The following is an excerpt from a very insightful article by Maya Schenwar.
The article, which discusses the “prison outside prison” world of electronic monitoring, house arrest and other forms of confinement outside of traditional prison, insight-fully equates the Sex Offender Registry to incarceration.
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Although the left-leaning among us may respond to secret data collection and hidden cameras with a visceral aversion, some other strategies that cage people are not so firmly installed on the list of liberal no-nos. Electronic monitoring, house arrest, and targeted policing number among these. Another such mechanism generally condoned or even championed by liberals is the sex offender registry. Yet placement on a registry is a sure ticket to imprisonment-outside-of-prison, sometimes for life. In most states, the minimum duration before you can get off a sex offender registry is at least a decade; in some states, it’s forever.
In 2013, Sable, an incarcerated Pennsylvania woman and mother of three young children, was gearing up for release. Three years earlier, when she was 24, she had been convicted of “statutory sexual assault”—carrying on a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old boy. In some ways, she was looking forward to leaving prison. In others, she was dreading it.
Release, she wrote me, would look nothing like freedom. She would, she explained, be required to avoid cell phones and the Internet. She’d be banned from contact with minors—including her own children. Beyond these tangible restrictions, she was terrified of a more amorphous kind of imprisonment, what she referred to as “the stigma I will live with for the next 22 years.” In Pennsylvania, anyone convicted of a sex offense spends the next quarter-century on a sex offender registry. She anticipated the fear, rejection, or even violence she might face from neighbors, prospective employers, and possible friends.
Sex offender registries are a relatively recent phenomenon. They became widespread in the 1990s in the wake of several high-profile abductions, rapes, and murders of children. Though there’s no evidence that the registries actually prevent sexual assault, they now exist in every state and have been codified into federal law.
To question their use is not to diminish the gravity of sexual violence. Rather, their lack of effectiveness in assault prevention, their grounding premise that ongoing punishment is appropriate long after imprisonment has ended, and their gathering up of those convicted of a wide range of offenses—from sex work (as outlined by scholar Erica Meiners) to the receipt of pornography—should give us pause, no matter how distasteful many of the registrants’ crimes may be.
In numerous states, the whole registry is available for search on the Internet, complete with mug shots and addresses. In some states, that includes juveniles.
Josh Gravens, a prison reform activist and Soros Justice Advocacy Fellow, was arrested at age 12 for having had sexual contact with his eight-year-old sister. He recently wrote in the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange that, despite three and a half years in juvenile prison and four years on parole, “by far the worst penalty I experienced was being placed on the Texas Sex Offender Registry.” As an adult, Gravens faced evictions, a near-impossible quest for employment, and a giant, pervasive stigma against him and his family. “As it stands today,” he writes, “the registry harms far more children than it protects.”
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