Estimating the incapacitation effect on sexual offending using the actual time served by 431,632 men convicted of rape, statutory rape, attempted rape, sexual assault, forcible sodomy, and lewd sexual acts with a child (NCRP 2000–2019)

Traditional incapacitation research assumes that collective imprisonment of all offenders will effectively reduce the number of rapes in society by a quantifiable amount. These estimates ignore the research on sex offender-specific risks for sexual offending. This article recalculates traditional incapacitation estimates to measure the number of rapes prevented by selectively imprisoning men already convicted of sex crimes. The National Corrections Reporting Program (NCRP) data is used to show that imprisoning 431,632 felony contact sex offenders for an average of 4.3 years each between the years 2000 and 2019 may have prevented between 120,744 and 551,708 rapes in the United States. This study also considers how many sexual recidivism outcomes could be prevented if offenders had served longer sentences. Limitations to incapacitation research and sexual recidivism research is described at length and suggestions for more accurate estimates are proposed.