When junk science about sex offenders infects the Supreme Court

This month the Supreme Court will have a rare opportunity to correct a flawed doctrine that for the past two decades has relied on junk social science to justify punishing more than 800,000 Americans. Two cases that the court could review concern people on the sex offender registry and the kinds of government control that can constitutionally be imposed upon them. [...]

For the past 24 years, Minnesota has detained sex offenders released from prison in a "therapeutic program" conveniently located on the grounds of a maximum-security prison in Moose Lake. The "patients" are kept in locked cells, transported outside the facility in handcuffs and leg irons, and subjected to a regimen that looks, sounds and smells just like that of the prison it is adjacent to. But unlike prison, this "therapeutic" program, which aims to teach the patients to control their sexual impulses and was initially designed to last from two to four years, has no fixed end date. Rather, program administrators decide which patients are safe enough to release. In the 24 years it has existed, not a single "patient" has ever been fully released. [...]

Driven by a pervasive fear of sexual predators, and facing no discernible opposition, politicians have become evermore inventive in dreaming up ways to corral and marginalize those forced to register - a category which itself has expanded radically and come to include those convicted of "sexting," having consensual sex with non-minor teenagers or even urinating in public. [...] And when these restrictions have been challenged in court, judge after judge has justified them based on a Supreme Court doctrine that allows such restrictions, thanks to the "frightening and high" recidivism rate ascribed to sex offenders - a rate the court has pegged "as high as 80 percent." The problem is this: The 80 percent recidivism rate is an entirely invented number.

source: Article 'When Junk Science About Sex Offenders Infects the Supreme Court' by David Feige; www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/opinion/when-junk-science-about-sex-offenders-infects-the-supreme-court.html; The New York Times; 12 September 2017