Sex Offender Experience in Communities of Poverty

• In Event: Roundtable: Neighborhoods, Communities and Crime

Abstract

In communities housing sexual offenders, the potential of recidivism poses an acute public safety concern. Studies show that implementation of the U.S. Sex Offender Registry, meant to diminish this concern, has instead augmented offender feelings of social stigmatization and loss of relationships, noted as key risk factors of recidivism. Despite research revealing rates of recidivism across most offender subgroups to be low, and the implementation of the Offender Registry, community perception holds that sex offenders have high recidivism rates. The disparity between sexual offenders’ reality and what community members perceive creates lived tensions in a shared space. Prior research fails to account for the lived experience of offenders post-release and has not sought offender perceptions in impoverished communities where the majority of offenders are relegated upon re-entry, jointly critical in delineating mechanisms of recidivism. To develop a comprehensive understanding of sex offenders’ displacement after release from incarceration and subsequent interactions with their community, I move beyond prior research to conduct in-depth interviews with sexual offenders after re-entry into an impoverished community, data that may yield consequences for placing offenders in areas of poverty as well as define policy implications for re-entry placement and avenues of support in offender integration.

Author

• Cassandra Sever, State University of New York at Albany