Desistance from Sex Offending

reviewed by Karen Franklin

The past two decades have seen a groundswell of laws enacted to protect the public from sex offenders. In response, a cottage industry has sprung up to manage and treat these social pariahs. But much of what passes for treatment--such as monitoring every thought and fantasy for hints of deviance--is actually risk-enhancing, gradually transforming ordinary criminals into what one ethnographer described in the British Journal of Criminology as beings entirely "consumed with sex."

A major reason for this paradoxical state of affairs is the disjuncture between clinical psychology and criminology, the field that has collected the most evidence about why criminals stop offending. This book is the effort of two leading scholars to bring scientific knowledge about desistance into the insular trenches of the sex-offender industry. Rather than approach offenders as risk-laden deviants, say D. Richard Laws, codirector of the Pacific Psychological Assessment Corp. in Canada, and Tony Ward, a clinical psychology professor at Victoria University in New Zealand, we should consider them fellow human beings who need gentle guidance to achieve more productive lives.

Desistance provides a readable survey of the criminological research on the subject. In a 2003 study tracking 500 offenders from their first offense through the age of 70, Robert Sampson and John Laub found that a key to desistance was seemingly random "turning points," such as landing a good job or finding a good partner. Advancing upon this classic research in his award-winning 2001 book Making Good, Shadd Maruna highlighted the role of individual agency and hope. Offenders who transformed their lives had forged a new narrative, or "redemption script," that contrasted with the hopeless, alienated self-narrative of persistent criminals, he found.

The authors advance Ward's "good lives" model of rehabilitation as a way to refocus on sex offenders' strengths. This model, first proposed in 2002, posits that all individuals seek beneficial and fulfilling lives, and that offending reflects attempts to pursue this goal in ways that are unacceptable to society and damaging to the individual and others. Thus, rather than approaching offenders as bundles of risk to be managed, treatment focuses on their practical needs, such as fulfilling jobs and stronger bonds with family and community.

The past few years have seen a burgeoning interest in good-lives principles, which have been incorporated into several hundred treatment programs for both sex offenders and general criminal offenders around the world. Although little outcome data is available due to its recency, good lives is one of several promising new approaches to rehabilitation. Collectively, these may signal a weakening of what one expert in the journal Punishment & Society calls the "penal harm movement," and a greater openness to progressive practices in correctional settings.

Significant hurdles exist, however. Just look at our own state: California prisons currently offer no formal treatment to sex offenders. State-mandated treatment for offenders who are on parole or civilly detained at mental health facilities (for example, Coalinga State Hospital) tends toward simplistic approaches that can be administered in a group setting. Popular methods include relapse prevention, borrowed from substance-abuse treatment, and tailoring individual treatment according to actuarially determined risk levels. Even if a humanistic approach such as good lives were to be adopted in theory at a facility such as Coalinga, to be meaningful it would have to withstand the corrupting influences of the systems in which it was embedded. Behind bars, many a visionary idea has been reduced to a shallow directive robotically administered by poorly trained technicians.

Desistance provides an accessible introduction to cutting-edge efforts to rehabilitate sex offenders. Given the ever-increasing number of these offenders ensnared in California's criminal justice system, any criminal lawyer will benefit from an overview of what is working, and why.

Karen Franklin is a forensic psychologist in El Cerrito, California, who blogs on the subject at bit.ly/blogforensics.

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