Sex Offender Registry Needs Reform?

It is not known what happened to Jacob Wetterling. He was abducted, but it is unknown if he was killed.

The fact that the majority of sex offences on children happens from people they know isn't relevant to getting rid of it. It might stop a woman from dating a man who's a registered sex offender who might be doing it to get close to her kid.

My issue with it is that it's handed out to easily, such as the case mentioned above. I thinks there needs to be more review and selectivity on that.

Public offender registries are useless at best, harmful at worst. It is, however, an arrow-filled path to attempt to change them.

They do nothing to stop sexual abuses. They've not been shown to stop abuse, ever. They don't stop abuse in the aggregate either - as noted above.

They give people a false sense of safety - 'oh, I looked up the sex offenders, my children are safe, because I told them not to go near those houses!' That presupposes all sex offenders on the registries will abuse children (a common, really odd misconception), and that most offenders are strangers (common, totally incorrect misconception).

They do encourage abuse - of people on the registry. There have been many, many people targetted for everything from neighbourhood flyer campaigns to literally having their homes burned down, being driven out of towns, etc., once the neighbours found them on registries.

Note that there are no registries for any other types of offenders. People get all up in arms about having a 'right' to know if there's a person living near them who was convicted of a sex offense. They don't petition to know where the murderers, burglars, people who committed agg. assault, etc., are living. It's odd.

There is, imo, a place for registries, but not for public ones. They've been useful for cops, and in some juvenile offender cases, in forcing families to deal with issues. Public registries are nothing but trouble.

Sad part, in my opinion, is that those who will offend again won't be on the registery, or if they are, won't keep their information current.

Those who feel and know they did bad will follow the law.

We frequently see news articles around here of registered offenders who didn't update and are caught trying again.

Like cornflake, I think the registry does more harm than good. It gives people a false sense of security, makes them feel entitled to become vigilantes, and makes it nearly impossible for nonviolent offenders to rebuild their lives. I think there's greater risk from other types of criminals, and I would be fine with the registry going away entirely. It's not like there aren't other ways of keeping, say, child molesters from working with kids.

There's a lot of ugliness in the system. I know someone who works in the system, and in my county, bond is set very high. Offenders sit in jail until they accept a plea, sometimes for close to two years. Even if they are innocent, they generally break down and accept the plea, and then they go on the registry. Now of course the majority aren't innocent, but there's very little innocent until proven guilty, particularly if they are sitting in jail waiting and waiting and waiting for their trial.

cornflake said:

That presupposes all sex offenders on the registries will abuse children (a common, really odd misconception)

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It's not all that odd a misconception: Megan Kanka (for whom Megan's Law, which established the registry that kicked off the movement, was named) was a child and registries have commonly been sold to the public as protecting children from molestors. They just end up including anything sexual that politicians don't want to be seen as coddling.

I've mentioned this on here before, but a guy I went to high school with is on the registry. He was a senior and 18. His girlfriend was a sophomore, and 15. Her parents found out they had had consensual sex and had him arrested for statutory rape.

He's on the registry for sex with a minor child. The guy isn't a pedophile. He was kind of a jackass and none of us liked him, granted, but he wasn't a pedophile, and as far as I know has never raped a woman. He had sex with his girlfriend and ended up on a list because the girl's parents were pissed.

I know he can't be the only one on a list like that, and while I'm not sure if I disagree with the list in general, I do disagree with the idea that people can end up on it for life over something stupid that happened as a kid that never should have made it that far (IMO) in the first place.

cornflake said:

Public offender registries are useless at best, harmful at worst. It is, however, an arrow-filled path to attempt to change them.

They do nothing to stop sexual abuses. They've not been shown to stop abuse, ever. They don't stop abuse in the aggregate either - as noted above.

They give people a false sense of safety - 'oh, I looked up the sex offenders, my children are safe, because I told them not to go near those houses!' That presupposes all sex offenders on the registries will abuse children (a common, really odd misconception), and that most offenders are strangers (common, totally incorrect misconception).

They do encourage abuse - of people on the registry. There have been many, many people targetted for everything from neighbourhood flyer campaigns to literally having their homes burned down, being driven out of towns, etc., once the neighbours found them on registries.

Note that there are no registries for any other types of offenders. People get all up in arms about having a 'right' to know if there's a person living near them who was convicted of a sex offense. They don't petition to know where the murderers, burglars, people who committed agg. assault, etc., are living. It's odd.

There is, imo, a place for registries, but not for public ones. They've been useful for cops, and in some juvenile offender cases, in forcing families to deal with issues. Public registries are nothing but trouble.

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Agree.

These things--sex offender registries--are horrible things. They're wrong, wholly and completely, imo. Regardless of the motivation behind their creation, they are affronts to justice imo.

When people talk about sex offender registries, I pose this question: "If SO registries are such a good thing, then why don't we just have a publicly available database of all released criminals? Why limit it to sex offenders?" I rarely get a reasonable answer.

I agree with a lot of what's been said here. There's a tendency to paint all SO as the ultimate boogeymen and women, and people forget that so many offenders make their first offense against someone known to them.

Putting their home address out there for everyone to see is pointless. It ignores the facts that offenders are still human beings who work, eat, go to the library, etc. In other words, they're just as mobile as everyone else in the US today. Saying "this address is bad" can lead to a false feeling of safety elsewhere, when you just need to be generally vigilant everywhere (but not paranoidly so).

The better way to handle this is to indeed make a publicly-available database, similar to what's used for the NICS gun purchase database. Let me as a citizen query the database with a full name and DOB, and go from there. Don't give me their SSN or home address.

Then again, I have an issue with how we as a society treat former convicts. I think far too often we make it way harder for them to re-assimilate back into society, and put their past behind them. We basically throw them in a cage for a few years, tell them they've been bad, then let them out, and tell them to behave now.

robeiae said:

Agree.

These things--sex offender registries--are horrible things. They're wrong, wholly and completely, imo. Regardless of the motivation behind their creation, they are affronts to justice imo.

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I totally agree. Both useless and wrong.

kaitie said:

I've mentioned this on here before, but a guy I went to high school with is on the registry. He was a senior and 18. His girlfriend was a sophomore, and 15. Her parents found out they had had consensual sex and had him arrested for statutory rape.

He's on the registry for sex with a minor child. The guy isn't a pedophile. He was kind of a jackass and none of us liked him, granted, but he wasn't a pedophile, and as far as I know has never raped a woman. He had sex with his girlfriend and ended up on a list because the girl's parents were pissed.

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Also, with crimes like that, it can't be assumed that the person is likely to re-offend, or that the initial crime was part of a pattern. Part of the logic of having a sex offender registry is that some offenders, like pedophiles, are difficult to treat and are likely to feel urges to re-offend all their lives. Some people exhibit a pattern of pursuing underage teens, but a single statutory rape charge in a situation like you describe doesn't show a pattern like that. A lot of sex offenders probably aren't any more likely to re-offend than any other type of criminal.

And with the people who do pose a continued risk to society, a registry feels like a band-aid approach to the problem. I would rather see efforts made to reform sentencing guidelines. Right now, there are a lot of efforts to control potentially dangerous offenders after they finish their sentences, which doesn't work well and sometimes results in ethically questionable actions, like committing people to psychiatric hospitals after they're released from prison. I think the legal system needs to get a better idea of what it's trying to do with dangerous SOs (punishing criminals? Treating convicts with dangerous mental illnesses?) and sentence accordingly from the start. I don't really have a problem with some offenders receiving a sentence that, for example, involves a probationary period after they're released from prison, or mandatory therapy if they want to stay out (though I don't agree with having a public registry that identifies them).

Uh...is it possible to not abbreviate sex offender as SO? Because I've always used it and seen it used as "significant other" and it's just...unsettling seeing it used in this way. Might just be me, though.

Vince524 said:

It might stop a woman from dating a man who's a registered sex offender who might be doing it to get close to her kid.

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kaitie said:

Uh...is it possible to not abbreviate sex offender as SO? Because I've always used it and seen it used as "significant other" and it's just...unsettling seeing it used in this way. Might just be me, though.

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Combining the two thoughts, if the sex-offender registry is supposedly to warn people about dangerous individuals, why isn't there an abusive-spouse/significant other registry, so people can be warned about violent, high-risk potential mates?
Or, indeed, murderers?

How about a registry of people with concealed carry permits?

Sex offender registries are nuts.

1. Not proportional to the offense. It's one thing if a serial rapist or child molester is out and about, but a lot of folks on the list are the list for minor crimes like pissing in public or for statutory rape type convictions.

2. Why no registries for other crimes? You could be a convicted murderer and basically go back to living a normal life once you get out of prison. A sex offender on the other hand, especially with laws in place, are social pariahs. They are restricted in where they can live in some places to the point of being homeless, they can't get jobs, and they're viciously persecuted regardless of their actual offense simply due to their status. This just seems to me to be the opposite of what you should be trying to do with people who are released from jail.

3. Drives the fear mongering by the media and has caused a situation where men are publicly stigmatized for interacting with kids. I remember getting death glares from women when I walked a lost toddler in a store up to the store front to have his mother paged. It's like the assumption was there that I had done something to this kid, even though I was there doing the right thing. I've talked to other men who've had similar encounters, be it smiling at a child in a grocery store, helping a kid fix their bike when their chain came off, or playing with their own children in the park. My general rule now, is that I don't interact with kids unless I've got a female present.

Don't get me wrong. Sex crimes are a serious issue, but I think the registries are a large driver of the stranger-danger paranoia that's got this country in a death grip. They don't keep people safe, they drive offenders to the margins of society (where they become even more dangerous), and they create an environment of fear.