Delusional campaign for a world without risk

Convicted sex offender Anthony Sowell seemed run-of-the-mill. He scored a low "1" on the Static-99, the popular actuarial tool designed to quantify risk for sexual recidivism. Now, he is suspected in the murders of 11 women whose remains were found at his Cleveland, Ohio home. (His publicly leaked risk evaluation is HERE.)

John Albert Gardner III, who like Oscar-winning film director Roman Polanski was convicted of molesting a 13-year-old girl, looked almost as routine. Paroling after a 5-year prison stint, he scored a "2" on the Static. Now, he stands charged with the highly publicized San Diego rape-murder of teenager Chelsea King.

While the United States crashes and burns -- jobs disappearing, home values plummeting, public school teachers begging for basic supplies like paper and pencils -- politicians are hosting emergency hearings to determine "what went wrong."

Who you gonna blame? The Static-99

The same California politicians who enthusiastically enacted a law -- the ambitiously titled Sex Offender Control and Containment Act of 2006 -- mandating the use of this scientifically flawed actuarial tool are now jumping all over prison bureaucrats for mandating its use to determine which paroling sex offenders should be most carefully monitored. Maybe they should have listened to those who have been saying all along that actuarial tools are not a panacea.

When I got a call from a news reporter exploring that angle, I found myself in the amusing position of (half-heartedly) defending the Static-99. As I tried to explain to the reporter (who then misquoted me), finding a needle in a haystack ain’t easy. At the risk of sounding perseverative: it's the statistical problem of low base rates. If only about one of every ten paroling sex offenders will reoffend sexually, picking out that one is difficult. And picking the one who will commit an exceedingly rare crime like the Chelsea King murder is virtually impossible. The hysterical masses can't seem to grasp that:

• The broad majority of men who are apprehended and prosecuted for a sex offense are never rearrested for another, and
  

• The broad majority of sex crimes are committed by men who fly below the radar because they have never been apprehended before. To catch these guys, you'd have to engage in massive over-prediction, producing an epidemic of what we call "false positives."

And that's just what the mobs are calling for. As one man in the crowd lobbying for the new "Chelsea's Law" put it, anyone who "touches a child" should automatically lose all Constitutional rights.

Be careful what you wish for. Even in a fascist police state, bad stuff will still happen. In fact, a misplaced emphasis on eliminating risk will paradoxically decrease public safety, by eliminating primary prevention programs that actually work to reduce crime. In California, prison officials told an emergency meeting of the Assembly Select Committee on Prisons and Rehabilitation Reform they would need $1 billion more each a year to return every paroled sex offender to prison on the basis of minor violations like Gardner's. That would mean taking even more pencils away from teachers in a state near bankrupted by its massive prison infrastructure.

All aboard the opportunist train

It's understandable why parents of crime victims like Chelsea King lobby for tougher laws. It's a way to deny their impotence and channel their feelings of sadness, guilt and rage.

And it's similarly easy to understand why politicians jump on the bandwagon. Powerless to fix our shattered economy and lacking the political will to tackle more complex social problems, they seize on random horrors to make themselves look good. Illusory efficacy wins votes.

And then the other opportunists jump on board. Crime Victims United used this week's hearing to lobby against early release of nonviolent prisoners. (Can you say non sequitur?)

Not to be outdone, a group of embittered forensic psychologists have jumped on the Chelsea bandwagon. Forming a secret "consortium," they have complained to the state Attorney General's Office that if they were still evaluating paroling prisoners for potential civil commitment as Sexually Violent Predators (SVP's), they would have done a better job of protecting the public. The evaluators, who are shielding their identities through an attorney, claim that the state's new contract bidding policy for SVP evaluations "results in the loss of life of untold victims" "for the sake of economic expediency." Their propaganda, aired on the incendiary Larry King Live show, conveniently omits mention of their pecuniary interest: Many of these state contractors were billing more than $1 million per year, again while school teachers begged for budget crumbs.

Cultural Myopia and moral relativism

Underlying these empty moral campaigns are a set of intertwined myths and lopsided values:

• Rare sex crimes are a significant threat to public safety. As the mob vents its impotent rage against the government and its spawn -- the mythical sexual predator -- the fact remains that the biggest killer of 15- to 24-year-olds worldwide remains motor vehicle accidents. The is followed closely by suicides, the fourth-leading killer of children over age 10 in seven developed nations.

• Only sex crimes count. Is sexual assault really all that much worse than murder, torture, or other serious crimes? Why is it treated so differently? Are legislatures assigning as much resources to combating the "pseudocommander mass murderer" or the burgeoning militia movement stoked up by its racist hatred of Obama?

• Only a certain type of sex crime counts. Many of the same angry folks who want to suspend the Constitutional rights of some accused sex criminals are busy defending others. When the Chelsea King case broke, the reaction to another breaking sex crime story was its polar opposite. Responding to news that star football quarterback Ben Roethlisberger was accused of a second rape, media pundits went wild on lying, gold-digging women who falsely accuse men of rape. In fact, some of the men who most vitriolically despise sexual predators are rapists themselves. Rape is endemic on many college campuses, with fraternity boys virtually immune from prosecution. As an excellent National Public Radio series describes, young men face few consequences for using alcohol as weapon with which to sexually assault naive young women who are then often forced to quit school. If we really want to make the world a safer place, we need to look a little closer to home. Instead of focusing on an easy bogeyman, let's put our efforts into primary prevention of rape and child molestation. And if we truly want to stop criminals from reoffending, let's not eliminate rehabilitation programs in prison!

• Science is capable of eliminating (or at least drastically reducing) risk. The search for blame has become reflexive. Whenever anything bad happens, the what-went-wrong tenor of media coverage encourages finger-pointing, public wrath, and -- ultimately -- pointless (or worse) legal tweaks by opportunist politicians. When hoodlums sneak into a zoo and taunt a tiger into attacking them, it's the zoo's fault for not building high enough fences. (Remember that 2007 case?) When a speeding truck careens over the side of a bridge, traffic engineers get blamed. "They" -- shorthand for the amorphous "government" -- can never do enough to protect their citizens from all conceivable danger.
  

It's hard to accept that random danger is a part of life. Sometimes, bad stuff just happens.