Freakonomics Radio - 208. Making Sex Offenders Pay -- and Pay and Pay and Pay

Episode Date: June 11, 2015

Sure, sex crimes are horrific, and the perpetrators deserve to be punished harshly. But society keeps exacting costs -- out-of-pocket and otherwise -- long after the prison sentence has been served.

Hey guys, so I just finished my MA in Forensic Psychology at John Jay and started an internship in a new city. I spend most of my days hanging out with lovely people like rapists and pedophiles. That's Jake Swartz. I'm an intern at Treatment Evaluation Services. Jake had sent us an email about his job. I primarily do therapy, he wrote, both group and individual, with convicted sex offenders. And it made me realize being a sex offender is a terrible idea, apart from the obvious reasons. It's economically disastrous.

That is not the kind of observation you hear every day. I assume that by economically disastrous, Jake was mostly talking about sex offender registries, which limit job options and constrain where a sex offender can live after getting out of prison. When we followed up with Jake by phone, he had a suggestion for an episode. I think it would be interesting to cover the economics of being a sex offender. I agree with Jake. As disturbing as this topic may be to some people, I agree that the economics of being a sex offender might indeed be interesting and that it might even tell us something more generally about crime and punishment. Do you agree? From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio,

the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. If we're talking about how a certain crime is punished, in this case a sex offense, we should begin with how we think about punishment more generally. Part of why we punish people ex post is because we want to deter them up front. That's Steve Leavitt, my Freakonomics friend and co-author. And the amount of punishment that society thinks is fair is often, in some sense, proportional to the kind of damage that's done with the crime. Okay, so if we're concerned with the damage caused by a crime, let's get into what constitutes

a sex offense. The definition varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but since Jake Swartz is working with convicted sex offenders in Colorado, let's focus on that. In Colorado, the crimes that will get you categorized as a sex offender range from the expected sexual assault, unwanted sexual contact, and so on, to crimes including indecent exposure, prostitution, incest, enticement of a child, and sexual conduct while imprisoned. Not every sex offense will land a criminal on the sex offender registry, but it will require a particular treatment routine, which has a lot of out-of-pocket costs associated with it.

Hello, you've reached the offices of Treatment and Evaluation Services and Dr. Rick May. I'm Dr. Rick May, and I'm director of the treatment program, Treatment and Evaluation Services. Rick May is a psychologist in Aurora, Colorado. And how does he spend most of his work hours? Mostly evaluations and treatment of individuals who have been accused of crossing sexual boundaries. And how many such individuals has he seen? Tens of thousands, probably.

I've been doing this for over 30 years. And so we've had a lot of people come through the agency. May agreed to help us add up the out-of-pocket costs that clients like his have had to pay. Okay, I've divided it into the different components that they're involved in and what they're required to pay. Oh, yeah, sure. I can walk you through a lot of the costs that are specific to sex offenses. And that is Lori Rose Kepros. She agreed to help us, too. She also works in Colorado as the Director of Sexual Litigation for the Colorado Office of the State Public Defender,

which means that she trains and advises lawyers who represent people accused or convicted of sexual crimes. Kepros and Rick May explained to us that Colorado has a Sex Offender Management Board, which has a protocol for dealing with sex offenders. Everybody who's convicted of a sexual offense has to have what's called a sex offense-specific mental health evaluation. Okay, so if someone is convicted of a sex crime, they are required to do this psychosexual evaluation. Okay, so if someone is convicted of a sex crime, they are required to do this psychosexual evaluation.

The first evaluation runs in the neighborhood of between $1,000 and $2,000. After the evaluation comes the treatment. So we have some numbers from across our state that show that the average person who is required to do sex offender treatment will do five treatment sessions per month. Four of those will be group therapy at a rate of about $50 per session, and one of those will be individual therapy at a rate of about $75 per session.

So aside from everything else, that means there will be a treatment cost of $275 per month just to go to treatment, just to go to group. Rick May says about 15 or 20 percent of his clients get help from the Department of Probation to pay for treatment. But every offender at his agency has to sign a contract agreeing to pay the full bill. If they fail, that leads to more trouble. They're in violation of probation as well as the treatment contract, correct. Now, we should point out that sex offenders are hardly the only criminals with mandatory evaluations or treatment. What is unique about sex offender treatment and the costs associated with it

is that the dose of treatment tends to be significantly greater. That is, the person will be in treatment not just for a few months, but sometimes for years and years. I would not be surprised to learn that it is a costly crime. That's Leora Joseph. She runs the Special Victims Unit in a Colorado district attorney's office, so she prosecutes sex offenders. She is not surprised to learn that sex offenders have to pay for a lot of treatment because, well, it's a conviction that requires a lot of treatment. And so when I look at sexual crimes of sexual violence,

including pedophilia and all the parafills, I would expect it to be expensive. And why is that? First of all, if you look at something like the DSM, I think they just came out with the DSM-5, which, as you know, probably, you know, diagnoses all kinds of mental disabilities or psychiatric illnesses. The DSM refers to all these sexual parafills and pedophilia as one of those as chronic and lifelong. And it says specifically they're really hard to treat. You're really talking about whether or not you can rewire somebody. Joseph is bothered by this notion. She points out that some people who might be offended by the notion of rewiring, say, homosexuals, might firmly believe that a sex offender's sexual urges can be fundamentally changed.

I think it is a contradiction. I'm one of those believers that without getting into some big political discussion about this, that if you're born gay, you're gay, and you can't and shouldn't be rewired to think a different way. Well, if we can't rewire our sexuality, why do we think we can rewire the sexuality of a child predator or a man who is aroused by being violent with women? Why do we think we can? The Colorado Sex Offender Management Board agrees. In its handbook, the first guiding principle states that sexual offending is a behavioral disorder which cannot be, quote, cured. So treating that which cannot be cured can go on for a long time. Yeah, it's very long.

That's Elizabeth Letourneau. I am currently the president of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, or ATSA. ATSA is a membership organization made up of therapists, probation officers, policymakers, researchers, and others. Letourneau herself is an associate professor in the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and she directs the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse. before you can really get good change. And so we see average treatment lengths, I think the national average is about 18 months, but we see ranges.

You rarely see less than one year of treatment, and it can extend up to three years. Viterno says there is some evidence that treatment helps. The state of the art for treatment of adult sex offenders is group-based cognitive behavioral relapse prevention intervention. It's been around since the 80s. And there is evidence to support its use that it does seem to have a positive impact in reducing recidivism rates, sexual and non-sexual recidivism rates. For juveniles, there's actually very good evidence of effectiveness

of a family-based intervention that does not group delinquent kids together, but that rather treats a youth and his or her family as the unit of treatment. And that's called multisystemic therapy or MST. And multisystemic therapies with youth who have sexually offended has undergone three randomized controlled trials, and all of them support its effectiveness with youth who have sexually offended. During the course of these various treatments, potentially many years of treatments, there are other out-of-pocket costs that some sex offenders must pay. A tracker, for instance. This is often an off-duty law enforcement officer.

Other programs hire individuals with, usually with some type of police background. Whose entire job is to pop up everywhere you go in your life and make sure you are where you say you are. Clients required to call in each day with a schedule. I'm at my house. I want to leave my house to go to the grocery store. Then they call and say, I'm done at the grocery store. I need to go put gas in my car. Then they call and say, I'm putting gas in my car. And the idea is that these trackers

will go and see if the person is indeed where they say they are. That could be work. It could be home. It could be anywhere that they're allowed to go. And again, that's another potential cost to the client. And so that's another charge, and that's usually charged by the hour. That could be $15 to $20 to $30 an hour. And there's at least one more out-of-pocket expense, at least in Colorado. In our state, we require that people who are being supervised for a sex offense complete polygraphs. Some sex offenders are required to take two polygraphs a year. That's if they pass.

If they don't, the tests are more frequent. Those usually run in the $250 range. That's $250 each. I don't know of any other crime where the offenders are routinely subjected to polygraph examination. That is Elizabeth Letourneau again with Johns Hopkins and the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers. No other country that I'm aware of utilizes polygraph to anything like the extent that the U.S. does. And yet other industrialized countries, other high-income countries, they have the same recidivism rates as we do. So their sex offenders manage to get through treatment and through probation with the same level of success, but without polygraph.

And so many people who use polygraph really rely on it, but I actually wonder what the clinical utility is when there's just no other place in the world that I'm aware of that uses this particular device. I think the polygraph associations have actually been quite good at marketing. Well, that's a hard claim for us to evaluate. But if you think about the incentives at play here, there are a lot of examples from a lot of different realms where we create many, many layers of safety to protect us from something that frightens us, even if there's no proof that every safety layer is actually effective. And let's be clear, sex crimes are truly frightening. The life of a victim can be irrevocably damaged. Thus, the creation of so many after-the-fact safety measures, the evaluation, the treatment, the trackers, the polygraph tests. For the convict, the financial costs add up. Here's Rick May again.

I'm guessing the first year that an individual is charged and convicted, they're going to be easily in the $10,000 range. When we come back, we ask whether these costs are, number one, fair. So if we believe that doing one's time in prison is enough of a punishment, then we have to ask questions about whether people should continue to pay financially and in other ways after they get out. And more to the point, whether the steps we have taken to prevent sex crimes and prevent recidivism among sex crime convicts are actually working.

So when I first saw these results, I actually thought maybe I had made a mistake. From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. Even though Steve Leavitt is an economist at the University of Chicago, one of his research obsessions for many years has been crime and punishment. Yeah, so there are two kinds of costs that you might think about if you're a sex offender. The first one is just the direct punishment and all of the going to prison and the humiliation and all that that goes with it. The second is after you get out, you've got an incredibly difficult job market because of reporting requirements and all the usual things that goes with being a felon, but also the existence of these sex offender registries that make it incredibly hard for

you to hide. This brings us to what is easily the greatest cost for a convicted sex offender, the registry. I think the registry is really, if you are a sex offender, the registry is just a brutal way of making sure you can never hide. For most other crimes, you're essentially anonymous. There's no really easy way for people to know that you've done the crimes. And true, when you apply for a job, you're supposed to say that you're a convicted felon, but nobody really does anyway. And the worst that can happen to you if you don't say it is they just fire you after a while if they find it out. But the registry is really a different kind of beast because a registry means that no

matter where you go or what you're doing, there are easy, virtually costless ways for people to find out who you are. And it's hard to say, is that a good thing or a bad thing? I mean, from a deterrence perspective, you think it's got to be a good thing, that if you know ahead of time that your entire life you're going to be labeled a sex offender, it's got to have some effect in terms of trying to, you know, it's got to have some effect in terms of trying to, you know, it's got to have some effect in terms of keeping you from doing the crime. Well, you said if it's a good deterrent, then it might be worth it as costly as it may be to the individuals. What do you know about how much of a deterrent it is, the registry?

Yeah, so the best evidence I know is from my former student and friend, Amanda Agin. So as soon as you are released from jail, you are informed that you are required to register. That is Amanda Agin. She is a postdoctoral economics researcher at Princeton. Several years ago, she wanted to know if there was good research on whether public shaming, like a sex offender registry, is an effective crime deterrent.

I did not find anything. And I had at the time been looking for a topic for research. And so I said, OK, well, this is it. This is what I want to research. This is what I want to do. I think this is a really important policy. It's one that's been implemented in every state now. And we really needed to know what is really working, you know, particularly as we're thinking about expanding these to other types of registration. I think Tennessee is doing methamphetamine registration. I mean, this is, as we're thinking about expanding these sort of policies, I thought it was an important one to study. The impetus for the sex offender registry was the abduction of a boy in Minnesota. Sunday night, just outside of town, 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling was abducted by a masked man with a gun.

Okay, so in 1994, they passed the Jacob Wetterling Act, which required that all states register, maintain a registry of convicted sex offenders. And this was named after a young boy named Jacob Wetterling, who was kidnapped. And actually, his current whereabouts are unknown. Jacob's disappearance is especially shocking because he was with his 10-year-old brother, Trevor, and an 11-year-old friend, Aaron Larson, when the abduction took place. What did this man look like? Well, he was wearing, he was all in black. He had a mask on.

You couldn't see his face? Uh-uh. He had a nylon mask or some kind of mask. Did Jacob say anything to the man? Uh-uh. Just his age. When you ran, did you look back? Yeah, once we got way down there.

What did you see? Nothing. No, he wasn't there anymore. Then we got an amendment to the Jacob Wetterling Act in 1996 called Megan's Law. To understand what this law really means, never forget its name. The name of a seven-year-old girl taken wrongly in the beginning of her life. The law that bears the name of one child is now for every child, for every parent and every family. This law required that the states notify the community about the contents of the registry. I mean, this particular law was named after a young girl named Megan Conka,

who was kidnapped and murdered by somebody who had been previously convicted of a sex offense. And so the argument of the family and the states was that if they had known about this information, they may have been able to do something to protect their daughter. Today, there are roughly 800,000 registered sex offenders in the United States. Some are required to register for 15 years, some for 25, and some for life. Yep. It'll vary a bit by state, but generally you're going to see a picture of the registered sex offender, the crime they were convicted of, the address that they live at. Sometimes you will see identifying information, like maybe whether they have tattoos or height or something like that. You may also see their work address, depending on the state that you're living in.

So on top of all the out-of-pocket costs we detailed earlier, a convicted sex offender continues to pay for his or her crime with the closest thing we've got these days to a scarlet letter. The question, of course, is whether it's effective. In addition to being punitive, does it deter further crime? Yeah. So the initial question I wanted to ask was, was the implementation of these registration or notification laws in different states associated with a decrease in rates of sex offenses?

And so what I did was I used data from each of the 50 states that they had reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, to their Uniform Crime Reporting, or UCR, program. And so then I was able to look at how many sex offenses, how many rapes were being reported, and how many sex offense arrests were being reported in each state. And then I also gathered information on when the states implemented their registry policies, and also when they put this information online. I mean, basically what I was doing was then looking at before and after the registration law goes into effect or before and after the notification law goes into effect.

How are the rates of rape incidences or sex offense arrests changing? The resulting paper published in the Journal of Law and Economics was called Sex Offender Registries, Fear Without Function. Basically what I found is that there was no change in the sex offense arrest rates or rape incidence rates either after registration goes into effect or after notification goes into effect. And so at least in this sort of aggregate state-level data,

it did not appear that there was any, it did not appear that the was any, it did not appear that the registry laws or the notification laws were effective at reducing rates of crime. That was not what Egan had expected. Not at all. So when I first saw these results, I actually thought maybe I had made a mistake. And so I did as any good researcher would do. I did a lot of checks. I did, I checked my data. I did a lot of different types of specifications just to ensure that I was getting the correct result. And then the more I started to think about it, the more I thought, you know, maybe this does sort of make sense. As we are basically shaming these sex offenders,

as they're having trouble getting jobs or maintaining family relationships, maintaining friendships, finding housing. We may in some sense decrease what an economist would call the opportunity cost of committing a crime. That is normally when you commit a crime, what happens? You're going to be incarcerated. You are going to lose your family ties. You're going to lose your housing. You're going to lose your job. But if those things are already lost for you, then those are no longer a deterrent to committing a further crime. And so it could be that, you know, the registries are causing these sort of adverse effects and hence reducing the effectiveness of these types of policies. So at first I was surprised. But as I thought about it more, I thought maybe it wasn't so shocking. I mean, I think for me... Steve Leavitt again. I don't tend to get moral on issues, and I think if society has decided that the right kind of punishment is a registry so that you essentially can never hide the rest of your life from having committed a sex offense, then I think that's not necessarily a bad idea. I think that maybe that is the right view of the world,

is that some crimes are so heinous that you want them to track you for the rest of your life. There is one thing about the registry that bothers Levin. Where I did have moral qualms were when the sex offender registry laws were coming into place. They were always made retrospective, you know, retroactive. So if I had committed a sex offense in a world in which that wasn't part of the punishment, this was just a new punishment that was added on ex post after I'd committed the crime. And to me, that almost seems immoral of the society and the government to, after someone has committed some act, to then go back and change the rules on them and say,

well, because you did that a long time ago, you have to be punished for the rest of your life. Which is, it's just, you know, look, I'm not a big supporter of sex offenders, and no one is. And maybe that's part of the problem, is that politically, since no one supports sex offenders, there is an inevitable and constant push towards greater and greater punishment and embarrassment and harassment of them. But I think it's all fair. If it's out in front of you and you commit the crime and you know what the consequences are, then it's just your choice. But I think it's tricky for governments to recidivism among them, which might lead one to think that recidivism is really high among sex offenders. Do you know anything about those numbers, recidivism among sex offenders versus other criminals? So I don't know off the top of my head the exact numbers,

but in general, recidivism among people who do various serious offenses tend to be much lower than those of people who do more minor offenses, you know, like auto thieves and burglars and stuff like that. The thing that's kind of special about sex offenders, though, is they can impose enormous costs even without recidivating. So if I know I have a pedophile next door, as a parent, it affects the behavior, my behavior, and what I let my children do. It's very, very costly, even if the pedophile never does recidivate. Now, obviously, the costs are much, much greater if the pedophile does recidivate. But it's kind of the irony of the registry is that by making the information so public, it probably, potentially, maybe,

maybe doesn't, it depends, but it might reduce the amount of recidivism. But one thing it does for sure is it raises a level of fear. And so much of the costs of crime are the fear, not just, not the fear of the actual victims or the pain of the victims, but it's the fear of everyone who imagines that might be aender got out of prison and moved into your neighborhood. And this is where things begin to get costly for you, the innocent homeowner. A research paper by the economists Lee Linden and Jonah Rakoff found that when a sex offender moves into the neighborhood, quote, the values of homes within 0.1 miles of an offender fall by roughly 4%. Now, this presumes you live in a neighborhood where a sex offender is allowed to move in. Finding housing is one of the hardest things for a sex offender since they are prohibited from living anywhere from 500 to 2,500 feet, that's almost half a mile, from a school, daycare,

playground, park, or recreation center. Elizabeth Letourneau told us about an interesting case in Alabama. Yeah, Alabama, there was just a legal decision rendered that basically found at the federal court level that their sex offender registration and notification in residence and employment restriction policy, which is called a SORNA, there was a court case against a SORNA per se. And the expert testimony involved an individual who showed maps of where sex offenders were permitted to live in Montgomery City in Montgomery, Alabama. And basically, the tracks of land where they could live and be in compliance with the Asorna policy was the airport strips. And so you can't actually live there. So there were very, very, very few parcels of land. I think he reported that 87% of the parcels of land in Montgomery City would not be in compliance for a sorna, and so were off limits for anyone who was a registered sex offender. So, I think we can agree by this point that the costs of being a convicted sex offender are quite severe, which, even if they

don't necessarily discourage further sexual crime, at least impose further costs on people whom society finds particularly menacing. But are sex crimes overall more costly than other serious crimes? I think we punish murderers by sending them to prison for the rest of their lives. That's Leora Joseph, the Colorado prosecutor. And that's actually not the case with sex offenders. So most sex offenders are not punished more harshly. Now, you may say that it might be more costly, but that's not necessarily more harshly. Those are two very different things.

Loss of liberty in this country is considered, it's one of the biggest punitive things we do. And most murderers, when they're caught, they spend a significant amount of time in prison. My name is Galen Boffman. I live in Arlington, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C. I'm 31 years old now. I got out of prison three years ago last Sunday. Boffman was convicted of carnal knowledge of a minor, aggravated sexual battery, and promoting an obscene sexual performance by a child. He says he has wondered if his punishment might have been less severe, depending on the circumstances, if he'd actually killed someone. I've known guys in prison who said, you know, I had a 15-year-old girlfriend when I was 19,

and I really would have been better off if I just killed her instead of having sex with her, because then I would have done, you know, 15 or 20 years, and then I would have gotten out and gotten to move on with my life. But being labeled a sex offender, I will permanently be punished by all of these laws. One last thought to consider. Perhaps society exacts such a steep cost from sex offenders

because the sex offenders have exacted such a steep cost from their victims. The paper is called Rape as an Economic Crime, the Impact of Sexual Violence on Survivors' Employment and Economic Well-Being. That's Rebecca Loya. And I'm a researcher at the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, which is at Brandeis. And I also teach social policy at Boston University School of Social Work. I have a PhD in social policy and a master's degree in psychology.

Loya interviewed rape survivors to learn how sexual violence affected them in the long run. Okay, so there is a bit of research out there. The first big study is by Miller, Cohen, and Weissermann. They published this in 1996. What they did was they estimated the costs of each kind of crime. Their estimate for sexual assault is that it costs $5,100 in what they call tangible losses. This is things like lost productivity, medical and mental health care, property damage. And then to this, they add $81,400 in what they call lost quality of life. And this adds up to about $87,000 per victimization in 1993 dollars which by inflation comes out to 142 000 in 2014 dollars but one limitation of this data is that their lost quality of life is based on jury awards for pain and suffering which we know the vast majority of sexual assault survivors never get to a civil court case in order

to get such damages so it's a little bit difficult to interpret those numbers. The other limitation is of the tangible losses, the $5,100, we don't know how much of that is paid by the survivor versus paid by the perpetrator or families or society at large. But it gives us a hint as to how much sexual assault is costing people. Most sexual assaults, as it happens, are never reported. And as Loya points out, an even smaller share of victims make it to civil court and are awarded damages. And she had something interesting to say when we asked her the central question in today's episode, why sex offenders are required to pay so much for so long for a crime even after they've served their prison time.

That raises a question to me about what we as a society believe our criminal justice system should be doing. in prison is enough of a punishment, then we have to ask questions about whether people should continue to pay financially and in other ways after they get out. And perhaps as a society, we don't believe that and we believe people should continue to pay and perhaps our law reflects that. Hey, podcast listeners. On the next Freakonomics Radio, everyone knows what a market is, right? It's where demand and supply can get together thanks to pricing, thanks to money. But in some cases, like college admissions or job hiring or organ donations, you need a different kind of market. Matching markets are markets where money prices don't do all the work. And

some of the markets I've studied, we don't let prices do any of the work. Meet Al Roth, whose work in market design is helping save lives and even won him a Nobel Prize. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Thank you. We had help this week from David Herman, Rick Kwan, Anna Hyatt, and Wayne Schulmeister. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more.