Multnomah County's Circles of Support and Accountability (COSA)

The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006 (AWA) (Pub. L. 109-248, 42 U.S.C. § 16901, et seq) authorizes the Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking (SMART) to administer sex offender management grants. Section 637 of the Act authorizes the Department of Justice to conduct sex offender risk assessment studies, including analysis of assessment tools.

The Circles of Support and Accountability (COSA) model is a supervision strategy involving the use of community volunteers to provide support to an individual sex offender. COSA assists offenders with garnering community resources, while holding them accountable to their self-monitoring plan, typically following completion of legal supervision. The Multnomah County Department of Community Justice (MCDOCJ) plans to reduce the rate of recidivism for high-risk sex offenders by 50 percent. MCDOCJ intends to achieve this goal through the systematic merging of the following three strategies: 1) recruiting and training a group of 40 COSA volunteers in Multnomah County to improve desistance motivation and outcomes; 2) creating and operating six COSA models in Multnomah County over two years as developed in Canada to foster narratives of desistance; and 3) applying the COSA models to strengthen social capital and community capacity to support re-entry of the target offender population. ca/ncf