Florida Action Committee (FAC)

OSCEOLA COUNTY, Fla. – Detectives with the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office recently conducted checks on the hundreds of sex offenders and predators in the county and found dozens of them are still breaking the law. When members of the sex offender and predator unit checked up on all 550 offenders and predators living in Osceola County, they didn’t just check

Although Cuomo’s proposal purports to take sexual violence seriously, it aggressively ignores reality in favor of lazy solutions. Data from the U.S. Department of Justice indicates that most people who are held accountable for a sex offense aren’t rearrested for another sex offense. Research indicates that more than 95 percent of all arrests for sex crimes involve someone without a prior sex crime conviction. Data involving arrests of people with prior sex offense convictions specifically involving social media and other online platforms is limited, but a 2009 study examining trends in arrests for sex crimes against minors between 2000 and 2006 found that 96 percent involved someone not on a registry. And a 2016 article appearing in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law observed that “to our knowledge, no data have yet demonstrated that banning sex offenders from the Internet or [social media platforms] actually reduces recidivism rates.” Similarly, buried in the middle of BuzzFeed’s reporting was the fact that—of the cases of sexual violence facilitated by online platforms—“only a fraction” involved someone on a sex offense registry.

In other words, even assuming that everyone with a prior conviction is banished from the digital landscape (and assuming that those who are determined to commit a crime don’t simply lie about their presence), the reality is that the vast majority of sexual violence remains unaffected.

Savor Cinema of Ft. Lauderdale, the location for our community event “A Courageous Conversation About Sex Offenders in Our Communities” has graciously agreed to co-host the event, alongside the Florida Action Committee and the Broward County Criminal Justice Reentry Task Force’s Sex Offender Housing Subcommittee. The event is scheduled for January 27, 2020 at 6:00PM and will take place at

It is understandable and necessary to protect children and the vulnerable, but the data show that our lawmakers, our justice system is failing badly but still moving at lightning speed to permanently punish and lock up anyone whose sexual interest is determined to be abnormal. For many in law enforcement, the intention was to protect children, but our ignorance of

In 2015, the Sacramento Bee wrote that many sex offenders were being killed in California prisons. According to the Associated Press, Male sex offenders made up about 15 percent of the prison population but accounted for nearly 30 percent of homicide victims. Now we have greater insight into how that is able to happen. Five years later the same paper