Self-Defense & Violence Prevention Blog

Galen Eagle writes about the rehabilitation of sexual offenders. I include an excerpt:

[…]Haley only works with those willing to be held accountable and willing to take treatment. The courts can’t force an offender to take therapy, so they must do so willingly if there is any hope for rehabilitation, Haley said.

“I help counsel them on taking full responsibility for what they have done. The only way these guys can get help and I know our community will be safe is if they take 100 per cent responsibility for what they have done and take the treatment,” he said. “I have no time for an offender who makes excuses.”

Every sexual offender who enters the federal prison system – those serving two years or more – is initially herded through the assessment unit at Millhaven Institution near Kingston.

There they go through a sexual offender risk assessment to determine their level of risk and their treatment needs. They are then dispersed to various regional facilities.

Those who are sent to the Warkworth Institution, as many Peterborough offenders are, come under the watch of Dr. Ed Peacock, a psychologist who has treated sexual offenders for the past 15 years.

With the right treatment, Peacock said Corrections Canada has had high success rates with sexual offenders. The popular notion that pedophiles, molesters and rapists can’t be helped, that they are destined to re-offend, is not what the statistics suggest, Peacock said.

“I would say it is largely a myth. The known re-offence rates or the rates of sexual recidivism are much lower than most people think,” he said.

Read entire article by Galen Eagle.

I like hearing that we can successfully rehabilitate more sexual offenders than often thought. It makes me hopeful.

Of course, we need to actually do it.

Unfortunately, many prison systems throughout the world (especially in my home country, the USA) fail to work effectively. They just throw offenders in cells and let them live with criminals for a certain number of years before releasing them back into the public. If anything, violent offenders come out of prison more dangerous than when they went into prison.

Additionally, these inefficient and dysfunctional incarceration systems get bogged down and overcrowded by high populations of non-violent offenders arrested for victimless crimes. Let’s stop wasting resources on non-violent druggies, prostitutes and such! Instead, let’s focus our resources on rehabilitating victimizers, such as sexual offenders, murders, thieves, and such. That way we actually protect people.

Also, I don’t agree with maximum sentences. Regardless of what violent crime these violent criminals committed, let’s keep them in jail until – if ever – they have been rehabilitated. I’d rather have a completely rehabilitated murderer walking the streets than a unrehabilitated mugger.

I see money as the only justifiable obstacle. However, we would have much more funding to spend on jailing and rehabilitating victimizers if we stopped wasting it on enforcing victimless crimes. Also, I suggest billing convicted criminals for the costs associated with investigating them, arresting them, convicting them, jailing them, and any other costs resulting from their crime and the punishment thereof. Why bill innocent tax-payers for the crimes of somebody else?

What do you think? Can we rehabilitate sexual offenders?