Sex Offender Registries Don’t Keep Kids Safe, But Politicians Keep Expanding Them Anyway
Lawmakers are using “stranger danger” myths to keep almost a million Americans out of work and on the verge of homelessness.
Following are some excerpts from a GREAT article in the Huffington Post
Winters is a member of an expanding and invisible American underclass. In 1994, when Congress passed the first sex offender registration law, the list was reserved for law enforcement officials and only applied to the most serious offenders. Since then, American lawmakers at every level have relentlessly increased its scope and severity.
The registry now includes more than 900,000 people, a population slightly greater than Vermont’s. At least 12 states require sex offender registration for public urination; five apply it to people charged with offenses related to sex work; 29 require it for consensual sex between teenagers. According to Human Rights Watch, people have been forced to spend decades on the registry for crimes they committed as young as 10 years old.
The conditions imposed on registered sex offenders have become significantly more draconian over time. More than 30 states now require registrants to live at least 1,000 feet away from schools, churches and other places children congregate — a requirement that renders up to 99% of homes and apartment buildings off-limits. Some states require registered offenders to submit to regular polygraph tests and random police inspections. Florida adds “sexual predator” to the front of registrants’ driver’s licenses. Louisiana doesn’t allow sex offenders to evacuate from their own homes before natural disasters.
What explains these relentlessly tightening restrictions, Levenson said, is the domino effect that happens every time a city or state strengthens their registration laws. Politicians in neighboring jurisdictions, fearing an influx of offenders, feel they have no choice but to tighten their own. In April, Tennessee passed a new law restricting sex offenders from being alone with their own children, a direct response to a similar provision in Alabama.
Despite child sexual abuse declining by 60% between 1992 and 2010, states continue to legislate as if lenient sex offender laws are a national emergency.
While the criteria for sex offender registries vary widely between states, they are all based on the same two false assumptions: that sex offenders are uniquely likely to reoffend, and that notifying their employers, landlords and neighbors of their status will make that outcome less likely.
The first assumption is based on the “stranger danger” myth — that serial predators commit most offenses against children. In reality, strangers carry out only 7% of these crimes. Statistically speaking, the greatest risks to children are their parents, other children and authority figures they know and trust.
Researchers consistently find that sex offenders are in fact less likely to reoffend than other criminals. A study of nearly 1,800 sex offenders across four states found that only 10% reoffended in the decade after their release from prison — far lower than the 83% recidivism rate for parolees convicted of other crimes.
Not only are registered sex offenders relatively unlikely to reoffend, but the registries themselves appear to have no effect whatsoever on recidivism rates. Numerous studies have found that enacting sex offender registries doesn’t reduce the rate of sex crimes and that states don’t see a drop in the number of abuse victims after enacting harsher requirements.
One of the most common restrictions on registered sex offenders is the “buffer zone” preventing them from living or working near schools, parks or playgrounds. While these restrictions may seem like an obvious safety measure, they too appear to have no effect on abuse or recidivism rates. An analysis of 224 crimes committed by known offenders in Minnesota found that residential restrictions would not have prevented even one. Another study in New Jersey found that just 4.4% of offenders met their victims in the types of public, children-oriented spaces the registry restricts.
The rest of the country’s registrants face similar challenges. A 2014 survey of sex offenders five years after their release from prison found that 36% had never found employment. Another, in 2013, found that Florida registrants in counties with larger buffer zones around schools were more likely to be homeless. Numerous studies have found that being out of work and living on the streets significantly increase the risk of recidivism.
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Boo, I have neither a Twitter nor a Facebook account. It appears that we have to use one to sign up to that site in order to post?
Make a list from top to bottom, if the things that injure, mame and kill our kids. Sex Offender will be at the bottom.
Now add up the total number of kids injured, maimed and killed by the United States Military, during this short Century.
I feel the real issue lies at the foot of the door. Stop electing these people to office. These people need to be confronted when they get in front of the press an town halls. Asking them where the jobs,education and vocations at Instead of building prisons build schools, and training centers. I wish I could stand in front of the crowd and demand answers from those politicans why they have to grandstand on sex offenders while other violent crimes continue to grow. Where are the laws restricting them from schools and parks. After all, where is their public out when innocent kids get turn on to drugs and easy money?
” Stop electing these people to office”
Easy to say but takes a hell of a lot of work to run political campaigns. You more organize all SO’s and their supporters in the relevant districts. Communicate with them. Canvas them to know what they think. Get them out to the polls on election day.
Are you the man to do it?
@ gauloise, Thank you for your interest in my reply. You suggested am I “the man to do it.” No I longer wish to organize such events because I know from past experience.I would be left alone in the wind.. I did something like that while I was in prison and a handful of us ex prisoners were sent to confinement and transfer to other prison. because prison officals made fried chicken to quell the peaceful riot. So I learn my fellow prisoners can be brought off with a 50 cent piece of chicken while I and few others were punished for speaking out against an inmates’ death.
Now from reading you awesome advice and replies you have been given to these threads. This seem something you would be good at. I know I am not the man to do what you suggested. Well how about you? Can you do what you suggested for others? I like to asked your question back at you. I gave you my replied to your question. It would be fair that you answer your own question. right? “Are you the man to do it?” I looked forward to your reply Respectfully
Apparently, the judge for Epstein’s case thinks that recidivism increases with age. Where did he that from??
Maybe since most people on the registry are not real predators, like what it was meant to be set up for, this is why actual recidivism rates for that group is very low. Some of those crimes were actually made up, and many of those individuals do not belong on there at all (if there needs to be a registry at all). It’s just not likely that someone who has never been a predator, will suddenly become one.
Maybe the recidivism rates they are looking at or talking about apply to only individuals like Jeffrey Epstein, and all those other individuals, in high places, that have been accused of preying on and sexually abusing women. Then they pay their way out of it. So, there may very well be a group that this does apply to. There should be different research done for the different types.
The problem is that they are lumping everybody together. We have individuals on there who are not even close to being predators, and everybody on the registry gets treated like they are just like Epstein and R Kelly.
In other news, water is still wet, the sky is blue, and the Earth’s gravity keeps pulling things to the ground…
That was a great article in the Huffington Post..I, fall into the unemployable category, a sex offender doctor that no one will employ…I would be willing to be a volunteer, but, if someone had a pre-done email list of all of the email addresses of our lawmakers in Florida, I would be willing to forward this article to everyone of them and future articles that they may sooner or later ‘get the point’ and maybe one of them will initiate a change…
Dave – please reach out to [email protected]
She might have that list.
Hey Dr. Dave, unemployed fracture Management specialist. Surg tech for UF. No more…
When I introduce myself for registration… ” … Think of me as 2.8 million dollars if lost wages”, willing to add every one to the lawsuit. After twenty years, no one knows my name, or what I’ve done. They are proud of their ignorance.
I just sent the link to the HuffPost article to my local PBS TV news station. Please, let’s all of us do the same!
(I will also send this link to the network stations here as well.)
I am out of town today, but when I am back home tomorrow, I will take care of sending the link to the article to the TV stations and local/state politicians in the Duval/Clay area, plus the Florida Times-Union newspaper published in Jacksonville.
Will the three major networks (ABC, NBC, CBS) automatically be aware of this article?
I think the question you might ask is this:
Will the three major networks think this article sensational enough to remark on it in any way?
We should all be posting comments on the article supporting the writer and his conclusions. If we don’t think it sensational enough to remark on it, we can’t expect others to.
If I could figure out how to post comments on the article, I would. Instead I scroll below it endlessly seeing ads and clickbait.
on the left margin there’s an icon that looks like a cartoon bubble. Click that.