Sex offender registration fees are a bad idea.
Setting aside the constitutionality of charging individuals for the “privilege” of registering as a sex offender – something that’s not only involuntary but that all would certainly prefer not to do – and claiming it’s not a “penalty”, it’s a logistical nightmare.
Because of the public website and the stigma that comes with it, most registered sex offenders are either grossly underemployed or unemployed. Many of the collateral consequences of being a registrant are extremely expensive. Registrants are required, in most cases to cover the costs of items such as “treatment”, GPS monitoring and polygraphs. Because their housing options are so limited, they usually pay a premium just to put a roof over their head. In summary; they are broke!
So the state of Tennessee imposed a “fee” they intended to charge the registrants. Now, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, is discovering why that was a bad idea. According to a report presented by Comptroller Justin P. Wilson to legislators on the state Senate Finance, Ways and Means Committee, it cost the bureau an estimated $419,400 in collections, accounting and administering the fee!
How many registrants do you think can afford to pay the $150 fee? For a state that has just over 20,000 registrants, you have to wonder whether this fee scheme turned out to be as good an idea as planned.
I am a registered citizen of means. We recently cancelled a trip to Tennessee because of these fees. Although my way from and I can certainly afford them, the thought of having to pay to enter the state as a tourist is abhorrent and in-American. Registered citizens who have finished their sentence and probation should not be have to pay fees for interstate travel
Do i have to pay the registration fee? Will It Cause Legal Problems?
I lived in Broward County, FL for over 10 years and registered every 6 months as required at no cost.
I sold my house and moved last year to Indian River County and was told that I had to pay $25 admin fee every 6 months that I registered. Also if a change of any kind like adding a car or job change or address change etc that was a $10.00 change fee in top of the $25 registration fee.
To top it off I am forced to register even though I was convicted in 1991 but had three months of probation left when the Florida Registration was signed into law.
I have been out if work for 5 months and can not afford the registration fees but either I pay them or get arrested.
john,
Did you fill out a case consideration form? This is something I’d like to raise to the attorneys handling our ExPostFacto case.
FAC<
I am not familiar with said, "case consideration form".
Where can I go to find out info on this form?
Fill out the form at this link:
https://floridaactioncommittee.org/case-consideration/
Thank you for the link.
I have filled it out to the best of my knowledge and submitted it for consideration.
I am not familiar with the case consideration forn can you please inform me how to receive one
There is a link on top of our website that says “Case Consideration”. Click that link.
This sounds like Florida’s definition of justice. It’s beyond logic of anyone with half a brain…but then most political bureaucrats have never been known to have a logical brain…only a ‘what’s in it for me’ brain.
Bearden Vs Georgia. Look it up.
This ruling states that an ex-con can not go to prison for failire to pay legal financial obligations provided that a good faith effort is made.
Translation: Tell the Legal syatem to go FΩΩk themselves, and fill out job applications regardless of whether or not you’ll get hired.
Do not borrow money from friends and family (discourage them from doing so) and see about getting waivers for the registry fees due to the fact that you have no job or the fees are an unreasonable expense ( housing and groceries are important, Legal fees are not.
If the government wants the registry, they should pay for it and how are you expected to pay the fees if you cant get hired?
The full cite for Bearden is 461 US 660 (1983).
Just got out of PDC for this very thing – couldn’t afford a polygraph. Even showed that I couldn’t afford it, and the judge decided to sentence me anyway because of my original charges.
I don’t borrow, either. If/when the POs or courts tell me I should, I want it in writing. Lot of precedents that say they can’t force family to pay a probationer’s legal obligations.
Tell them to go pound sand. Look up Bearden vs Georgia.
You can not be arrested for being unable to pay fines and fees provided you make a good faith effort.
Rent, utilities and groceries are necessities. Sex offender registry fees are luxuries. If it is that important for you to register, the state needs to pass the cost on to the tax payer or have Ron Book pay for the registry since his dumb @$$ lobbied for the registry.
$25 every time you re-register in Duh-Val County aka Jacksonville. So they rake in $50-$100 per year off every registrant.
Personally, I have been very successful at legally costing governments a lot of money. I make it a job to cost them an amount that is at least 12 times any amount that they cost me. I keep track down to the dollar. If they would charge me $150 to Register, I would directly cost them at least $1,800 and preferably more.
I recommend that all of the millions of people who are affected in any negative way by any Nanny Big Government (NBG) Registry do the exact same thing. Make it a job. Put a lot of effort and hours into it. You will find that it is not that difficult to really cost them a lot and harm them.
The only good NBG is a broke and dysfunctional NBG.
Lastly, don’t accept being broke or underemployed. F the terrorists that support the Registries. Make them broke and unemployed. Don’t look for a job, make a job for yourself and run them into the ground. Make the terrorists beg you for a job, housing, and such. Then turn them away and help people who deserve it.
Can you share how you accomplish that?
Sure can. Sorry it will be a bit of a brain dump but I’m in a hurry ….
There are plenty of ways to do it illegally but I’m not up for that, personally. I am not going to give the criminal regimes even more ways to attack me. And though you can cost them millions of dollars like that, I think in the long run, it is too difficult and doesn’t cost them enough. Even an attack like Oklahoma City or the Twin Towers has limited effect and life span.
But anyway, a key way you can do it legally is by doing business with government. If you are capable of owning companies (and most people are more capable than they believe), then it is trivial to own companies that do millions and millions of dollars of business with government and they don’t even have any idea who you are. Trivial. Once you have done that it is easy to not worry so much about their costs. And don’t business try to maximize their profits anyway? You can cost them more money than people outside of it would believe. So that is one very effective way.
Another way is to be very connected with people in government. And you don’t have to do it personally, you can do it with people who work for you. Although, when you are wealthy, people are dying to be connected to you, no matter what. They may want to hide their connections, but they want it. This is very related to having businesses that do business with government. Outsiders would be shocked at the money being made by everyone.
Another way is to find people whose agenda is to keep government broke. There are plenty of citizens watch groups that work over government budgets. Plenty of groups that fight salary and benefit increases to public employees, including law enforcement. They have been very, very effective in many areas. Public employees, including law enforcement, are very poorly paid and the turnover is outrageous.
Another way that I find pretty interesting is to find dumb, expensive, wasteful government policies that people like and get them enacted. It is not hard to find stupid government budget items and get them going. Lots of ways to do this. Supporting dumb citizen referendums is a good one.
Most of the activities are a bit of a “scorched earth” policy but who cares, eh? End of the day I am going to win and I am going to harm people who support the Registries. They want war and I’ve been giving to them. They are losing badly.
Took the words out of my mouth.
Government bueracrats are nor intelligent
Sure a high registry fee looks and sounds tough but who will this fee be collected from people who can’t afford it?
Will you throw them in prison to be tough so you can get those votes and show you are active during election years?
Is it worth spending tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to be toughbon someone who cant pay the under 100 fees?
Paying a “Registration Fee” AFTER your off paper is just plain Extortion.
Justice Kennedy wrote in his opinion in Packingham….”(Of importance, the TROUBLING FACT that the law imposes severe restrictions on persons who already have served their sentence and are no longer subject to the supervision of the criminal justice system…)
Even SCOTUS knows there is an END to this punishment and paying a fee AFTER your out of the system is not allowed by law even though the states think it is.
Therefore, I just don’t pay it. By law it can’t be enforced. I have not been accosted by any law enforcement for failure to pay.
When I was put on monitoring for a ridiculous reason from the perspective of any normal person, the probation people salivated and had me pay $360 a month for monitoring. I thought that was awfully high and so did my lawyer when I finally told him. He told me to speak to my PO about it. I did and of course she was very defensive but finally went to the DoC web site and sure enough I had been over paying since April 2009…I had $5,200 in a DoC account. She told me that I did not have to pay the monthly fee for 22 months…I will probably be off of probation by then. They had been over charging me all that time and made no effort to correct it. I guess they thought I was sending them money for the fun of it. It’s not at all pleasant being monitored by crooks.
Capt Munsey, if you are receiving Veterans Administration Disability benefits, you are not required to pay a penny for both, the Probations and the Monitoring.
I know because I was paying the Probations crap until the VA rendered my disability ratings, and then I brought the VA papers to the PO and I was not required to pay a dime afterwards.
Fortunately I am in good health and if I have to look at the positive side of events…which I always try to do…I am blessed to be able to pay this ‘rip off’ bounty. One day I know that those who are today unforgiving and feel justified in taking advantage of others will be called to account and it will not be ‘pretty’ for them. Thanks for the advice, though.
Dear M.
Does that VA policy apply also to veterans on an old age pension?
Fortunately I survived my 29 years of military service with only minor injuries and have, since retiring, been seen by the medical facilities at Patrick AFB. I have not had to avail myself of the VA although I do have friends who do and that think well of the treatment they receive. I paid $360 a month for monitoring since April 2009. At the encouragement of my lawyer I inquired about the amount I was paying and with much reluctance probation checked for me and sure enough I had been over paying to the tune that I had over $5,200 in an account set up for me by DoC…that represented the amount I had been over paying and no one at DoC bothered to let me know I was paying too much. I wonder who was collecting the interest on that money? I was released from probation eleven years early and have since…with much “teeth pulling”…received a refund. I was always honest in my dealings with DoC and I expected them to be so with me…not! I am now living a relatively normal life with my grown children and their families close by. My paperwork to have my voting rights restored has been submitted and received by Tallahassee. Once that is done I will go to work getting my name removed from the registry. During my service in DC I enjoyed pointing out the bureaucracy to the ‘inbreds’, so doing so with Florida will be an enjoyable challenge. This lifetime effort by politicians to destroy certain lives has got to come to an end. I am not easily offended but when I am put in the same category as a murderer I am offended…the other offensive thing in my life is being called ‘politically correct’. All have a fine Navy day!
Capt Munsey-
Were you a twenty or thirty year man? If so, you qualify of course for the whole panoply of line-ups at the VA. It covers all the US military services. My particular pension is meant to supplement my paltrey Social Security payments. (under a thousand a month. The VA will supplement that to bring my income up to 12,900 a year. They will also pay for any treatment for outside medical I might receive. I did get a little windfall when I got back all that I had paid those crooks running the cottage industry in Illinois of Sex Offender “treatment”. The captive clientele must pay CASH for all of it in Illinois. Including all polygraph testing, which goes on ad infinitum. The treatment providers do not even have P.h.d.s in their field and are supervised by no one in the “field”. The classes run night and day and I have always wondered where all that cash is winding up-probably a good portion of it in the hands of compliant supervisors who force their charges into these groups on pain of violation of supervised release.
Florida’s and Illinois’ both have “offense” based treatment regimens, whereas the standard now is the 99CR risk-based assessment programs. According to those an old man like me with Low-T and no priors is a Tier one and needing no treatment and little or no supervision. I’m an author whose work was originally published back in 1970-80 by brick and mortar houses in New York City. When I was released, the self publishing phenomenon was on, and so now I’m on Amazon with Ebooks/audiobooks and all that. BUT…I am just four novels out of 40 million, so it’s a little hard to get noticed. My original offense didn’t even involve prurience, but journalistic curiosity for a book on the whole CP phenomenon. I’d never seen any CP, but responded to a mail offer and was nailed on it the first time out. My entire life has been in pursuit of the arts, first as an actor working with some pretty big stars of the era (Deborah Kerr, Jose Ferrer, Maureen O’Sulivan, etc) and a hallmark of that is the inordinate need to understand all aspects of the human condition, including on occasion its bizarre extremes. I just never imagined the government would throw one in jail for that.
I completed my ‘counselling’ in 2009. The counselor was a ‘good guy’ and caused me no problems. I paid $25 a week for five years. I treated it mostly as ‘entertainment’. I sat and listened to the ‘stories’ and threw in my ‘two-cents worth’ every now and then. I knew what I had done was wrong and I really didn’t need some one to tell me what I already knew. I was over it before I even started. I have since been released from probation…eleven years early… and am back to pretty much living a normal life. I look forward to each day.
Good for you! You didn’t feel your SO treatment provider was extorting that 25 bucks a week? I tried the route you describe and found it to be total nonsense. The people I had were not even Phds in their field and treated all of us like sub-human lepers and pieces of fecal matter. I had to drive 70 miles a week and pay 30 bucks for an hour and a half of that? My offense was non-contact/non-violent and I felt my “crime” to be simply journalistic curiosity, which it WAS. The Army turned me into a reporter and it”s information school was like a four year journalism degree in eight weeks. I wrote for the Stars and Stripes and the camp newspaper, and papers back home as an “information specialist”. Later on, those skills helped me with four published novels, two produced plays, and a host of television scripts-all out of New York City in last century’s 70s, 80s, and 90’s. The real money as far as television went, was in OWNING what you wrote.Most of the time I was just a “hired gun” with a good salary, and longed to actually own a project I had labored on. My “crime” involved no “prurience” in and of itself. I simply was seeking more information and understanding about a subject I knew nothing about. I was for many years an actor, writer, producer and I worked with some of the biggest stars in the industry. It is a hallmark of those whose lives are spent in pursuit of the arts to have an inordinate interest in all aspects of the human condition. And some of us will on occasion cross the line. I was nabbed my first time out through what amounted to an illegal and outrageous sting. As so many of those of us on the registry are. Because I relied on the SCOTUS decision “Curzon vs the Director of the Missouri dept of Health” in which the right to refuse medical treatment was upheld for any competent adult, I was recently denied for early release from criminal supervised release and thus am still a government slave. Consider… most sentences for ANY sex offense in Florida and many other states are for LIFETIME Supervision and Registration, regardless of the length of any prison sentence. We are not talking PAROLE here as my sentence was completed.
Current sex offender laws are simply a resurgence of the slave codes of the antebellum south. I was released in December of 2014 after seven years of an eight year sentence. My “masters” there told me I had three days to report to my new masters in Central Illinois. All I got back from my former life was the right to vote in elections. I was forced into unnecessary ‘treatment’ against my will, not allowed to attend the church I grew up in because it held Sunday School classes for little kids while the Adult services went on in the downstairs auditorium. I can’t participate in any family celebration where anyone under 18 attends also. I have no access to social media, can only own ONE internet device (my computer) which is constantly monitored at a personal cost to me of 42 bucks a month. This monitoring software slows my state of the art computer down to an early model of the breed. It takes forever to do anything on it. All the conditions and restrictions covering me, just at the state level, runs to a large half inch thick sheaf of double-sided print-outs.
I have a lot in common with that poor devil Dred Scott who was told back in 1857 the SCOTUS chief Justice that he had no rights anyone was bound to respect.
Dear M.
What is that address at the VA you mentioned in your reply to Capt.Munsey?
This is SO right on… It’s like being forced to buy the whip that they bloody you with. In Illinois it’s a hundred bucks a year. If you refuse to pay, they refuse to register you, and then if you miss your date, they arrest you-it’s a felony for registrants not to re-register, and they can lock you up again. The “treatment” regimen, with all the cash only requirements, plus the same for multiple polygraph tests at $360 a pop, because passing it the first time does not excuse you from follow-up “maintenance” tests. Whose maintenance I wonder? Between psychologists with no phd’s and collusion with supervisory parole parasites, one wonders where all that cash is winding up. These “Group Treatment” sessions run day and night, and of course are based upon recently de-bunked science that flies entirely in the face of current paradigms of “treatment” for this captive clientele. Registrants are living through the Nazification of our justice system with its own American “Nuremburg” laws.
PHYS ED on January 17, 2018 at 2:34 pm:
Treatment is complete nonsense. There is absolutely no way that anyone with a brain can say that any person who commits any offense that is related to SEX needs “treatment” but a person who commits any one of thousands of other non-SEX related crimes does not. Frankly, I think that a person who shoots someone else with a gun needs quite a lot more “treatment” than a person who looks at bad pictures, just to give one simple example of thousands.