NY: Sex offender risk assessments said to have little predictive value

Convicted sex offenders under New York law must have their risk of reoffense assessed by courts under the Sex Offender Registration Act (“SORA” or “Megan’s Law”) with courts determining whether offenders are at low, moderate or high risk to re-offend. The rankings not only determine the length and intrusiveness of sex offender registration and community notification, which often last for

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MN: Third COVID death at Moose Lake Civil Commitment Center

Minnesota’s Civil Commitment center at Moose Lake, where certain persons required to register as sex offenders are indefinitely detained for “treatment” after the expiration of their sentence, reported their third death from COVID-19. Two other “clients” died last month. The Moose Lake facility was featured by the PBS News Hour in a 2016 feature entitled, “Inside Minnesota’s sex offender facility,

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Taiwan: Civil Commitment “Mostly Constitutional”

Taiwan’s Constitutional Court on Thursday declared that current laws allowing convicted sex offenders to be held in a designated facility for therapy after completing their sentence are “mostly constitutional.” However, the court ruled it “unconstitutional” that the laws do not give convicted sex offenders a chance to express their opinion before making them undergo inpatient treatment after completing their prison

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How Thousands of American Laws Keep People ‘Imprisoned’ Long After They’re Released

From Politico Across the country, people with felony convictions face a daunting web of small obstacles to rebuilding normal lives. What will it take to fix? Nationwide, 45,000 “collateral consequences” regulate the lives of people with criminal records, dictating where they may work, with whom they may live and how they may spend their time, according to a database of

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