Sexual delinquency in racine: does early sex offending predict later sex offending in youth and young adulthood?*

Research Summary: One recent aspect of discourse about sex offenders is a debate about whether juvenile sex offending should be targeted with adult–style registration and stigma. But data on sex offending are quite thin, and data on the link between juvenile sex offending and adult careers are almost nonexistent. In fact, public policies with regard to sex offenders and the nature of their sexual offending assume that they are persistent specialists whose sexual offending is both recidivistic and dangerous. Yet, research on these assumptions is mixed, which leads some researchers to conclude that just about anything can be stated with regard to sex offenders. In an effort to overcome the limitations of previous research (highly select samples, short follow–up periods, lack of comparison group), the current study employs data from three birth cohorts from Racine, Wisconsin to examine the issue of juvenile to adult sex offending and its implications for current sex offender public policy. Policy Implications: Several results emerged from the current study. First, the fraction of juvenile sex offenders who committed adult sex offenses was quite small. Second, males who committed juvenile sex offenses were a tiny fraction of the cohort males who had a police contact for a juvenile offense. Third, the best predictor during a juvenile career for adult sex offending was the frequency of offending as a juvenile rather than whether a boy committed a sexual offense. Whether a male in Racine had a juvenile sex police contact contributed little to predicting his likelihood of adult sex offending. Specifically, 8.5% of males with juvenile sex police contacts had adult sex police contacts compared with 6.2% of males with any non–sex juvenile contact. With regard to policy, our findings also indicate that concentrating effort on those who were juvenile sex offenders will miss more than 90% of the cohort members who commit sex crimes as adults and will misidentify 90% of the targeted group of the juveniles as adult sex offenders. Such errors speak to the near impossibility of predicting which adolescent sex offenders will emerge as adult sex offenders and cast some doubt on the long–term predictive utility of juvenile sex offender registration.