Sex Offender Recidivism Rare In California

California sex offender data shows that sex offender recidivism is rare, and that the vast majority of sex offenders who do reoffend do so in the first three years after they are released.

New research in California shows that only a tiny fraction - 3.38 percent - of released sex offenders are convicted of a new sex offense within 10 years of release. The study followed 3,577 prisoners who were released between 1997 and 2007 after serving time for sex offenses.

In an even larger parallel study by California's Sex Offender Management Board, tracking 4,204 paroled sex offenders, only 3.21 percent were convicted of a new sex offense within 5 years of release.

In both studies, almost all of the recidivism came within the first year post-release. Sex offenders were returned to custody for parole violations at a lower rate than other paroled prisoners, despite the fact that they were supervised more intensely. And they were more likely to be rearrested for crimes other than sex offenses.

The findings are consistent with a smaller study two years ago of recidivism by civilly committed Sexually Violent Predators. Of 93 such high-risk offenders released from Atascadero State Hospital without completing treatment, only 4.3 percent reoffended within six years.

"The data call into question the dramatically higher recidivism rates cited by state evaluators at Sexually Violent Predator (SVP) civil commitment trials. Those data are based on Canadian research with an actuarial instrument called the Static 99. The Static 99 recidivism base rates are 18 percent after five years and 21.3 percent after 10 years, many times higher than the California data."

From here.

The total five year recidivism rate for sex offenders in California was 4.69% (including sex and non-sex offenses), and the total technical parole violation rate over five years was 47.05% (compared with 60-70% for all CDRC parolees, many of whom are less intensely supervised).

The ten year study showed a 3.86% total recidivism rate in ten years (using a smaller data pool) and a 49.06% technical parole violation rate over ten years.

The pattern of recidivism in the five year study involving 4,024 released sex offenders in California was as follows: (sex offense, non-sex offense, technical parole violation):

Year 1: 86, 114, 1455
Year 2: 25, 57, 378
Year 3: 14, 24, 123
Year 4 & 5: 10, 2, 22
Five year total: 135, 197, 1978
% in first two years: 82%, 87%, 93%
% in first three years: 93%, 99%, 99%

The pattern of recidivism in the (overlapping sample) ten year study involving 3,577 released sex offenders in California was as follows (sex offense, non-sex offense, technical parole violation)

Year 1: 79, 89, 1316
Year 2: 26, 42, 291
Year 3: 10, 5, 115
Years 4 and 5 combined: 3, 1, 24
Years 6 through 10 combined: 3, 0, 9
Ten year total: 121, 137, 1755
% in first two years: 87%, 96%, 92%
% in first three years: 95%, 99%, 98%

The study casts serious doubt on lifetime sex offender monitoring statutes. Almost all of the risk of recidivism and parole violations is in the first three years after release, with the first two years being by far the most important.

How Many Companies Are "Investment Grade"?

As of the year 2000, Moody's, one of the five leading credit rating agencies for long term corporate bonds (the other are Standard and Poor's, Fitch Ratings, Dominion Bond Rating Service and A.M. Best.), issued a coverted "investment grade" bond rating to about 2,900 companies, and a "speculative-grade" bond rating (the less charitable name for them is "junk bonds" and more charitably called "high-yield debt") to another 5,000.

When an issuer goes from investment grade status to speculative grade status, it is called a "fallen angel." As of February 2009, S&P identified 75 issuers at risk of becoming fallen angels. These bonds must often be sold in a fire sale by institutional investors prohibited from owning speculative grade bonds.

Toxic For A Reason

Whole classes of mortgages are viewed as toxic for good reason:

For the third straight month, option adjustable-rate mortgages are generating proportionally more delinquencies and foreclosures than subprime mortgages.

Option ARMs were typically issued to creditworthy homeowners and allow borrowers to make a range of monthly payments. The payment options include a partial-interest payment that adds the unpaid interest to the loan's balance. On many such loans, balances have risen while values of the underlying properties have plummeted amid the housing crisis.

As of April, 36.9% of Pick-A-Pay loans were at least 60 days past due, while 19% were in foreclosure, according to data from First American CoreLogic, a unit of Santa Ana, Calif.-based First American Corp. In contrast, 33.9% of subprime loans were delinquent, with 14.5% of those loans in foreclosure, the figures show.

These loans are not only going bad in droves, but are producing massive, basically unprecedented losses when they do go bad. The average Alt-A or Subprime foreclosure results in the bank losing 64.7% of the original loan balance.

Put the numbers together and the underlying value of a given portfolio of option ARM and subprime loans is about 20%-25% less than the aggregate principal balance of the loans involved.

When the borrower has almost no equity, any decline in the value of the collateral mostly impacts the lender, and the value of real estate in the housing bubble markets where Alt-A and subprime loans were most common has plummeted.

So many loans are going bad in that in Sacramento, California, 70% of the homes on the market are being sold by lenders who have already foreclosed, or in short sales.

Colorado Baby Factories

In-fill neighborhoods like Stapleton and Lowry are baby factories and largely white and middle class.

From here.

The larger article discussed the changing demographics of metro Denver public schools.

The 15 districts that make up the metro area — from Douglas County to St. Vrain — added 62,661 students between 2000 to 2008, and 55,950 of those were minorities. On average, about 81 percent were Latino, 8.6 percent African-American and nearly 11 percent Asian.

The trend throughout Colorado and the nation is because of immigration and babies born to minority populations that are younger and have higher birthrates than whites, said Elizabeth Garner, state demographer.

"A lot of it is due to the migration in the 1990s," Garner said. "Those are basically folks who moved here and started having kids in 1995 through 2003. It's like a second wave."

Describing "added students" as if they were an actual discrete group of students, rather than a statistical concept is somewhat deceptive. In fact, many more students have been added to and left the fifteen districts in the relevant time period. But, it does dramatically illustrate the concept that Latino, African-American and Asian youth populations are growing much more rapidly than non-Hispanic white youth populations in the metro area, accompanied by gentrification of the central city.

The story also accurately illustrates the relatively recent and increasing ethnic and racial integration of metropolitan Denver's suburbs.

Among the interesting factoids:

Cherry Creek's overall enrollment this decade grew by 20 percent, and all of that growth was from minority students. The student population is now 37 percent minority and is expected to reach 50 percent by 2012.

Six metro-area school districts now have more minority students than white students: Denver, Aurora, Sheridan, Mapleton, Westminster 50 and Adams 14 in Commerce City.

Ten of the 15 districts posted a net loss of white students this decade, including Jefferson County Public Schools — the state's largest district — which saw white enrollment decline by 9,000 students. Aurora lost almost 4,000 white students and Westminster lost almost 3,000 white students.

Take away the increase of white students in Douglas County — which added 16,941 white students this decade — and there would have been an overall decline in the number of white students in the metro area. . . .

The statistics suggest that some of the minority students in suburban districts might have left Denver to get there or chosen the suburb over Denver.

More white students are entering Denver schools, especially in the early grades, than at any time in the past decade.

First-grade enrollment, for example, was 25.5 percent white in 2008, compared with 18 percent five years before. Kindergarten was 27.3 percent white in 2008, compared with 18.7 percent in 2003.

Seven metro-area school districts added more minority students than Denver: Adams 12, Brighton, Cherry Creek, Aurora, St. Vrain, Douglas County and Jefferson County. . . .

Denver's black student population has fallen by 11 percent since 2000.

Denver is the only district in the metro area with an increasing percentage of non-Hispanic white children, although that percentage 22.8% is lowest in the metropolitan area other than the 15.3% in Adams County 14, and it had the lowest percentage of non-Hispanic white children in 2000. Almost 30% of children in Denver do not attend the Denver Public Schools, with the numbers rising higher in higher grade levels.

While the "baby factory" term is used in good humor in the article to describe neighborhoods popular with families settling down to have children (with reference mostly to useage applied to suburban neighborhoods during the American baby boom after World War II), with no offense intended, real life and fictional baby farms are often not bucolic paradises.

GM and Chrysler Move On, Rust Belt Doesn't

The operating successor companies for both GM and Chrysler are now operating outside of bankruptcy, while creditors of the legacy companies fight over the pittance of assets that remain. Both companies have substantial union retiree trust and government ownership. Fiat is a major private shareholder of Chrysler. GM private bond holders have taken a 10% stake in the new company. Ford is now the only investor owned, publicly held American automobile manufacturer left.

Both GM and Chrysler are dramatically restructuring their businesses. Non-core businesses like financing arms and recently acquired brands have been jettisoned or are in the process of being jettisoned. Both companies are making dramatic cuts to their dealership networks. GM is selling its Saturn and Opel brands, and discontinuing the Pontiac brand and laying off about a third of its employees, leaving a new company which is only a shadow of its former self.

The Old And New Rust Belt

This means another 20,000 or so lay offs at GM, on top of additional layoffs at Chrysler and automobile industry suppliers and dealerships, with the brunt of the burden concentrated in the Rust Belt, the former hub of American industrial activity, more or less, from Pittsburg to Buffalo and then along the Great Lakes to Milwaukee. Interestingly, many of the workers were lured to the Rust Belt from the South in one of the greatest waves of internal migration ever seen in the United States, at the height of the American industrial era.

The manufacturing industry has been in decline in the United States for about four decades. Manufacturing industry growth, where it has happened at all (almost entirely outside the Big Three American auto makers, often in relatively small businesses), has been centered in the South, in a band from the Carolinas to Mississippi. These states are, accurately, perceived by management as less prone to unionization and environmental activism. the wage scales are lower there, the legacy of past industrial pollution can be avoided, and companies can quickly secure the political privileges that come with becoming dominant employers in the region.

Left In Their Wake

The impact of the automobile industry's most recent stumble have focused on its Detroit hub. But, cities across the Rust Belt have suffered. According to the UAW regional director in Flint, Michigan:

In the late '70s early '80s, there was 80,000 GM workers. Currently, we've got 6,100. That doesn't count the job loss from the supplier-base side[.]

These job losses so far have had a dramatic impact on the City of Flint (emphasis added):

At its peak, Flint was home to General Motors, with a growing population of some 200,000 people . . . . Today, the population is about half what it once was . . . . More than one-third of the homes in Flint have been abandoned. . . . Last month, Flint's acting mayor, Michael Brown, stirred controversy when he spoke publicly about "shutting down quadrants of the city." . . .

Alan Mallach, an urban planner with the Brookings Institution, says the debate in Flint is similar to debates in a number of other Rust Belt cities. . . . "There are certainly thousands of properties that need to be demolished — they're not fit for human habitation. . . . But it doesn't follow that the other residents on the block want to move to some other place. I don't think any city has figured out how to do this yet."

The county treasurer responsible for Flint uses an analogy that I've used before on this blog, Flint "looks like the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans — a sort of a slow-motion [Hurricane] Katrina."

In Flint, as in Detroit, community gardens are being eyed as one of the most attractive ways to fill land that was once full of abandoned buildings.

In Milwaukee, real estate conditions are so bad in some cases, that lenders are choosing not to foreclose on mortgages that are in default, because the homes that form collateral for their loans have negative value net of liens for property taxes and condemnation issues for the abandoned properties.

Ideas to replace automobile industry jobs abound, but none have really panned out.

Traditional free market economic theory isn't surprised by the demise of the American automobile industry, which production efficiency, off shoring spured by lower foreign labor prices and cheap shipping, and a variety of other factors explain. But, free market economic theory claims that new investment should rush in to make use of cheap land and legions of unemployed people, something that hasn't been happening in real life.

Internet Radio Lives

SoundExchange, the representative of the studios for Internet radio licensing, has made available a new royalty scheme for Internet radio, under a deal reached with Internet radio providers AccuRadio, Digitally Imported and RadioIO. Pandora, which has lobbied me heavily on the issue, is expected to join the deal. The Copyright Royalty Board, a U.S. government tribunal designed to set fair rates for internet radio in the absence of an agreement, had set rates far in excess of what most providers were able to pay that threatened to put the entire industry out of business.

The compromise turned out to be a 10-year deal, covering 2006-2015, with an escalating royalty scale and a clause by which Internet radio companies can often pay a percentage of their revenue.

The percentage is up to 25% of gross revenues and the per song alternative fee is less than the Copyright Royalty Tribunal number.

The State of the Afghan National Army (Corrected)

As of November 2008, the ANA had seven battalions and one brigade and one corps headquarters rated at Capability Milestone (CM)1: capable of operating independently.

Twenty-nine battalions/squadrons, six brigade headquarters, and three corps headquarters were reported at the CM2 level: capable of planning, executing, and sustaining counterinsurgency operations at the battalion level with international support.

Twenty-five battalions/squadrons, four brigade headquarters, one corps headquarters, and the ANAAC headquarters were reported at the CM3: partially capable of conducting counterinsurgency operations at the company level with support from international forces.

Six battalions/squadrons and one brigade headquarters are reported at CM4: formed but not yet capable of conducting primary operational missions.

Finally, there are eighteen battalions/squadrons and two brigade headquarters that are still not formed or reporting.

From here (citing "the latest DoD report to Congress on Afghanistan.")

The commentator, Herschel Smith, who is the indirect source of the quote above, also states in reliance upon the British reporting firm, The Guardian, that "there is significant drug abuse and incompetency in the Afghan National Army. It has been estimated that if the ANA were to implement drug testing, it would lose as much as 85% of its forces."

Marines Go Low Tech

Q: What costs $5 each and provides better performance than proposed future combat system land based robotic drones in mountain warfare?

A: Donkeys, the Marine's newest ride.

While it sounds silly, really it's wise.

Color Is Relative

The notion that "color is relative" isn't a political slogan about race, it is a scientific fact describing how our eyes interpret visual signals. An amazing optical illusion, illustrates this fact.

Left Hand Meet Right Hand

Bank Sues Itself. The initial facts reported don't appear to redeem the case.

In rare cases, divisions of the federal government (typically, one part is an independent agency) can sue each other. But, the federal government is designed to be intentionally at cross purposes with itself from time to time. In contrast, all divisions of a bank are supposed to advance the end of shareholder profit.