Q&A with Ryan Spohn, Ph.D.

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Q&A With Ryan Spohn, Ph.D., author of Nebraska Sex Offender Registry Study. An exclusive interview with NINETY-FIVE%. (Click here to read full research report).

Copyright Š 2013 Nebraskans Unafraid

Q

Your study shows the most common tier level of the post-285 (AWA compliant) system as Tier III, and that post-285 Tiers do a better job of identifying the most dangerous people. If all registrants were Tier III, the registry would do a perfect job of identifying the most dangerous people. How would you change the current law to be more efficient in culling lower risk offenders from the highrisk offenders?

Dr. Spohn: In general I think a system based on a psychological risk assessment is better than one IF WE'RE GOING TO HAVE A SYSTEM, I THINK that is just based on the severity of the offense. So I think that risk THERE ARE MORE ADVANTAGES TO THE OLD assessments are very useful. I SYSTEM THAN THE NEW SYSTEM. understand that they take time, I understand that there are appeals.

I understand that part of what the State Patrol sees as positive about the new system is that they don't have to do, you know, all those risk assessments. But as a scientist, as somebody that likes scientifically informed public policy as opposed to public policy just based on emotion, I think it (risk assessments) was a good part of the old system.

So if it was up to me I'd go back to the system based on risk assessments.

Q: Are the years, 10, 25, and lifetime empirically based at all? Do you have an opinion on registry duration?

Dr. Spohn: I don't think they are. I would say they are fairly arbitrary and I don't have any research background that would say (pause) I don't think they need to be longer. Do they need to be shorter than we had in the old system? Maybe. I'm sure there is some research that's been done on this. I know Dr. [Lisa] Sample [has conducted] research of when and if reoffense occurs, in what time frame is it likely to occur. And in general I think that’s probably less than five years, so I certainly wouldn't lengthen them and it probably makes sense that they were shorter.

Q: Would you recommend pre-285, post-285 classification, or a different system all together?

Dr. Spohn: I think there are probably more advantages to the old system. If we're going to have a system, I think there are more advantages to the old system than the new system. Now I know that there were some issues with the old risk assessment, so I think if Nebraska decided to go back to risk assessment they would probably make some alterations. You know there's a number of . . .

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Q: There's newer tests out now, more empirically studied tests.

Dr. Spohn: There's a more widely validated test, the STATIC 99, those sorts of things that other states use that have a lot of research behind them. And I think that is one thing that would need to be addressed. Have a little more accurate risk assessment system. My one kind of “soapbox” thing is, if you're going to have a system, make sure it is not portrayed as a tool to protect people from that dangerous stranger. That's really just my one soapbox is that, the data show that, in Nebraska, your biggest risk is acquaintances and family.

We don't want to think that [an] acquaintance [or] family could do something that could harm children, or harm anybody else, but the fact is that people that commit harmful acts -- they have family members and they have friends, have acquaintances.

Everybody does and they could be one of yours.

If you're going to have it, make sure that it’s again not just based on emotion, you know that stranger danger sort of emotion.

Q: As far as I know, every study done on the subject has come up with the same conclusion, that a vast majority of sexual abuse cases are from friends, and acquaintances and family. Given your study's findings, which system do you believe is more effective at positively affecting public safety? The old, pre LB 285 system or the Adam Walsh compliant one?

Dr. Spohn: Again, the old system, just because of the fact that it’s based on a validated risk assessment, that you're looking at risk to reoffend. Now my findings did show that the highest tiered offenders under the new system did have the highest rates of recidivism, and you know, I would love to follow that up and study, look at more data in the future. I know that they (the Nebraska State Patrol) are improving their data system and so a very difficult study that I did should be easier in the future and I think that needs to be followed up just because my findings were not consistent with what has been found in other states. In other states they found that the Adam Walsh wasn't working, wasn't predicting risk, so I was very surprised by that finding and that’s something I want to look further into.

Q: Because Nebraska is anomalous in that respect?

Dr. Spohn: Yeah. There's no other research that I know of that, particularly not only that Tier III offenders had the highest risk, highest reoffense rate, but it was quite large. There's quite a large difference between . . .

Q: A fourteen multiplier I believe it was?

Dr. Spohn: In the multivariate model, yes so that's big.

Q: That's significant.

Dr. Spohn: Very significant, very large, very substantively large, and so that's something that I would, you know, given the opportunity, that I'd like to do more research on.

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Q: There are registrants that rose from Level 1 in the pre-285 sytstem to a Tier III in the post-285 system. Do you have any thoughts to a jump like that? I know that it’s much more clear-cut in the Adam Walsh compliant system, or the attempted Adam Walsh compliant system. Do you have any thoughts on the viability of a jump like that?

Dr. Spohn: My response would be: What's the justification? So, you have one system that's law, you're using that . . . then you change the law and you have such extreme impacts for particular individuals. You know, give me a justification for why. Essentially, what you're saying, de facto, you're saying that this person is much more dangerous now in the new system than in the old. That’s the essence of it for that particular individual.

Explain that to me. It doesn't make much sense: how a person becomes more dangerous because a law is passed.

Q: Did your view on the Sex Offender Registry, and registrants themselves, change during the course of your study?

Dr. Spohn: I think just in general I had to take a more nuanced approach and really think about IT DOESN'T MAKE MUCH SENSE: HOW A PERSON the positives and negatives the BECOMES MORE DANGEROUS BECAUSE A LAW IS advantages and disadvantages of sex offender registries and, you PASSED. know, the advantages of having them versus not having them. In a society where we're probably not going to not have them, you know, what is the best model?

And when I took on this project, I was told, you know, we're not compliant with Adam Walsh because, primarily just because they don't put minors on the list.

Q: Correct.

Dr. Spohn: Which, if they were going to, they would have to change a whole lot of other state laws. But, because of that, it gives us the freedom to create the best system, what we believe is the best system for Nebraska, and that sounded really really good to me.

That we have flexibility and we're not just going to ride emotion and create a draconian system. We're not just going to throw the book at everybody. That we're going to put some thought into what we believe is the best system for the state of Nebraska.

So there are the conclusions of the report where I talk about the raw data and findings from my analysis can't really make a decision for anybody. It’s really a political decision, balancing the advantages of the list. Public safety essentially [juxtaposed] to individual rights and the impact that it has on the people that are placed on the list. If if registrants are much more likely to be unemployed because of the list, that’s doing social harm.

Putting people in danger because we don't have an effective deterrent is social harm.

So you're balancing public good, social harm and I hadn't ever thought that deeply about it before. And you know, it’s a difficult decision.

Another thing I mentioned: We don't know how much of a deterrence really [registries] are. There's not a lot of good research.

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Q: Short of getting rid of the registry and seeing what happens, there's not going to be.

Dr. Spohn: Right, you know and when we make changes, so the change from the old system to the new system I can compare before and after. If a change is made in 2013 or 2014, we can do that again. We can see, to the extent that the data is good, which a lot of the recidivism data isn't that great, but to the extent that we can rely on the data we can look at the impact of changes in that fashion, in saying it’s a political decision.

It’s a difficult political decision, but it’s also a difficult political decision based on Bounded Rationality.

That term [means] that you're making a rational decision but on very limited information, and that's what this really is that the information (pause) my report hopefully provided a lot more information than we had before, but it still is limited and so the decision to be made is going to be based on Bounded Rationality. What do we think is best, most appropriate, but with limited information.

Q: In your answer you said, “If we have a registry, which it doesn't look like we're going to be getting rid of them as a society any time soon, we want to make them as smart possible (to paraphrase that section of your answer). Are you saying you'd rather not, as a public polilcy, have registries at all? Public registries at all?”

Dr. Spohn: It’s an option. We didn't have them in the past. There was a time in every state when they didn't have them. Society survived. I don't know that that is the next route, but I don't think that public registries are a God-send either. I mean its somewhere in the middle. They're not the worst social problem, but they're not the best social solution either.

It’s somewhere in the middle. I think it's like changing liquor laws. 18 year olds used to be able to drink, then it went to 21. Could we go back? Absolutely. Are we going to go back? It’s very highly unlikely. Would there be some positive things from going back to a drinking age that was 18? Possibly, you know. Who knows? But in my mind, when I think of the public good and public policy, society existed when the drinking age was 18, so let’s not take that off the table.

Q: Did you find evidence that the registry in its current form accomplishes its stated goals of protecting children?

Dr. Spohn: Protecting children, I can't say per se, because...

Q: In general, protecting the public.

Dr. Spohn: I found that the list, the Adam Walsh tier system that they are using is effective in identifying the offenders that were most at risk to reoffend. So to that extent, it’s useful, but I'm trying to remember the numbers correctly, but I believe overall recidivism is higher under the new system. Is that what you recollect?

Q: In the separate categories I do believe there was about 9 categories. Was the three tier systems before and after and whether the stats went up and down, the level ones and tier twos kind of switched places. Level IIIs or tier IIIs maintained the highest recidivism rates.

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Dr. Spohn: Right, right right. And because of the high recidivism rate of the Tier III offenders, the overall recidivism rate, if we're looking at the two year windows and the one year windows, was higher under the new system. So based on the evidence, it didn't seem to make the public safer switching to the new system.

Q: The Omaha World Herald reported, when your study came out, that overall recidivism rates went down with this study, it was one of their bullet points at the bottom of the article. Did you get a chance to see that, and did you get a chance to comment on it?

Dr. Spohn: I did. I talked to the reporter on that and that was taken from a subsection of the report that was focusing, there was a heading on that section of the report on whether or not the lower tier offenders should be on a public list, like they are now, or on a private list for law enforcement as it used to be. And those numbers actually went down, but that was only the lowest tier offenders.

So what the overall ramifications of that are, there are probably different ways you can interpret it, but that was definitely taken out of I WAS STRUCK BY WHAT I SAW AS AN OPINION context and I had a conversation BEING CODIFIED INTO NEBRASKA STATE LAW. with the reporter about that. That was focusing on a very specific issue, because that was one of the primary issues that the Judiciary Committee were interested in. It’s one of the reasons why they gave me the funding to do this study was to help them make that decision. So that's why there was a specific part of the report focusing on that particular issue. And so the World Herald kind of took that out of context, and generalized that to all sex offenders, but it was only focusing on those lowest tier offenders.

Q: The Nebraska Sex Offender Registration Act, specifically §29-4002, states in its first sentence that, “The Legislature finds that sex offenders present a high risk to commit repeat offenses.” Does it make sense to have that as part of state law, in that it is incorrect?

Dr. Spohn: I haven't communicated with the Judiciary Committee since the report was released, so I have no idea what their thoughts or feelings are. I was very struck. I included that in the report because I was struck by what I saw as an opinion being codified into Nebraska state law.

That and the fact that it flew in the face of basically every published research study to come out over the last 10 years. I just found it odd when I read it and I don't think it’s appropriate to have opinions codified like that. nu