Shortly before convicted child molester Earl Shriner was scheduled to be released from a Washington state prison in 1988, prison officials faced an awful dilemma.
They knew Shriner had drawn pictures and written in his diary about torturing children once he was free, but he had served his sentence and had to be released.Prison officials tried to have Shriner committed to a mental institution, but a judge ruled that he was not mentally ill under the law. Five months later, Shriner raped and mutilated a 7-year-old boy.
The case raised an outcry and led to the passage of a comprehensive legislative package aimed at stopping another Earl Shriner. One statute permits police to notify residents when a recently released sex offender moves into the neighborhood. Another permits the state to hold "sexually violent predators" indefinitely in a mental-treatment wing of the state prison.
Since then, dozens of states have passed similarly tough statutes, often following horrifying sexual crimes in their own back yards. As of December 1995, 30 states had passed community-notification laws.
But the laws have been challenged by civil libertarians as attacks on the rights of prisoners who have served the full sentence for their crimes. In New Jersey, a federal judge has declared the state's notification law unconstitutional, saying it amounts to a second punishment on offenders. Laws that permit dangerous sexual predators to be detained beyond their sentences have been challenged in five states - Washington, Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota and Iowa.
The tough anti-predator laws raise basic questions about how sex offenses should be viewed: Are they caused by mental illnesses that can be treated with therapy? Or are they crimes, plain and simple, that should be punished?
The mental health profession is divided over the issue. And there is vigorous debate over which, if any, treatments are effective in rehabilitating sex offenders.
The Washington State Psychiatric Association is among those challenging the state's sexual predator law, under which the state currently is holding 32 sex offenders beyond their sentences.
"These are merely criminals," says Seattle psychiatrist James D. Reardon, an association spokesman. "There is no scientifically based effective treatment for sex offenders. We couldn't find any research (showing) that treating is any more effective than in-car-cer-ating."
But some experts who work with sex offenders insist they have found therapies that work.
Fred S. Berlin, director of the National Institute for the Study, Prevention and Treatment of Sexual Trauma in Baltimore is one of them.
"I don't think the majority (of sex offenders) have a condition that's curable," he says, "but I do think that many of them have a psychiatric disorder and can, like alcoholics, learn to control themselves and live safely in the community."
"There are probably sex offenders who are criminals and some who are mentally ill," says Roxanne Lieb, associate director of the Washington State Institute for Public Policy at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.
"It's not black and white, as it's been posed in this debate. Incest offenders are in a very different category from a compulsive pedophile who targets little boys, has done it 20 times and will do it 20 times more. With an incest offender violating his daughter, it's not sexual drive; it's more typically issues of power and control."
Incest offenders are also the least likely of all sex offenders to commit sex crimes again, particularly outside the family.
The most publicized cases tend to focus on violence by strangers. Yet rape-murders constitute fewer than 3 percent of all sex offenses, and sadistic sex offenders are equally uncommon, according to Robert E. Freeman-Longo of the Safer Society Foundation in Brandon, Vt., which tracks sex-offender treatment programs nationwide and provides treatment referral.
In almost 90 percent of the molestation cases leading to convictions, the children know their abuser, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. In almost half the cases, the abuser is a parent or relative. Similarly, adults are more likely to be raped by someone they know than by strangers; acquaintances, boyfriends or family members represent about 60 percent of convicted rapists.
"The public always hates the sex offenders it doesn't know and believes they should all go to prison forever," says Lucy Berliner, research director at the Harborview Sexual Assault Center in Seattle, which treats assault victims. "The one they do know - their brother, their son, their pastor - they want to have the opportunity to get rehabilitated."
Berliner served on the task force that drafted Washington state's pioneering sex predator law. She defends the law against assaults by civil libertarians, arguing that it's narrowly drawn to get at a few hard-core, repetitive offenders like Shriner.
For policymakers, it comes down to a balancing act between the rights of ex-offenders and the rights of potential victims.
"Is the state helpless?" asks Alexander D. Brooks, professor of law emeritus at Rutgers Law School in Newark, N.J. "Must the state release such a person and say it can't do anything until he commits another crime?"
Initially, Brooks expected to oppose the Washington state law on civil liberties grounds, but he changed his mind after contemplating the legal impasse Washington state faced in the Shriner case.
"Which interest are you more concerned about protecting?" he asks. "Keeping dangerous offenders on the street where they will commit sexual offenses against women and children, or protecting women and children by committing the most dangerous offenders with the hope of treating them?"
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Recidivism rate among sex offenders
Recidivism rates vary widely among different types of sex offenders. Exhibitionists and child molesters are most likely to commit new offenses, according to a survey of international research findings. Incest offenders are the least likely to reoffend.
The survey tracked the most frequently cited studies of recidivism by offenders not treated by mental health professionals for sexual deviancy. Recidivism is defined as a rearrest, a reconviction or a return to prison.
Recidivism rates for untreated sex offenders
Incest offenders 4 percent to 10 percent
Rapists 7 percent to 35 percent
Child molesters (girl victims) 10 percent to 29 percent
Child molesters (boy victims) 13 percent to 40 percent
Exhibitionists 41 percent to 71 percent
(Source: W. L. Marshall and H.E. Barbaree, "Handbook of Sexual Assault" (1990), and Lin Song and Roxanne Lieb, "Adult Sex Offender Recidivism: A Review of Studies," Washington State Institute for Public Policy, January 1994)