Considering that Maine has some of the lightest sentences nationwide for child sex abusers and that longer prison sentences would reduce the ability of repeat offenders to assault children, the conclusions of a recent legislative commission were understandable and deserve support. But recommending more prison time is just the beginning, as the commission acknowledges, to addressing this issue.

The Commission to Improve Safety and Sex Offender Accountability looked specifically at sex crimes committed against children age 12 and under in part because it believes perpetrators of these crimes are most likely to repeat them, perhaps hundreds of times. For instance, it reports, “A study of child-focused sexual behavior, which involved gathering self-reported data on victimization rates from 561 offenders, resulted in reporting a total of 291,737 ‘paraphilic acts’ or perverse sexual behavior, committed against 195,407 victims under the age of 18 years.” And it concludes, “There is limited data to support the conclusion that sex offender notification increases community safety. Contrastingly, there is a more effective direct approach: incarceration. By definition, offenders who are incarcerated cannot victimize children.”

If the commission went only this far, it would be just a tough-on-crime group. But it goes substantially further, trying to break the cycle of child-abuse victims becoming perpetrators. Though the report stresses that only a small percentage of victims become aggressors (and not all aggressors were once victims), there are so many victims that the problem is serious. In addition to increasing parole time, the commission also proposed adding sex-offender specialists in the Department of Corrections and treatment within Maine prisons.

The emphasis of the report clearly is on incarceration and monitoring after prison, but it is careful about its proposals, specifically avoiding, for instance, setting mandatory minimum sentences and even changing the widely used term “dangerous sexual offender” to “repeat sexual assault offender.” That may be why the commission found agreement among both prosecuting and defense attorneys.

The challenge for the Legislature’s Committee on Criminal Justice and Public Safety, which heard the proposal earlier this week, is to identify the costs of the proposal, weigh them against other possibilities and set priorities for reducing the horrifying problem of child abuse. They must do this even as the state’s prison system is overcrowded and its parole system badly overburdened. Such a state of emergency is nothing new for Maine’s prisons, but it does suggest that the commission’s work should be evaluated in a larger review of overall public-safety demands.

The Legislature should incorporate this work into its larger view of overall prison reform.