Is FAC in favor of a pared-down, non-public, risk-based registry, or outright abolition of the registry? What is FAC’s basic message to state lawmakers on this question?

Someone mentioned how in another state, people successfully advocated for a tiered system, and that didn’t solve the problem. And it’s true, tiers in themselves do not solve any problem. They can, but it depends how those tiers are defined and how they are administered, and the majority of tiered state registries fail in this area.

I’ve been dumped on by many “registry reform advocates” for espousing this message over the years but I never let those folks shame me into watering down my efforts to abolish this useless, bloated government blacklist.

Long before there was an FAC or an ACSOL, back when the big group was SOHopeful, and when NARSOL was just RSOL and RSOL was little more than an online petition, and even before I even started what became OnceFallen, I was already shunned by some for this message because it was “too harsh” or “too radical.”

But here we are, over a quarter century after the passage of the Jacob Wetterling Act, the first federal law forcing sex offense registration upon us, and the registry is entrenched in our society. This ANTI-REGISTRY MOVEMENT has settled for begging for minute changes to the registry yet the registry continues to grow. We pushed for states to remove juveniles from the registry, yet a new report from the Juvenile Law Center just reported that we now have about 200k juveniles on the registry.

We patted ourselves on the back when a certain West Coast state adopted a “Tiered registry.” I still maintain advocating for a Tiered registry is advocating for a registry. In advocating for this tiered registry, the leader of this group proclaimed a tiered registry protects the public. Why would we say such a thing? Now this state has a tiered registry, but there’s still no guarantee people are going to get off the registry, since the new law still required a court hearing to determine whether or not you get a reprieve.

I belief this effort hurt our cause. This leader believes in an “incremental approach” to reforming the registry, but at what cost? I can see the words this leader spoke being weaponized in future efforts to chip away at the registry.

But I digress. For years, I’ve said this registry is like the mythical hydra. If we cut off only one head, it’ll simply grow back. It would only take one tragic case to change all that. Florida knows this all too well. After the Cherish Perrywinkle murder in 2013, Florida legislators vowed to make the state “scorched earth” for all registered persons.

Anyone who believes the registry can merely be “reformed” is merely fooling themselves.

Regarding the registry, LE has our DNA so in the event of a re-offense, LE knows who the offender is. Considering the convoluted nature of laws state to state, maybe the best solution IS to kill the registry. Perhaps by chipping away at the registry, our efforts have actually validated the concept of the law. We accept the laws as you so accurately observed and we have tried to make them less onerous. The point being, why do we have a useless, punitive law Ex post facto AT ALL. We have been trying to turn the temperature down on a pot of water when we should be focused on taking the pot off the stove all together.

PAID IN FULL!

Abolition is the only path! The squeaky wheel gets the grease! Make sure to SPEAK UP!!