I personally believe in a very tough therapy and times in rehabilitation, whoever i also think sex offenders should get a LOT more time in prison than mlst of them are actually given.
Rehabilitation
A LOT more time in prison
Pick one, because most prisons DON’T rehabilitate prisoners into society. Instead, they serve to keep them locked up, which can lead to reoffending.
Anyway, here’s how Norway deals with it:
A quote from the second linked article that explains the rational behind Norway’s prison system:
In closed prisons we keep them locked up for some years and then let them back out, not having had any real responsibility for working or cooking. In the law, being sent to prison is nothing to do with putting you in a terrible prison to make you suffer. The punishment is that you lose your freedom. If we treat people like animals when they are in prison they are likely to behave like animals. Here we pay attention to you as human beings.
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I’ve spoken with many offenders over the years, with a range of sentences, situations, and requirements and let me be clear about several things:
- The sentences that sex offenders are given are already too harsh for most and deter reporting, which is already abysmal, because most sex offenses are committed by someone known and trusted. They’re people that the victim and their family care about. Recidivism is already low, contrary to popular belief - searching sex offender recidivism rates shows this and there’s plenty of information on the topic.
- You’re not factoring in registration, which is typically for life. That means that if someone gets a new car, they have to inform the state. New social media handle. New job. New volunteer position. Quit a job. Sell a car. Move their residence or spend the night somewhere else. In many cases, this is information the public can look up and use it to harass them with it.
- Therapy doesn’t work when it’s ‘tough’ and tied to someone’s sentence. Therapy, by nature, is about being vulnerable and sharing one’s deepest fears and truths. If doing so would mean a harsher state law enforcement response, do you think that happens? In many cases, “therapy” is so draconian it can’t even be rationally called psychology, just state-sponsored discrimination, at which point it isn’t rehabilitation.
- Many (some researchers say half, some say 35%, but it’s significant) of the scary sex offenders are juveniles who have a less than 3% chance of committing another sex crime. You’re literally saying kids should spend more time in prison by saying sex offenders should have more prison time.
While I understand the emotions and reaction towards the boogeymen that are sex offenders, I would absolutely invite people to actually learn the topic before spouting off with nonsense about more prison time.
What we need to do is prevent sex crime. We have more than plenty in place to react to sex crime after it happens, and not nearly enough to prevent it and ensure people have the resources they need to avoid harming others in the first place.
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First you have to define what a sex offender is. In some places looking at a cartoon or having a piece of plastic with a hole in it could be considered a sexual offense. In many places looking at a basic nudist picture could be considered a sexual offense if a judge determines that it aroused you sexually.
I realize you may be only talking about contact or CSM, but laws have pushed the definition of sex offenses to such lengths that even thoughts would qualify if they could be monitored.
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Mooving to a higher awareness that what a person is about to do to another person will damage them for the rest of their life should be enough for someone to say to themselves; “I’m not willing to do that kind of damage.” If we are ever going to reach a higher sense of spirituality; selfish, harmful acts and violence against one another needs to stop.
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I come from Australia, which has very conservative laws for MAP’s, having done a lengthy sentence myself (6.5 years) I feel the time done, to be perfectly honest, is a very expensive waste.
I can’t find the link to the most recent news story but a 2016 news report claims that it costs, on average, $106K per year for the average prisoner.
2016 news report on prisoner costs
Criminology suggests that an element of public humiliation or shame ensures others do not offend, to add to this, I argue that the victims* involved do need, what I call, ‘measured revenge’. Harm was done by offending, the ones harmed must be financially and emotionally compensated and it is the current agreement that we must be removed from society for a time.
- By offending against one person (adult or child) for just a single act, you permanently harm their parents, family, friends, forensic medical team, detectives, lawyers, your parents, your family and friends and to an extent society as well - ‘that could/did happen to me’.
I am of the belief that, on the global scale, the prison system is like a very inefficient and very expensive naughty corner. You go away for a while and ‘think about what you did’ and come out ‘calmer and all better now’, this is not realistic.
I put forward that a sentence should be determined by the amount of time required to correct a person + 30% (as it seemed the agreed amount when having a similar conversation) of that for social justice + 10% for usual delays in program delivery.
For example, the corrective program I was given was a CBT based approach which was administered over nine months, including delays. Adding on the 30% toll, the prison sentence would come to around one year.
It was in those 8 months, not the 6.5 years where I did the largest growth.
In Australia, we also must pay financial compensation to any victims, via a state enforced scheme and the fines are usually in the thousands.
The question, however, is If sentences were optimised, so that a prisoner served the shortest time possible, could society accept this or does society itself need time away from the offender also?
As a final note, change is very slowly happening over here. It was actually the police who put me onto support groups like this.