Stephen V. Gies

Research Summary: Safe harbor laws are designed to redirect young victims of commercial sexual exploitation away from justice system involvement by prohibiting their arrest and prosecution as criminals. A quasi‐experimental design was used to compare prostitution‐related crime and sex abuse maltreatment trends at the county level in states that have implemented safe harbor laws with a comparison group of counties in states that have not implemented safe harbor laws. Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) were used to measure prostitution‐related crime trends, while National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS) data were used to measure sex abuse maltreatment trends. We used a multilevel Poisson regression model to analyze the change in prostitution‐related crime and sex abuse maltreatment trends in treatment and comparison counties over an 11‐year observation period (2005–15). Policy Implications: Overall, the findings provide a striking perspective into the current U.S. landscape of dealing with the commercial sexual exploitation of juveniles. To that end, the decline in the number of overall and juvenile arrests across all prostitution‐related offenses suggests that safe harbor laws were effective in redirecting young victims away from system involvement. But the systematic provision of treatment services envisioned to go to these young victims has, to date, not become a reality. Nevertheless, these findings offer policymakers a foundation of evidence that can be used to engage intelligently and knowledgeably with regard to the current state of U.S. policy.

There is growing recognition that policymakers can achieve substantially better results by using an evidence-based approach to solve social problems. Nevertheless, there is still considerable debate as to how best to identify evidence-based information, aggregate and process this information, and then disseminate it to non-technical users. This manuscript discusses the sources of this discord within the context of evidence-based registries and propose ways in which to ameliorate it.

In response to media attention and public demand, legislation increasingly mandates more stringent surveillance for sex offenders. This trend towards greater supervision resulted in the lifetime GPS monitoring of high-risk sex offenders (HRSO) in California. This study assesses the impact of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s GPS program for HRSOs by employing a quasi-experimental design. The treatment group was drawn from all HRSO who were released from prison and placed on GPS monitoring in California. To identify comparison individuals likely to have pretreatment risk characteristics similar to those in the treatment group, a propensity score matching procedure was performed. The final sample included 516 subjects equally divided between the treatment and control groups. Data was assessed using Cox proportional hazards survival analysis clustering participants by parole district. Results showed the GPS condition was associated with significantly fewer parole registration and arrest violations, arrests, and convictions. These results are discussed in relation to other electronic monitoring research, the policy implications for the increasing use of this technology, and its effectiveness in reducing crime, prison populations, and ensuring public safety.