[danso]

Furthermore, the evidence suggests that the U.S. Supreme Court has made an assumption of extremely high recidivism (as high as 80 percent) based on questionable research:

> And where did the government come up with their numbers? As it turns out, the solicitor’s brief in McKune cited a government manual that in turn cited a single article published in 1986 in Psychology Today, a mass-market magazine aimed at a lay audience. It was there that Ellman found this sentence: “Most untreated sex offenders released from prison go on to commit more offenses—indeed, as many as 80 percent do.” The article did not even pretend to be a scientific study. It offered no hard data, and its author was neither a scientist nor a professor, but rather a man with a degree in counseling who ran a program for sex offenders in an Oregon prison.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudenc...