CRIMINAL SEX OFFENDERS: SUMMARY
Most sex-offender groups have fewer members with juvenile records than has the prison group, and their offenses are generally less serious. Few committed juvenile sex offenses, but for these few the offenses are fairly predictive for their adult offense behavior.
The sex offenders in general become involved with the law later than the members of the prison group. Only in the prison group and two sex-offender groups did the average individual experience his first adult conviction before age twenty. Among the sex offenders there is a gap of from about three to 12 years between their first criminal conviction and their first conviction for the offense for which they are named.
About half to two thirds of most sex-offender groups had purely sex-offense convictions. Taking all convictions into account, for most groups between half and three fifths were for sex offenses.
Half of the sex-offender groups had more convictions per capita than the prison group and half had less; the range is 2.4 to 5.5. Those who use force and those whose sexual objects were children tend to have been convicted most often.
The commonest nonsexual crimes of the sex offenders are those loosely labeled as vagrancy or disorderly conduct: from one fifth to one half of the nonsexual convictions are for offenses of this nature. Crimes against the person are significantly numerous only for the aggressors. Other sex offenders tend to be nonviolent.
Specificity, the repetition of sex offenses of the same type, is rather high among most sex offenders. The incest offenders and the homosexual offenders vs. adults are particularly apt to confine their offenses to those which earned them their labels. Among the latter, about eight out of ten of their sex offenses were against other adult males. The aggressors and the homosexual offenders vs. children are the least inclined to repeat. Only about half of the offenses of the aggressors vs. children and minors were specific as to type.
Our data concerning recidivism are seriously deficient in that our sampling generally was confined to offenders currently in prison—i.e., the men who were not recidivists (sexual or otherwise) were men still serving their first sentence. Nevertheless it appears that the aggressors (especially aggressors vs. children), exhibitionists, and peepers are the most recidivistic both for sex offenses and total offenses, and the incest offenders are the least recidivistic. Those whose sex offense involved a child tend to be more recidivistic than those whose offenses involved a minor or adult.
In general there is no evolution from minor to serious offenses. There is a pronounced tendency among most sex-offender groups for the second offense to be of the same type as the first. In cases where more than two offenses have been committed there is a tendency for the use of force or threat to become less common in the third or subsequent offenses.
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