08-22-2016 Council Packet - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

490 CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR 2,500-foot zone (0.5 miles). To ensure that neither distance was overly restrictive, residen- tial proximity was also determined on the basis of a 1-mile zone (5,280 feet). As a result, three distances were used in this study to determine residential proximity: 1,000 feet, 2,500 feet, and 5,280 feet (1 mile). The third criterion concerns the type of location where the offender established contact with the victim. In order for a case to be considered one that might have been prevented by a residency restrictions law, the offender had to have established victim contact in or near one of the prohibited areas: a school, park, playground, daycare center, or other location where children are known to congregate. The fourth criterion concerns the age of the victim. Because housing restrictions focus on the protection of children, the victim(s) had to have been younger than age 18 at the time of the offense for it to be considered a case where a residency restriction law might have made a difference. All four of the criteria outlined above had to be met for an offense to be classified as one that might have been prevented by housing restrictions. If, for example, an offender estab- lished direct contact with a juvenile victim 0.3 miles (1,584 feet) away from his residence at a park and committed the offense in the same location, residential proximity would be rele- vant for both the 0.5 mile (2,500 feet) and 1.0 mile distances but not for the 0.2 mile (1,000 feet) distance. If, however, the victim in this situation were an adult, then the case would not be classified as one that might have been deterred by residency restrictions. Similarly, if an offender broke into a neighbor’s home 0.1 miles (500 feet) away from his own residence and victimized a juvenile female victim, the case would not meet the criteria for classification because the first contact location would be the victim’s home rather than a child congregation location. RESULTS The results show that 85% (n =190) of the sexual offenders’ reoffenses occurred in a residential location (see Table 1). The other 15% (n =34) took place in a public location, of which most were an exterior location such as a street, alley, or park. Slightly more than one half (54%) of the recidivists committed the reoffense in their own residence. Of these 121 reoffenses, the offender shared the residence with the victim in 37% of the cases. In 42% (n =94) of the cases, the offense took place within the victim’s home. The victim shared the residence with the offender in 48% (n =45) of these cases. For 27 of the 224 cases, it was not possible to estimate the distance between the offender’s residence and the location where the offense took place because of the absence of specific address information for at least one of the locations. This was especially true for the older cases (i.e., those that took place in the early to mid-1990s) in that specific address information for either the offender’s residence or the offense location was less likely to be available in any of the data sources used. OFFENDER RESIDENCE–OFFENSE LOCATION DISTANCE The results in Table 1, which also display the straight-line distance between the offender’s residence and the offense location, suggest that offenders were more likely to commit offenses in or near their place of residence. Of the 197 cases where specific address at University of British Columbia Library on April 27, 2010 http://cjb.sagepub.comDownloaded from