Jim Kimball Gets the Treatment

I heard a story today on the radio concerning a guy in Idaho. Here is a link with broadcast details and how to order. Here is a full article from another source on the guy. I wanted to keep a link to this because it is exactly like what we get here all the time.

This guy, Jim Kimball, is on the sex offender registry because he was charged with a sex offense, which was in fact dismissed. Apparently, in Idaho you can be a registered sex offender without having been convicted of a sex offense, and the burden is on you if you want the record expunged. The offense was an isolated incident of consensual sexual contact about 15 years ago, involving a teenage girl that he flirted with in his early 20s and never actually had intercourse with.

A local news station hyped his story. Some high points:

• They initially failed to report that he was not convicted, or that the allegation was 15 years old, even though these were matters of public record.
  
• They failed to ever seek his side of the story.
  
• They pushed to air in spite of concerns raised by the reporter that this would ruin someone's life and that the details had not yet emerged to justify the story.
  
• They misleadingly illustrated the story by showing children ten years younger than the alleged victim in his case.
  
• They used special effects like washing out the color from his photograph and zooming in slowly on the eyes, to manufacture a sense of menace.
  
• When other news agencies universally decided not to cover the story, because it was not real news in any way, the station used the fact that it had exercised unsound judgment as a selling-point, repeatedly emphasizing that it had an exclusive.
  
• They managed to get him fired; expose him to his nine-year old daughter whom he and his wife had planned to tell when she was older; traumatized is wife; forced him to miss school events for his children; drove away his friends because people were misled into thinking he was a child sexual predator.

I have some doubts about the use of actuarial tests to lock people up, but I do think they have some scientifically proven predictive value. If you were to apply a test like the STATIC-99 to Kimball, I have no doubt he would fall into the lowest risk category. Guys like this tend to be off-the-scale low risk. There is no evidence I know of that they are at any greater risk of offense than the general population.

I do want to correct one assertion from the KCBI report linked to above. It is stated in the report that an offender's recidivism rate rises over time. This is just bullshit. The cumulative likelihood of course rises, by definition, but the annual rate of recidivism decreases steadily. It decreases even more at older ages, and (for serial offenders) after roughly the first six offenses. The only time risk tends to rise over time, is when there has been recent penalty or treatment whose effects are still fresh and are wearing off, which is a small factor in the long term. That's something that would be meaningless in this case. Otherwise, just think: would we feel that a person just released from prison for a sex offense would be the low risk guy, and the guy who's been good for 25 years is the one you have to watch? It runs completely counter to the principle of induction.