An Assessment of Long-Term Risk of Recidivism By Adult Sex Offenders: One Size Doesn’t fIt All

Abstract

Numerous instruments are available to clinicians for evaluating sex offenders’ reoffense risk. Although they have demonstrated effectiveness in predicting recidivism significantly better than unstructured clinical evaluation, little is known about their predictive accuracy in subgroups of sexual offenders or in the long term. This study was undertaken to evaluate the predictive accuracy of nine instruments (VRAG, SORAG, RRASOR, Static-99, Static-2002, RM2000, MnSOST-R, SVR-20, PCL-R) among three groups of sexual offenders across a 15-year follow-up period. The results indicate that these instruments yielded marginal to modest predictive accuracy for sexual recidivism. A more detailed study of aggressor subgroups indicated that in both the short and the long term, these instruments were more effective at predicting the sexual recidivism of child molesters and the violent and nonviolent recidivism of rapists. Finally, although mixed offenders sexually reoffend more often and more rapidly than do rapists or child molesters, firm conclusions cannot be drawn because of the small number of mixed offenders in the sample.