Why did California destroy research into a group of people it says are dangerous enough to be locked up indefinitely?
Read this insightful and in-depth article on Reason.com about studies conducted by psychologist Jesus Padilla and colleagues at California’s Atascadero State Hospital about civil commitment and recidivism rates among those deemed sexual violent predators.
The Truth Could Set Them FreeMcEntee called as a witness Jesus Padilla, one of Atascadero’s psychologists. Padilla was four years into a study of ex-offenders classified as SVPs who had been released on technical grounds. Padilla had tracked them to find out their recidivism rates, which he presumed would be high.
What he discovered would undermine the basic premise of civilly committing people with sex crime records. In his sworn testimony before the judge and an October 10, 2006, memo, Padilla explained that of the 93 ex-offenders he and a colleague had tracked, just six had been rearrested for an alleged sexual crime after about five years in the community. That amounts to an astonishingly low rearrest rate of 6.5 percent. By comparison, a 2018 study by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 49 percent of all state prisoners were arrested again for the same type of offense within five years of their release.