Desistance from Sex Offending Alternatives to Throwing

Away the Keys

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 To my wife, Cynthia Mills,
who offered encouragement and support throughout,
and to the late Harris B. Rubin, who introduced me
to the study of human sexual behavior
and taught me how to write like a professional
—D. R. L.

To my late father-in-law, John A. Stewart,

a man of integrity and compassion
—T. W.
About the Authors

D. Richard Laws, PhD, is Codirector of the Pacific Psychological Assess-

ment Corporation (PPAC) and Director of Pacific Design Research,
which serves as a development arm of PPAC. Dr. Laws holds appoint-
ments at Simon Fraser University (Canada) and the University of Bir-
mingham (United Kingdom). His research interests center primarily on
development of assessment procedures for offenders. He is the author
of numerous journal articles, book chapters, and scholarly essays, and
coeditor/coauthor of a number of books and manuals.

Tony Ward, PhD, is Head of School and Professor of Clinical Psychology

at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His research inter-
ests include cognition in offenders, rehabilitation and reintegration
processes, and ethical issues in forensic psychology. He has published
extensively in these areas and has over 280 academic publications.

vi
Preface

Human beings are creatures of habit and tend to seek the path of least
resistance when it comes to understanding the world around them and
getting on with their lives. We can figure out the simple things by our-
selves—what to eat, what to wear, and how to organize our finances.
There are also the big questions, foundational issues about the meaning
of life and other major life issues. In these matters we too easily accept
the truth as it is told to us by others we acknowledge as experts or who
have the assigned authority to provide advice about what to think and
how to act.
The area of crime and sex offender treatment is no different. Lay
people defer to political and therapeutic experts and accept their sugges-
tions and advice concerning how to manage sex offenders. The experts
tell us that these dangerous individuals must be assessed, their predilec-
tions for harmful behavior identified and scientifically treated. There is
no easy way forward, they assure us; there is only the careful measure-
ment of dispositions and behavior and the all-too-frequent verdict that
such men and sometimes women are beyond hope. We therefore look
to protect ourselves from sex offenders, keeping them securely locked
up somewhere far away from our houses, schools, and communities. To
be safe, to ensure danger does not lurk around the corner, we are told
to put barriers between them and us. These barriers are legal, social,
ethical, and physical.
The trouble is that in the case of offenders in general and sex
offenders in particular, the experts are victims of their own myopia.
They have their own blind spots that blur the truth into simple images

vii
viii Preface

and pat answers while hard facts and scientific evidence are overtaken
by dogma, ideology, and ethical assumptions. The question of whether,
in fact, sex offenders should be contained, managed, and locked away,
however, remains unanswered and unaddressed.
But if we listen carefully to the whispers in the periphery of the
scientific community, dissenting voices to the established viewpoint of
how to treat sex offenders are now emerging. Such voices raise questions
and ask us to think about what we have in common with those who hurt
us. And such voices remind us that human beings share common needs,
and each of us carries within us a spark of humanity, a sliver of value
that means we all merit respect and a chance to belong no matter what
wrong we have done.
These whispers can now be heard in every discipline but are par-
ticularly evident in criminology and its sister disciplines of law and soci-
ology. This book seeks to listen to the messages of such scholars, and it
seeks to understand just how offenders can make good by what they do
to turn their lives around. This book provides a space to think differ-
ently about treatment, reintegration, reentry, rehabilitation, and pun-
ishment. It asks: What do we owe those who have harmed us? How can
we help them to come back to us once they have paid their dues? It is
far too easy to categorize sex offenders simply as individuals marred by
deviancy and cruelty. The science of sex offender treatment needs to
be broader, more flexible, and open to conversations with other disci-
plines.
This book represents our attempt to create a bridge between crimi-
nology, psychology, and correctional practice, and how they address the
treatment of sex offenders. It is only a beginning for this much-needed
discussion, however, but a beginning it is.

D. R ichard L aws and Tony Ward

Acknowledgments

D. Richard Laws: I would like to thank a number of individuals and

institutions that played critical roles in the development of my thinking
and the formation of this book: Richard Packard, who first introduced
me to the criminological approach to desistance and, in particular, the
works of Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck and Robert Sampson and John
Laub; Shadd Maruna, who generously served as a guide to the necessary
portions of the criminological literature; Shawn Bushway, who provided
an excellent description of trajectory analysis and a figure illustrating
the results; Howard Barbaree, Robert Sampson, John Laub, and Shadd
Maruna, for providing figures describing their research; Harvard Uni-
versity Press, Sage Publications, Springer Publications, and Wiley–
Blackwell Publications, for permission to reprint figures and lengthy
excerpts; Jim Nageotte of The Guilford Press, who served as our editor
and guide throughout the preparation of this book; and last, but not
least, my coauthor, Tony Ward, whose pioneering theoretical and practi-
cal work has changed my mind on a number of social and psychological
issues.

Tony Ward: I would like to thank the following people for their support
and intellectual companionship over the years: Tony Beech, James Bick-
ley, Astrid Birgden, Mark Brown, Sharon Casey, Rachael Collie, Marie
Connolly, Joy Creet, Andy Day, Hilary Eldridge, Dawn Fisher, Theresa
Gannon, Brian Haig, the late Chris Heeney, Sonia Heeney, the late Steve
Hudson, Robyn Langlands, Ruth Mann, Shadd Maruna, Bill Marshall,
Mayumi Purvis, Karen Salmon, Doug Shaw, Claire Stewart, Richard

ix
x Acknowledgments

Siegert, Jim Vess, Alex Ward, Kalya Ward, Nathaniel Ward, Nick Ward,
Carolyn Wilshire, and Pamela Yates. I would also like to thank Mayumi
Purvis for allowing me to use Table 6 (Figure 15.1 in this book) from her
PhD thesis; �Taylor & Francis Group (Routledge) for giving permission
to use material from Chapter 5 of my coauthored (with Shadd Maruna)
book Rehabilitation: Beyond the Risk Paradigm (2007) in Chapter 14 of this
book; and Ioan Durnescu, editor of the European Journal of Probation,
for allowing me to use material from my article “Dignity and Human
Rights in Correctional Practice,” published in this journal (2009, Vol. 1,
pp. 110–123), in Chapter 16 of this book. Finally, I would like to thank
my coauthor, Richard Laws, for his friendship, intellectual clarity, fierce
dedication to the truth, and, above all, his insistence that researchers
should ask the hard questions and never settle for the easy ones.
Contents

I.╇ General Issues

Chapter 1. Introduction 3

II.╇ The Criminological Perspective

Chapter 2. Defining and Measuring Desistance 15

Chapter 3. The Age–Crime Curve: A Brief Overview 27

Chapter 4. Theoretical Perspectives on Desistance 36

Chapter 5. Factors Influencing Desistance 53

Chapter 6. Two Major Theories of Desistance 61

III.╇ The Forensic Psychological Perspective

Chapter 7. Do Sex Offenders Desist? 89

Chapter 8. Sex Offender Treatment and€Desistance 96

xi
xii Contents

IV.╇ Reentry and Reintegration

Chapter 9. Barriers to Reentry and Reintegration 113

Chapter 10. Overcoming Barriers to Reentry and€Reintegration 135

V.╇ Recruitment

Chapter 11. The Unknown Sex Offenders: 151

Bringing Them in from the Cold

Chapter 12. Blending Theory and Practice: 162

A Criminological Perspective

VI.╇ Desistance-�Focused Intervention

Chapter 13. The Good Lives Model of Offender Rehabilitation: 175

Basic Assumptions, Etiological Commitments,
and€Practice Implications

Chapter 14. The Good Lives Model and Desistance Theory 203
and€Research: Points of Convergence

Chapter 15. The Good Lives–Â�Desistance Model: 231

Assessment and Treatment

VII.╇ Where to from Here?

Chapter 16. Dignity, Punishment, and Human Rights: 261

The Ethics of Desistance

Chapter 17. Moral Strangers or One of Us?: Concluding Thoughts 280

References 285

Index 299
Offenders differ from nonoffenders only in their tendency
to offend.
—Gottfredson and Hirschi,
A General Theory of Crime (1990)

Damascene conversions may happen for a few, but . . .

for€many people, the progression is faltering, hesitant and
oscillating.
—Bottoms et al., Towards Desistance: Theoretical
Underpinnings for€an€Empirical Study (2004)

A study of the present that neglects the processes of

change by which the present was created is necessarily
superficial.
—Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians (1973)

Le penchant au crime, vers l’age adulte, croît assez

rapidement; it atteint un maximum et décroît ensuite
jusqu’aux dernières limites de la vie.
—Quételet, Sur l’Homme et le Développement de ses Facultés,
ou Essai de Physique Sociale (1836)
I
General Issues
Chapter 1

Introduction

The primary subject matter of this book is encouraging and maintain-

ing desistance from crime in sex offenders. All formal legal structures
(probation, parole) and more informal structures such as treatment
interventions with this clientele have desistance from future criminal
activity as their goal. The book provides information from two areas of
current investigation: desistance from criminal behavior and the Good
Lives Model (GLM) of offender rehabilitation. The former comes to us
from criminology and the latter from behavioral psychology. Although
representing different social science disciplines, they are intertwined
and have a theoretical resonance. Our main focus will be upon a unique
and generally dreaded clientele: sexual offenders. Much of what we have
to say will apply equally well to general criminal offenders.
Over 25 years ago the first author made the following observa-
tions:

The theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer once said, “If you are
a scientist you believe that it is a good thing to find out how the world
works.” Using the methods of science, we have found out a little about
how the world of deviant sexuality works.€.€.€. We believe in the power
of the scientific method to throw light into some of the darker recesses
of human behavior, to dispel ignorance. In those dark recesses, we
will doubtless find that we resemble more than we wish those sexual
outlaws whom we have scorned and labeled deviants. We will find that
in matters sexual, the human being is a rather fallible and malleable
organism, that in the end perhaps all of us have some capacity for
loathsome acts. (Laws & Osborn, 1983, pp.€233–234)
3
4 GENERAL ISSUES

And, indeed, that prediction has been proven accurate. The majority
of apprehended first-time sex offenders are not lifetime sexual deviants
and many do not have an official criminal background. A recent study of
young adult nonoffenders (Williams, Cooper, Howell, Yuille, & Paulhus,
2009) reported that, in their sample, 95% of the respondents admitted
to having at least one deviant sexual fantasy, and 74% reported engag-
ing in at least one deviant sexual behavior. It is thus possible that deviant
sexual activity is a considerably broader problem than is currently rec-
ognized. It is important to remember that sexual offending has a very
low base rate (i.e., it occurs infrequently). For example, the Bureau of
Justice Statistics (BJS) reported that rape and sexual assault accounted
for only 1% of all violent crimes reported in 2004 (K. Bumby, personal
communication, April 7, 2009). Our intent is not to minimize the soci-
etal problem, nor to suggest that some sex offenders are not very dan-
gerous persons. “Wicked people exist,” observed political scientist James
Q. Wilson (1985, p.€193). “Nothing avails except to set them apart from
innocent people” (p.€235). This is undeniably true but there is a consid-
erable body of evidence indicating that they represent a tiny minority
of serious criminal offenders. The majority of sex offenders are not the
rampaging monsters that some politicians and the media would have us
believe.
Second, the present authors have, collectively, over a half century
of experience with sex offenders. We have been struck repeatedly with
the realization that these offenders, with a very few exceptions, are far
from extraordinary. For the most part they, like us, come from rather
unexceptional backgrounds. Most of them, apart from their sexual devi-
ance, are not criminals. They hunger for the same things that we all do:
a good education, a decent job, good friends, home ownership, family
ties, children, being loved by someone, and having a stable life. They
are, without question, people very much like us. And given that acknowl-
edgment, it is incumbent upon us as professionals to try to help them
achieve their longed-for goals, what the second author will call “primary
goods.” Ward and Marshall (2007) capture this theme nicely:

Offenders, like all other people, attempt to secure beneficial outcomes

such as good relationships, a sense of mastery, and recognition from
others that they matter.€.€.€. [O]ffending can reflect the search for cer-
tain kinds of experience, namely, the attainment of specific goals or
goods. Furthermore, offenders’ personal strivings express their sense
of who they are and what they would like to become.€.€.€. This feature of
offending renders it more intelligible and, in a sense, more human. It
reminds us that effective treatment should aim to provide alternative
means for achieving human goods. (p.€297)
Introduction 5

There is a third, ethical consideration, that we think particularly

relevant as well. According to the ethical universalism we embrace, all
human beings possess inherent value and dignity simply because they
are fellow human beings (see Chapter 16). This dignity is based on the
capacity to act autonomously and to fashion a life based on individuals’
personally endorsed goals. A basic implication of the inherent dignity
of all human beings is that each of us has certain entitlements and obli-
gations. Essentially these are rights to certain well-being and freedom
goods, and, correspondingly, a duty to respect the entitlements of fellow
members of the moral community. To hold offenders accountable to
the norms of a society always implies accepting their rights to recogni-
tion and respectful treatment, and a chance to regain our trust and to
reenter society once they have undergone punishment. You cannot have
it both ways: if offenders are to be held accountable and punished for
their actions, they should also be treated with respect when undergoing
punishment and when entering treatment programs. They should not
be regarded merely as objects to be manipulated for our ends. They are
people like us in that they also have intrinsic value and are part of the
moral community.

Desistance

The concept of desistance has many definitions. It has been described,

for example, as a self-�reported complete termination of criminal behav-
ior, a cessation of official citations for criminal behavior, a gradual slow-
ing down of criminal behavior, and a marked decrease in the frequency,
intensity, and seriousness of criminal behavior. As we shall see, there are
many other definitions. The definitions we find most appealing state
that desistance is not an event, but a process replete with lapses, relapses,
and recoveries, quite similar to the addiction relapse prevention model
originally espoused by Marlatt and Gordon (1985). In criminology we
find this position echoed in the work of Maruna (2001) and Laub and
Sampson (2001, 2003). Desistance research, which is primarily descrip-
tive, seeks to understand the change processes that are associated with
individuals turning away from lives of crime and becoming reintegrated
into the community (McNeill, Batchelor, Burnett, & Knox, 2005).
Professionals as well as ordinary citizens have difficulty with the
notion of desistance, particularly as it applies to offenders widely
believed to be incorrigible and incurable. In our view, this reluctance
to embrace the application of desistance ideas to sexual offenders is
partly grounded in a reductionistic view of offenders as self-�contained
deviancy machines. That is, offenders are conceptualized as indepen-