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Separation Of Sex Offenders In Prisons

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The majority of the public believes that when an offender serves their time in jail or prison, he or she will ultimately be free to go. However, that is not always the case. Sex offenders are often viewed as being potential recidivists, therefore certain states and the federal government have put laws in place to keep these potential offenders in prison. More than half the population of sexual predators which includes, rapists, pedophiles, and other sex offenders are held past their sentence on a recidivism assessment which is almost impossible to challenge. Legal procedures known as civil commitment can be determined or assessed by the sole opinion of a psychologist or expert. The law implemented serves as the people’s obligation to protect …show more content…
These debates are stemmed from the increase of sex offender in the criminal justice system. There are those who believe that sex offenders are best suited situated among the general population in prison and then there are those who argue in favor of having a separate program in place to treat and better understand the nature of a sex offender’s behavior, while there are other specialists who view civil commitment as the solution to the problem. Though many strongly agree on the separation of sex offenders from the general population, there is the issue of reaching an agreement on the approach to take on the treatment of such offenders. “Between 1930 and 1960, several states passed ‘sexual psychopath laws’ that offered indefinite hospitalization and treatment in lieu of incarceration for offenders who committed repetitive sexual crimes” (Zonana, 1997). However, as time passed these treatments was ineffective, therefore punishment became the primary deterrent, instead of …show more content…
The problem with that was upon release at the end of a relatively brief fixed sentence, several sex offenders, which included pedophiles, rapist and child molesters inevitably repeated some particularly heinous crimes (Zonana, 1997). Under the new statutes that were enacted in the 1990s, under civil law, state officials had to commit sex offenders who were considered dangerous to society, at the end of their sentence, they met the criteria of a "sexual predator" (Zonana, 1997). However, to do so, offenders had to have a "mental abnormality" that would lead to the commission of further

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