Describe research by Duwe, Donnay, and Tewksbury (2008) regarding the effects of Minnesota’s residency restriction statute on recidivism of registered sex offenders.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

One such endeavor was conducted by Duwe, Donnay, and Tewksbury (2008), who sought to determine the effects of Minnesota’s residency restriction statute on the recidivism behavior of registered sex offenders. Many states have passed legislation that restricts where sex offenders are allowed to live. These policies are primarily intended to protect children from child molesters by deterring the offenders’ direct contact with schools, day care centers, parks, and so on. Most of these statutes are applied to all sex offenders, regardless of their offending history or perceived risk of reoffense. The impact of such laws on sexual recidivism, however, remains unclear. Duwe et al. (2008) attempted to fill this gap in our knowledge. They examined 224 sex offenders who had been reincarcerated for a new sex offense between 1990 and 2005 and asked several research questions, including “Where did offenders initially establish contact with their victims, and where did they commit the offense?” and “What were the physical distances between an offender’s residence and both the offense and first contact locations?” (p. 488). The researchers used Google Earth to calculate the distance from an offender’s place of residence to the place where first contact with the victim occurred and from these locations to the place of the offense.
Duwe and his colleagues (2008) investigated four criteria to classify a reoffense as preventable: (a) the means by which offenders established contact with their victims, (b) the distance between an offender’s residence and where first contact was established (i.e., 1,000 feet; 2,500 feet; one mile), (c) the type of location where contact was established (e.g., Was it a place where children congregated?), and (d) whether the victim was under the age of 18. To be classified as preventable through housing restrictions, an offense had to meet certain criteria. For example, the offender would have had to establish direct contact with a juvenile victim within one mile of his or her residence at a place where children congregate (e.g., park, school). Results indicated that the majority of offenders, as in all cases of sexual violence, victimized someone they already knew. Only 35% of the sex offender recidivists established new direct contact with a victim, but these victims were more likely to be adults than children, and the contact usually occurred more than a mile away from the offender’s residence. Of the few offenders who directly established new contact with a juvenile victim within close proximity of their residence, none did so near a school, a park, a playground, or other locations included in residential restriction laws.