Sexually Violent Predator Evaluations: Empirical Evidence,Strategies for Professionals,and Research Directions

Several states have passed civil commitment laws that allow the precautionary detention of sex offenders who have completed their criminal sentences. Over 2,500 sex offenders have been committed across states with such statutes and several thousand more sex offenders have been evaluated. Most statutes call for an evaluation of risk by a mental health professional and, although each state statute is worded differently, three main elements common to sexually violent predator evaluations are used to guide evaluators: mental abnormality, volitional capacity, and likelihood of future sexual violence. The current article presents empirical evidence for the main tenants of these forensic evaluations, provides recommendations for evaluators in light of current limitations of evidence, and offers suggestions for future research in this area of forensic assessment.     

Employing the Mental Health System to Control Sex Offenders After Penal Incarceration*

In the 1930s, several states provided civil commitment in mental institutions for certain sex offenders. Civil commitment of these sex offenders abated after most states repealed their statutes in the 1960s. In the 1980s, however, these statutes returned, as outraged citizens deplored the offenses of repeated sex offenders. The author of this essay examines civil commitment statutes for sex offenders in Washington and Minnesota, two of the leading states in this area, as well as recent rulings from each state's Supreme Court upholding the constitutionality of these statutes. Particularly, the author focuses on the psychiatric or mental health discussions by the justices in the majority in both state rulings. Furthermore, the author criticizes the legislatively defined mental abnormality statutes that sanction these commitments, proposes use of the ordinary civil commitment statutes for individuals who are seriously mentally ill, and concludes that sex offenders who do not meet the criteria for traditional civil commitment should be handled by the criminal justice system.     

Hate groups and hate crime

This paper is the first to investigate the relationship between hate groups and hate crime empirically. We do so using panel data for the U.S. states between 2002 and 2008. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find little evidence that hate groups are associated with hate crime in the United States. We find somewhat stronger evidence that economic hardship may be related to hate crime. However, evidence for the potential importance of economic factors remains weak. Further, we find that demographic variables are not significantly related to hate crime in the United States. Our results leave the question of what factors may drive hate crime in America unresolved. But they cast doubt on the popular perception that hate groups are among them.     

Factors predicting selection of sexually violent predators for civil commitment

This study investigated the degree to which independent variables predicted civil commitment selection in a sample of 450 sexual offenders evaluated for civil commitment as "sexually violent predators" under Florida's Jimmy Ryce Act. Using logistic regression, this study examined the relationship between the dependent variable, commitment recommendation, and several sets of independent variables. Results revealed that the statistically significant predictors of recommendations for sex offender civil commitment were diagnoses of pedophilia and paraphilia not otherwise specified (NOS), psychopathy, actuarial risk assessment scores, younger age of victim, and nonminority race (R2 = .88). Discriminant function analysis confirmed that these variables correctly predicted commitment recommendations in 90% of cases. Sex offenders recommended for commitment consistently met the criteria set forth by the U.S. Supreme Court in Kansas v. Hendricks (1997): They suffered from a mental abnormality predisposing them to sexual violence, and risk assessment determined that they were likely to reoffend.     

The prediction of violent behavior during short-term civil commitment

The predictive validity of the clinical judgment of dangerousness in the context of short-term civil commitment was studied prospectively by comparing the behavioral scale ratings of both verbal and physical aggression between 37 persons committed on the basis of "danger to others" versus 31 persons committed on other grounds. No statistically significant difference was found between these two groups of detainees with regard to the levels of aggression measured during their approximately three-day detention. This finding is in agreement with abundant previous research which documents the inability of psychiatrists to accurately predict future dangerousness, prompting the author to suggest that the "dangerousness" criterion for civil commitment be rejected. Although society is unlikely to resurrect the broadly defined "in need of treatment" criterion because of its historically demonstrated ever present potential for abuse, the author suggests an alternative criterion for civil commitment which, in perhaps a more well-defined and more practical way, would allow the state to maintain its doctrine of parens patriae toward mental patients.     

Outpatient civil commitment in Texas for management and treatment of sexually violent predators: a preliminary report

Texas established in 1999 outpatient civil commitment for sexually violent predators discharged from prison with or without parole. These individuals suffer from a behavioral abnormality, have been convicted of two or more sexually violent crimes and are deemed likely to reoffend. Civilly committed individuals are managed by a team composed of case manager (supervision), treatment provider, public safety officer (global positioning satellite monitoring), and other professionals. Treatment consists of individual and group therapy using a standard workbook. Out of 21 committed individuals, 7 are in the treatment, 1 died, 10 are in custody after breaking conditions of commitment that constitute a felony, and 3 await release from prison. Cost of outpatient civil commitment is less than $20,000/person/year compared with more than $100,000 for inpatient commitment in other states. Texas has found outpatient civil commitment to be an effective and relatively low-cost way to protect the public and treat the offender.     

The United States Supreme Court and the death penalty since Furman: The settlement of basic issues

In 1972 the United States Supreme Court in Furman V. Georgia found that the death penalty as it was then being applied was cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution. Furman provided few constitutional guidelines, but states reinacted their death penalty statutes.In 1976 the Court began to receive appeals from death sentences imposed under the reinacted statutes. In its decisions the Court began to establish guidelines. It found the death penalty was not per se cruel and unusual punishment. Before the death penalty can be imposed the court must take into consideration any mitigating circumstances and the case must be reviewed by the state supreme court. A mandatory death sentence is unconstitutional.Other issues including proportionality, due process and finality of judgment will be examined in the next segment of this study.     

Drawing the Necessary Line: A Review of Dating Domestic Violence Statutes around the United States

Orders of protection help combat dating violence by ensuring a period of separation between the victim and the abuser. The prevalence of dating violence is similar to that of spousal abuse and the effects on the nonmarried victims are just as severe. Some jurisdictions in the United States do not offer victims in dating relationships protective orders and two states restrict orders for same‐sex couples only. Other state statutes are inadequate. A uniform statute that permits participants in dating relationships access to protective orders should be implemented across the country.

Key Points for the Family Court Community:
• See and understand the changes in dating domestic violence statutes
• Up to date as of 2011 with 2012 amendments to state statutes

     

Punishment or treatment?

Although there is strong support among the general public for providing insanity acquittees with mental health treatment, it is also believed that insanity acquittees should be punished when they break the law. Prior studies of the lengths of confinement of insanity acquittees have yielded inconsistent results. This article draws upon a large-scale, multistate study of insanity pleas to explore the question: Is society able to withhold punishment against persons acquitted of criminal charges due to insanity? Results indicate that offense seriousness is a more important factor than mental disorder in determining the lengths of confinement of persons foundNot Guilty by Reason of Insanity and that persons found guilty are more likely to be released without ever having been confined than persons acquited by reason of insanity. Implications for invoking offense seriousness as a primary criterion in assessments of dangerousness are discussed.     

Diagnostic and risk profiles among civilly committed sex offenders in Washington State

Since 1990, 17 states have passed legislation allowing for the civil commitment of a small number of sex offenders who are deemed at a particularly high risk for reoffense. Despite the very public and controversial nature of these laws, little is known about the individuals who are detained pursuant to them. The current article presents data on 190 civilly committed and detained sexually violent predators in Washington State. These sexual offenders suffer from a variety of mental illnesses. The modal offender is diagnosed with both an Axis I and an Axis II disorder. Furthermore, these offenders are at moderate to high risk for reoffense and present with a significant degree of psychopathy.     

Violent Sex Offenses: How are They Best Measured from Official Records?

In the United States, sexually violent predator (SVP) commitment statutes generally require assessment of an offender's risk of subsequent sexual violence. Current actuarial methods for predicting sexual reoffending were actually designed to predict something else—charges or convictions for offenses deemed sexual based on information obtained from police “rapsheets” alone. This study examined the referral and past offenses of 177 sex offenders. Results showed that police rapsheets (and data based on them) underestimated the number and severity of sexually motivated violent offenses for which sex offenders were actually apprehended. Rapsheet violent offenses seemed a more accurate index of the conduct addressed by SVP legislation than were rapsheet sex offenses. We suggest that, when evaluating sex offenders for SVP status, actuarial instruments designed to predict violent recidivism (as measured by rapsheet violent reoffenses) might be preferable to those designed to predict sexual recidivism (as measured by rapsheet sexual reoffenses).

A SECOND CHANCE FOR CHILDREN AND FAMILIES: A MODEL STATUTE TO REINSTATE PARENTAL RIGHTS AFTER TERMINATION

There are more than half a million children in foster care in the United States. Some of these children are adopted into loving families, but many are considered hard to adopt and never find a permanent family. Research suggests that the outlook for the teens who exit or age out of foster care without a permanent home or a meaningful adult relationship is bleak. They are more likely to face homelessness, joblessness, drug addiction, early pregnancy, mental health problems, and prison time. With such grim statistics, states should explore every possible permanent family resource for youth in foster care. This Note proposes that, in limited circumstances, it is in the best interest of the child to vacate a final order of termination and reinstate parental rights. It calls for states to adopt a model state statute based on the five state statutes currently in place that already allow for the reinstatement of parental rights.     

Student perceptions of hate crimes

Estimates indicate hate crimes are a growing concern in the United States. This paper addresses how criminal justice students perceive victims of hate crimes. Survey findings show subjects are less likely to define certain groups of people as victims of hate crimes. Suggestions are made as to how criminal justice departments can heighten awareness of hate crime victims, multiculturalism, and gender diversity among criminal justice students.     

The sex offender next door: deconstructing the United States' obsession with sex offender registries in an age of neoliberalism

In the 1990s, against the backdrop of an ascending Age of Neoliberalism, sex offender registration statutes were passed in the United States. These laws require law enforcement officials to utilize computer technologies in order to publicly identify individuals who have been convicted of sexual offenses. In this study, we conducted in-depth interviews with twenty-four respondents who were forced to register as sex offenders. All of these participants resided within Southeast Texas, which is arguably one of the most punitive regions within the United States. The vast majority of the sample reported moderate to severe forms of harassment as a result of being outed as sex offenders via computer technologies. We conclude that in the post-Keynesian United States, the Web-based monitoring of sex offenders will continue to remain a popular American pastime and may even expand to other industrialized democracies throughout the world.     

From Loss of Services to Loss of Support: The Wrongful Death Statutes, the Origins of Modern Tort Law, and the Making of the Nineteenth-Century Family

The wrongful death statutes enacted in most states during the mid-nineteenth century have long represented a classic moment in the narrative of American legal history. Historians have not observed, however, that American wrongful death statutes amended the English act on which they were modeled to introduce a gender asymmetry peculiar to the United States. Led by New York, most American jurisdictions limited wrongful death actions to "the widow and next of kin" of the decedent, categories that did not include husbands of deceased wives. Thus, a wife could bring a wrongful death action for the death of her husband, but a husband could not bring a wrongful death action on his own behalf for the death of his wife.
The wrongful death statutes represent a heretofore unrecognized conjuncture of the beginnings of the modem law of torts with the nineteenth-century legal reconstruction of the family. The statutes mowed accident litigation away from an eighteenth-century model of masters suing for loss of the services of a servant, slave, wife, or child, toward the now more familiar model of suits for loss of wages and support. Moreover, the gender asymmetry of the statutes embodied and reproduced a new nineteenth-century conception of the family in which men worked as free laborers and women were confined to relatively narrow domestic roles, removed from the market and dependent for their support on the wages of their husbands. Indeed, the statutes anticipated by over half a century the American welfare state's two-track approach to support for wage-earning men and dependent women.     

Recidivism in Stalking and Obsessional Harassment

Despite the rapidly growth of mental health attention focused on the phenomenon of stalking, no empirical research to date has attempted to assess the frequency of repeat offending or attempted to identify predictors of recidivism. A total of 148 stalking and harassment offenders who were court-ordered to undergo a mental health evaluation were followed for a period of 2.5–13 years in order to assess the frequency of repeat offenses and the variables that differentiated high versus low risk offenders. Recidivism data were obtained from a variety of sources, including criminal justice records, mental health records, and reports from probation officers and victims. A number of potential predictor variables were selected on the basis of the existing recidivism literature in other criminal justice populations. Frequency analysis were used to identify variables that significantly differentiated offenders who did and did not reoffend while survival analysis was used to analyze the impact of these covariates on time to reoffense. A total of 49% of the offenders reoffended during the follow-up period, 80% of whom reoffended during the first year. The strongest predictors of recidivism included the presence of a personality disorder, and in particular, a Cluster B personality disorder (i.e., antisocial, borderline, and/or narcissistic). In addition, those offenders with both a personality disorder and a history of substance abuse were significantly more likely to reoffend compared to either of these risk factors alone. Surprisingly, the presence of a delusional disorder (e.g., erotomania) was associated with a lower risk of reoffender. The findings are discussed in terms of the legal system and treatment implications.     

A Need Not Being Met: Providing Paid Family and Medical Leave for All Americans

Many parents in the United States face the quandary of whether to take time off from work to care for themselves, their children, or other family member, understanding that their jobs may not be there upon return and they will receive no income during their leave. The Family and Medical Leave Act has not lifted this burden; it only provides for unpaid leave. Four states and several cities have implemented paid family and medical leave statutes with both employees and employers benefiting. This Note proposes a uniform paid family and medical leave statute based on other countries’ statutes; proposed federal legislation; and statutes in New York, California, and San Francisco.     

Deadly Words: State Power and the Entanglement of Speech and Violence in Hate Crime

Any analysis of hate crime that attempts to separate speech from action, language from violence, faces epistemological difficulties that limit the range of conversations about laws responding to identity-based injury in the United States. Active debates have raged over the implications of bias crime sentence enhancement laws for the protection of ‘freespeech’, thus addressing the inextricability of language and meaning from hate crime. Those in favor of legal responses to identity-based injury tend toward essentialist claims which assume the stability of identity and of meanings inherent in words or actions. Those opposed assert the impossibility of codifying the meaning of words or actions in the law, and/or they worry about the reification of (victimized) identities accompanying bias crime statutes. This article argues that the focus on language and speech in these debates simultaneously enables an evasion of discussion about the law's response to bias-related violence, and misleadingly assumes too much stability in the functions of law and the nature of state power. Interviews conducted by the author with individuals involved in a 1992 racist hate crime are used to show the diverse elements of state power suffusing the incident and its aftermath. An analysis of the crime's investigation and prosecution under a Maryland hate crime statute suggests that law enforcement officers are primarily using hate crime laws as public relations tools in a fight against community perceptions that they are themselves bigots. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Effects of psychopathy and violence risk testimony on mock juror perceptions of dangerousness in a capital murder trial

The recent introduction of the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) into the sentencing phase of capital murder trials has heightened concerns about the potentially prejudicial impact of such information on jurors, who might give disproportionate weight to this diagnosis when determining whether a defendant is a “continuing threat to society”. To investigate this issue, 238 undergraduates read a case summary based on US v. Barnette ( ), in which prosecution testimony was presented regarding the presence of a mental disorder (psychopathy, psychosis, or no disorder). Compared to the “no disorder” condition, participants rated psychopathic defendants as more likely to be violent in the future, even though testimony related to level of risk (high or low) was held constant. The difference in perceived dangerousness across the psychopathy and no disorder groups was particularly pronounced when the experts described the defendant as being at low risk. A similar pattern of effects was noted for the psychosis condition, suggesting that the impact of mental disorder testimony on perceptions of dangerousness may not necessarily be specific to the PCL-R.