NCJ Number
146518
Journal
Journal of Offender Rehabilitation Volume: 20 Issue: 1/2 Dated: (1993) Pages: 159-205
Date Published
1993
Length
47 pages
Annotation
This paper examines problems related to legislation that prescribes differential sentencing for persons who commit sex offenses incidentally to other felonies and those who are presumably driven by psychosexual pathology.
Abstract
Such legislation calls upon mental health professionals to make distinctions for which little sound scientific support exists. To the extent that psychosexual pathology itself constitutes a mental disorder within the current lexicon that guides the mental health professions, any offender can automatically be categorized as mentally disordered. Therefore, either all or none should be accorded the differential sanction of legislatively mandated treatment. Although treatments collectively known as aversive behavior therapy are effective, judicial constraints seem to preclude their use on a wide scale. Thus, legislation mandating the confinement for treatment of mentally disordered sex offenders seems implicitly to mandate less than optimally effective treatment. Thus, this legislation limits the access of the sex offender to effective treatment. Notes and 138 references