This is a task force report on dangerous sex offenders.

In this book, legal and mental health experts analyze controversial new legal strategies adopted over the past decade to prevent sexual violence. The contributors examine innovative measures, including sexual predator laws used to commit dangerous sex offenders to mental hospitals after they have served their sentences, sex offender registration and notification laws, chemical castration of convicted sex offenders, intensive supervision programs for sex offenders living in the community, and programs for treating sexually abused children. Contributors also explore the serious constitutional questions these new legal strategies raise regarding the rights of sex offenders who have been fully punished. They also consider how much these laws cost and whether they actually prevent sexual violence. Experts discuss what we know and do not know about sex offenders: are they dangerous, who are their victims, and can they be treated. Psychologists and other mental health experts working with sexually dangerous offenders as well as lawyers, policymakers, and students in these fields may find this a useful book. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved).

Contemporary efforts to treat sex offenders are rooted in the post-Second World War era, in which an unshakable faith in science convinced many Canadian parents that pedophilia could be cured. Strangers in Our Midst explores the popularization of the notion of sexual deviancy as a way of understanding sexual behaviour, the emergence in Canada of legislation directed at sex offenders, and the evolution of treatment programs in Ontario. Popular discourses regarding sexual deviancy, legislative action against sex criminals, and the implementation of treatment programs for sex offenders have been widely attributed to a reactionary, conservative moral panic over changing sex and gender roles after the Second World War. Elise Chenier challenges this assumption, arguing that, in Canada, advocates of sex-offender treatment were actually liberal progressives. Drawing on previously unexamined sources, including medical reports, government commissions, prison files, and interviews with key figures, Strangers in Our Midst offers an original critical analysis of the rise of sexological thinking in Canada, and shows how what was conceived as a humane alternative to traditional punishment could be put into practice in inhumane ways.

This volume provides a clear and compelling introduction to one of the most significant topics in society today. Compiled by members of a Harvard seminar, it directs attention to psychoforensic issues most often raised by the general public and by students of social science and criminal justice. The frequently asked questions about the sexually dangerous address: conceptions of dangerousness attempts to confine the sexually dangerous psychological theories of causation psychological contributions to treatment media, political, social, and religious reactions, and statutory, judicial, and other legal responses. The case examples illustrate a variety of issues surrounding: serial, spousal, child, date, and statutory rape consensual sadomasochism surgical and chemical castration repressed memory and false confession video voyeurism restricting child pornography the labeling of object and speech, and post-imprisonment civil confinement in mental hospitals. The extensive bibliography directs students and the public interested in further cases and analyses to the important world where psychology and law, morality, and political and social policy interact. This brief and readable book is the first place to look for what most people want to know about the sexually dangerous.

The 109th Congress passed legislation that allows the federal government to civilly commit "sexually dangerous persons". Civil commitment, as it relates to sex offenders, is when a state retains custody of an individual, found by a judge or jury to be a "sexually dangerous person" by involuntarily committing the person to a secure mental health facility after the offender's prison sentence is done. In 1990, the state of Washington passed the first civil commitment law for sexually dangerous persons. Currently, 18 other states and the federal government have similar laws. Moreover, the Supreme Court, in Kansas v. Hendricks and Kansas v. Crane, ruled that current civil commitment laws are constitutional. The civil commitment of sex offenders centres on the belief that sex offenders are more likely than other offenders to re-offend. However, data on sex offender recidivism is varied. Data show that the recidivism risk for sex offenders may be lower than it is typically thought to be; in fact, some studies show that sex offenders recidivate at a lower rate than many other criminals. Other studies show that, given time, almost all sex offenders will commit a new sex crime. Most discussions about recidivism examine ways to decrease it; for example, by providing sex offenders with treatment. Research on the efficacy of sex offender treatment is promising, but it cannot prove that treatment reduces recidivism.

A classic from “the dean of true crime” (The Washington Post)—now with a new foreword—this 1983 masterpiece tells the incredible story of a Spokane, Washington serial rapist who was exposed as the handsome, privileged son of one of the city’s most elite families. For more than two years, a rapist prowled the night streets of the homey, All-American city of Spokane, Washington, terrorizing women, sparking a run on gun stores, and finally causing one newspaper to offer a reward—the calls taken by the distinguished managing editor himself, Gordon Coe. In March 1981, luck and inspired police work at last produced an arrest, and Spokane shuddered. The suspect was clean cut and conservative…and Gordon Coe’s son. For eighteen months, Jack Olsen researched the cases of Fred and Ruth Coe to try to learn not only what happened within that family, but how and why. He interviewed more than 150 people and built up a portrait not only of that extraordinary family, but of the mind of a psychopath. And searching the memories of the women in Fred Coe’s life, he unearthed a most horrifying question: What is it like to love and live with a man for years—and then discover he is a psychopathic criminal? In this “gruesomely spellbinding” (Glamour) examination of the mind of a psychopath and of the women—and men—who were his victims, Olsen delivers “a harrowing portrait…It has become fashionable with books about vicious crimes to compare them to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Finally there is a book that deserves the comparison” (Richmond Times-Dispatch).