Late last month, a Toronto musician who drugged and sexually assaulted three young women and a teenage girl was in court for sentencing. He was not declared a dangerous offender, which would have allowed for indefinite detention; neither was he designated a long-term offender, which would have meant up to 10 years of intensive supervision after his prison term ended. Instead, the musician-predator was given a 10-year prison term. He could be released in little more than three years.
Considering the harm that serial predators do, this entirely typical decision to give a career predator (the musician committed his crimes over a 15-year period) an opportunity to return quickly to the streets is disturbing enough. But it is more alarming still in light of two new studies on the nature of the problem Canada faces with sex offenders.
One study found that the true recidivism rate among sex offenders is 88.3 per cent. This is an astonishing figure, given that recent estimates were that roughly 37 per cent of convicted sex offenders will some day return to jail. Ron Langevin, a psychologist who led a University of Toronto research team, looked not only at RCMP data, which were woefully incomplete, but at hospital records, which contained the offenders' criminal histories. He also looked beyond convictions to plea bargaining in which sexual offences were reduced in return for guilty pleas to charges such as assault.
A second study, from British Columbia, found a dramatic increase between 1998 and 2002 in the number of sexual assaults that involved drugging the victim, usually a young woman 15 to 19. This crime is much more difficult to detect than other sexual assaults, partly because the victim may not remember much. It is also far more difficult for an individual to protect against, for the obvious reason that she is rendered unconscious.
Perhaps the recidivism among sex offenders is not quite as bad as Mr. Langevin presents it in his study, published in the latest issue of the Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice. The 351 offenders in his sample, all men, committed their first sexual offences (including incest, exhibitionism and attacks against women) between 1966 and 1974. He then followed their lives for 30 years.It may be that improvements in treat-ment or post-jail supervision have meant that the current generation of new offenders is at a somewhat lower risk of recidivism.
Still, the findings are critically important. The corrections system has developed actuarial tables to predict each individual inmate's risk of reoffending. These tables are based on the current knowledge of recidivism. Parole boards rely on these tables when deciding whether to release an inmate. If the assumptions are flawed, as they seem to be, Canada's parole system needs a serious re-examination.
An obvious conclusion from the Langevin study is that the only time the streets are safe from an offender is when he is in jail. Whether longer sentences would act as a deterrent is unclear, but at the very least they would deter offenders while those offenders were behind bars.
The Criminal Code already provides several options for major sex offenders. Yet Crown prosecutors do not necessarily ask a judge to apply them because, as in the case of the musician, they may think the judge will reject the request. (The musician was a first offender, and judges usually are lenient with first offenders, explains Toronto's regional Crown attorney.) In a world of 90-per-cent recidivism, those tools need to be used more frequently.
Prosecutors, judges and parole officials should take a serious look at the new evidence on recidivism, and on the use of drugs in sexual assaults. On the evidence, sex offenders pose a greater danger than the system has recognized.