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"Public Safety, Individual Liberty, and Suspect Science: Future Dangerousness Assessments and Sex Offender Laws"

By Douglas A. Berman

The title of this post is the title of this notable new paper from Melissa Hamilton now appearing on SSRN. Here is the abstract: This article argues that the new preventive law focus in sex offender laws is largely ineffective and too costly to personal liberty.  The application of sex offender laws involving civil commitment, sex offender registration, and residency restrictions is often based on an individualized analysis of future dangerousness, i.e., the risk the defendant will sexually recidivate. In assessing future dangerousness, experts and courts place heavy emphasis on the use of actuarial tools, basically checklists that mental health experts use to derive statistical estimates of risk.  This article provides substantiation that actuarial tools, while enjoying the imprimatur of science, suffer from significant empirical faults...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on April 12, 2010 (boomark / email).