Now that a decision has been made to deny parole to the serial rapist surnamed Yang (Sept. 1, front page) and perhaps now that the event is passed, a small amount of reason can be injected into the discussion.
A couple of preliminary comments are in order. First, note that I do not refer to him by his media name the "Hwakang Wolf." I have a marked distaste for media monikers for criminals. They tend to either glamorize or trivialize the situation.
Second, I am not going to state whether I think Yang should have been paroled or not. I was not and am not privy to information upon which I could base a rational opinion. Neither are 99.9 percent of the people who have commented on the case.
The third comment I would make is that parole is always a gamble. It can be and should be an informed gamble, but it is ultimately a gamble. Statistics by their very nature can merely tell you the odds; the odds for example of a parolee committing the same or a similar offense. The fancy criminal law term for this is recidivism.
If parole is a gamble why should societies take it? There are two main reasons for a parole system; one lofty, the other mundane. The lofty reason is that a parole system encourages rehabilitation and shows that society can accept the idea that convicts can change their "evil ways."
The mundane and, from a practical point of view, the more important reason is because the parole period allows for a convict to be out in society but still under the partial control of prison officials. Without a parole system, convicts are dumped directly back into society at the end of their prison terms without any control by the authorities. Parole, although prison officials are loath to admit it, is also a standard solution for reducing prison overcrowding and costs.
A short but insightful article on sex offenders and recidivism appeared in the September 1997 edition of the US journal Federal Sentencing Reporter.
In that article the author, Eric Lotke, writes "... only a minority of identified sex offenders reoffend. Over 80 percent never offend again, almost the opposite of what much of the public and many government officials believe, and substantially lower than for many other types of crime."
The lesson to draw from this is that if the public wants to be safe from sexual re-offenders, the solution is to ensure funds for a professional, adequately staffed and trained parole system. Long-term therapy and strategies designed to normalize and reintegrate the lives of offenders in the community are the most promising paths toward public safety.
Brian Kennedy is an attorney who writes and teaches on criminal justice and human rights issues.
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