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Methodology 3-year fo/%wup period For analytic purposes, "3 years" was defined as ? ,096 days from the day of release from prison. Any rearrest, reconviction, or re-imprisonment occur- ring after 1 ,096 days from the ? 994 release was not included. A conviction after 1 ,096 days was not counted even if it resulted "from an arrest within the period. State statutes, and when they were used they did not always conform to the study's definitions of them. In deciding which type of sex offender to classify the prisoner as, importance was attached not to the label the law gave to his conviction offense, but to how well the law's definition of the offense fit the study's definition of the type. statute the offender was imprisoned for violating, or the statute the released prisoner was charged with violating when he was rearrested for a sex crime. The former was obtained from the prison records assembled for the study; the latter, from the assembled arrest records. Separating sex offenders into four types The report gives statistics for four types of sex offenders. Separating sex offen- ders into the four types was done using information - in particular, the statute number for the imprisonment offense, the literal version of the statute, a numeric FBI code (called the "NCIC" code, short for "National Crime Infor- mation Center") indicating what the imprisonment offense was, and miscel- laneous other information -available in the prison records on the 9,691 men. However, the prison records obtained for the study did not always contain all four pieces of information on the imprisonment offense. Moreover, the available offense information was not always detailed enough to reliably distinguish different types of sex offenders. The process of sorting sex offenders into different types involved first creat- ing the study's definitions of the four types, and then determining which State statute numbers, which literal versions of those statutes, and which NCIC codes conformed to the defini- tions. Each inmate was next classified into one of the types (or possibly into more than one type, since the four are not mutually exclusive) depending on whether the imprisonment offense information available on him fit the study's definition. An obstacle to classifying sex offenders into types was that the labels "rape," "sexual assault," "child molestation," "statutory rape" were not widely used in Sex offenders compared fo non-sex offenders In ? 994, prisons in ? 5 States released 272,1 ? ? prisoners, representing two-thirds of all prisoners released in the United States that year. Among the 272,111 were 262,420 released prison- ers whose imprisonment offense was not a sex offense. Non-sex offenders include inmates, both male and female, who were in prison for violent crimes (such as murder or robbery), property crimes (such as burglary or motor vehicle theft), drug crimes, and public order offenses. Like the 9,691 male sex offenders examined in this report, all non-sex offenders were serving prison terms of one year or more in State prison when they were released in 1994. At various places, this report compares 9,691 released male sex offenders to 262,420 released non-sex offenders. While labeled "non-sex offenders," the 262,420 actually includes a small number- 87- who are sex offenders. The 87 are all the female sex offenders released from prisons in the 15 States in 1994. Ages of molested and a//eged/y mo/eated chi/dren Information on the ages of molested children was needed for two calcula- tions: 1) age of the child the released sex offender was sent to prison for molesting, and 2) age of the child alleg- edly molested by the released sex offender during the 3-year follow-up period. The most frequent source of both was a sex statute: either the sex None of the sex statutes was found to apply to a victim of a specific age; for example, just to 12-year-olds. But some were found to apply just to children in a certain age range; for example, under ? 2, or 13 to 1 5, or 16 to 17. While specific ages of children could not be obtained from statutes, the availability of information on age ranges at least made it possible to obtain approximate ages. The rule that was adopted was to record the victim's (or alleged victim's) age as the upper limit of a statute's age range. To illus- trate, astatute might indicate that the complainant/victim be "at least 13 but less than 16 years of age." In that case, the age of the child was recorded as 1 5, since the statute indicated the upper limit of the age range as any age "less than 16." As another example, if a statute indicated the complainant/ victim be "under 12 years of age," the child's age was recorded as 11 , as the phrasing of the age range did not include 12-year-olds, only those "under 12." Because the victim (or alleged victim) was always assigned the age of the oldest person in the age range, the study made the victims (or alleged victims) appear older than they actually were. How missing data were hand/ed in the report In many instances, the data needed to calculate a statistic were not available for all 9,691 released sex offenders. For example, the 9,691 were released in 15 States, but data needed to deter- mine the number reconvicted were only available for the 9,085 released in 14 of the 15. Of the 9,085, 2,180 (24%) were reconvicted. When data were missing, the statistic was computed on those Recidivism of Sex Offenders Re/eased from Prison in 1994 37 50A-89