, there are some who poses a persistent risk for reoffense for whatever reason. But, again, the problem with the application of a one-size-fits all law is you're going to be locking up a lot of people who do not pose a risk to anyone. The key, I think, is greater differentiation within groups.

Edited to add: Doh! They do mean new sex offense charges - it says it right in the graph! Oops.