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In a shocking exposure, figures show 400 sex offender who have been set free in the past three years had gone on to commit rape. (16 July 2012)

Date: 16/07/2012
Duncan Lewis, Legal News Solicitors, In a shocking exposure, figures show 400 sex offender who have been set free in the past three years had gone on to commit rape.

The figures have exposed the staggering extent to which reoffending by sexual predators was taking place in the country.
The number of such attackers who went on to commit a sex crime again has seen a sharp rise in recent years. The irony behind this is so glaring with the release of sex offender who have not served even half of their prison term.
The revelation was disturbing enough prompting concerns that dangerous serial criminals were being let of hook.
Last year, nearly one in seven convicted rapists had a previous conviction for a sex crime, the highest level for five years. Overall, more than nine out of ten had some form of previous conviction, including hundreds with criminal records for violent crimes.
The figures raised serious questions about whether the public are being protected from serial sex offenders. Rape victims’ charities also warned that current punishments were not acting as a deterrent to further offending.
Conservative MP Priti Patel said that these were disturbing figures that show too many dangerous criminals being let off the hook and allowed to reoffend over and over again.
The priority for the Government must be to ensure that these prolific offenders were locked up to keep the public safe. Statistics from the Ministry of Justice showed that a total of 3,263 rapists were convicted by the courts in the past three years.
Of those, 409 had previous convictions for sex offences, including 90 who were found guilty of rape. The true rate of reoffending could be far more as many would have gone undetected by the police dragnet.
A shocking 2,961, or more than 90 per cent, of rapists convicted last year were already known to the authorities and had a criminal record.
Criminals sentenced to prison in Britain are routinely released early. Sentencing rules mean most are eligible for parole halfway through their sentence, as long as they have behaved behind bars.
But there has been a sharp rise in the number of rapists who serve even less than half their time. In 2010, 769 rapists were released from prison. Of those, 86 served less than half their sentence, compared with only 15 in 2001.
Critics say pressure is being put on the criminal justice system to release offenders early because prisons were close to overflowing. The Government has faced calls from prison charities to reduce overcrowding by reserving jail for serious, persistent and violent offenders.
A spokesman for charity Rape Crisis, which provides support to victims of sexual violence, said the figures reveal that rapists were serial offenders which it believed always to be true.
Many victims of rape have been subjected to countless sexual assaults before they come forward to tell someone. They also demonstrate that rape can be an escalation of a similar offence that the individual has already “got away with” or where the punishment has not acted as a deterrent to further offending.

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