Sex Offender Management Professionals

Create Team Guidelines

To be effective, any management approach must include interagency and interdisciplinary teamwork and guidelines. For example—

• The California Coalition on Sexual Offending developed position papers on Internet sex offender information posting, treatment guidelines, community containment, family resolution, use of polygraphs, and residence restrictions.
• California and Wisconsin established sexual assault felony enforcement teams to reduce recidivism through community education, frequent contact with sex offenders, and monitoring of sex offender registration.⁸⁸ These teams may be important allies for SARTs' long-term intervention and prevention efforts.
• The Kansas Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Kansas Department of Corrections to participate in building a comprehensive continuum of sex offender management strategies.

You may want to consider incorporating some of the following goals and strategies from the Kansas coalition into your SART. Specifically, they include⁸⁹—

• Developing and implementing guidelines for coordinating the assessment, treatment, case management, release planning, transition, and supervision of sex offenders.
• Following a risk/needs-driven case management strategy for sex offenders.
• Fostering statewide collaboration between case managers, release/discharge planners, treatment providers, surveillance officers, victim service providers, and the parole board.
• Following comprehensive database and data collection protocols and practices for guiding sex offender management.
• Instituting release-planning protocols.
• Adopting protocols, policies, and practices to address housing issues.
• Instituting specialized staff training.

In addition to establishing interagency MOUs, developing sex offender protocols or guidelines will help you institutionalize sex offender management.