Children on Sex Offender Registries

From: Center of Public Integrity http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/05/01/12594/report-details-lives-ruined-children-put-sex-offender-registries

Report details lives ruined for children put on sex-offender registries

Nudity, streaking, petting, not just rape, have led to youths put on sex-offender registries

Put on a sex registry for the offense of public nudity as a minor. Harassed by neighbors out of a home and banned from a homeless shelter because of an offense committed at age 15.
The New York-based research group Human Rights Watch issued an extensive report today on the life-shattering consequences of putting minors on sex registries for offenses — sometimes shockingly mild offenses — for the rest of their lives.
Filled with devastating stories of teens and young adults unable to put offenses behind them, the rights group's report is called “Raised on the Register: The Irreparable Harm of Placing Children on Sex Offender Registries in the U.S.”
The report is the product of a 16-month investigation into 581 cases and interviews with 281 sex offenders — median age 15 — in 20 states.  Prosecutors, defense attorneys, child sexuality experts and victims of “child on child” sexual assault were also interviewed.  The investigation explores how a burgeoning national web of laws in various states requiring constant registration and public disclosure of offenders’ identities has affected the lives of young offenders long after time served or rehabilitation. Some on registries have killed themselves, even before reaching adulthood.
The report begins with Jacob C., who was 11 years old when convicted of one count of sexual misconduct in Michigan for touching, not penetrating, his sister’s genitals. He was not allowed to live in a home with other children, was eventually put into foster care and was placed on a sex registry that was made public when he turned 18.  He struggled to graduate from high school, and was shunned because of his registration status. And when he enrolled in college, he said, campus police followed him everywhere. He dropped out.
Now 26, the report says, Jacob’s life continues to be defined and limited by a conviction at age 11.
Another case in the report: “In 2004, in Western Pennsylvania, a 15-year-old girl was charged with manufacturing and disseminating child pornography for having taken nude photos of herself and (posting) them on the internet. She was charged as an adult, and as of 2012 was facing registration for life.”
Sex offender laws, the report says, “that trigger registration requirements for children began proliferating in the United States during the late 1980s and early 1990s. They subject youth offenders to registration for crimes ranging from public nudity and touching another child’s genitalia over clothing to very serious violent crimes like rape.”
Registries can also include “people who have committed offenses like public urination, indecent exposure (such as streaking across a college campus), and other more relatively innocuous offenses.”
The Human Rights Watch report acknowledged that registration laws were designed to protect the public from offenders, and that they are based on assumptions that offenders are likely to violate again.
“But including youth sex offenders on registries assumes that they are highly likely to reoffend, which is not the case,” the report says. “Numerous studies estimate the recidivism rate among children who commit sexual offenses to between 4 and 10 percent, compared with a 13 percent rate for adult sex offenders and a national rate of 45 percent for all crimes.”
The report was prepared by Nicole Pittman, a national expert on the application of sex offender registration laws who was an attorney at the Defender Association of Philadelphia. She specialized in child sexual assault cases and registries, and has provided testimony to Congress and state legislatures on the subject.
The report calls current registry laws “an overbroad policy of questionable effectiveness” that leaves the public often unable to discern who on a registry is actually dangerous.

Sex Offender Residency Restrictions Serve No Purpose

From: Golden State University Law Review

http://ggulawreview.org/2013/10/29/sex-offender-residency-restrictions-serve-no-purpose/

Sex Offender Residency Restrictions Serve No Purpose

OCTOBER 29, 2013 BY STEPHEN BUTTS 0 COMMENTS

Under Jessica’s Law, sex offenders in San Francisco are barred from residing within two thousand feet of any school or park where children regularly gather.  Due to San Francisco’s limited size and dense population, it is nearly impossible to find housing outside of this restricted zone.  Consequently, the number of homeless sex offenders living in San Francisco has surged since the implementation of the restriction.  This unintended consequence has led to multiple challenges to the restriction’s constitutionality and effectiveness.

The residency restriction is just one of many sex offender management strategies.  Electronic monitoring, public registration, and community notification provisions have also been implemented through Jessica’s Law and Megan’s Law. In addition to residency restrictions, Jessica’s Law requires sexual offenders to wear Global Positioning System (GPS) electronic monitoring devices.  Under Megan’s Law, sex offenders’ pictures, names, and addresses are made available to the public through a searchable website.  The general purpose of both of these laws is to protect society from the threat of further victimization posed by sex offenders.

Society can be protected either by diminishing the threat posed by sex offenders, or by enacting protections to neutralize the threat even though it still exists.  Sex offender rehabilitation diminishes the threat by reducing sexual recidivism, while GPS tracking and community notification neutralize the threat without diminishing it.  Using GPS electronic monitoring devices, parole agents protect the public by closely supervising sex offenders’ whereabouts.  Community notification allows the public to protect itself through awareness.  By knowing the residences of sex offenders, people are able to move if necessary.

In terms of the residency restriction, though, the text of Jessica’s Law does not specifically discuss how it will protect the public.  This is because the restriction serves no purpose.  It neither neutralizes the threat posed by sex offenders nor diminishes it, which makes it ineffective and unnecessary.

To begin with, the underlying premise of the residency restriction is flawed.  Very few sex offenders find their victims by frequenting schools or parks because most child molesters choose victims who are familiar to them.  Ninety percent of child victims know their offenders, with approximately fifty percent of the offenders being family members.  Since there is little threat of children being snatched from schools or playgrounds, there is little need to keep sex offenders from living within two thousand feet of them.  Even if there is a threat, the residency restriction still does not prevent sex offenders from travelling inside the two thousand foot restricted zone and sitting across the street from a school or park.

Instead of a residency restriction, which does not prevent access to children, GPS tracking can be relied upon to ensure sex offenders do not travel too closely to a school or park.  Monitoring the whereabouts of sex offenders is more difficult if those offenders are homeless.  Extra rules can be placed upon sex offenders with residences, such as the requirement that offenders be in their homes during certain hours of the night.  Such a restriction would be enforced using GPS tracking.  If GPS tracking is as effective as proponents claim, it can be used without the residency restrictions of Jessica’s Law.

Furthermore, it is necessary to remove the residency restriction because of its detrimental impact on the effectiveness of Megan’s Law.  Megan’s Law is designed to protect society through awareness of sex offenders’ whereabouts, but the residency restriction actually prevents the public from having this awareness and protecting itself.  It is difficult to find a list of transient sex offenders on the Megan’s Law searchable website.  Without a residence, their address information is not available on the website.  Searches by address, city, or zip code only show sex offenders for whom complete address information is available, which means transient sex offenders are not included.  Unfortunately, it is not apparent that a search by county is required to have transient offenders populate the list.  The public must either know to search by county or know the offender’s name.  Then, only the transient sex offender’s name, picture, and county are shown.  Without awareness of sex offenders’ whereabouts, the public will be uncertain if relocation is necessary.

Finally, the residency restriction provision has a negative impact on sex offender rehabilitation.  Lack of housing may be linked to problems with employment and support, but its most detrimental effect is on mental health treatment.  Since sex offenders will always have access to children, the threat they pose must be reduced through treatment, which focuses on preventing a relapse of sexual offending.  Transient sex offenders are more difficult to treat than those with permanent housing.  This idea is supported by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which theorizes that basic human needs like shelter must be met before people can focus on self-improvement.  Therefore, transient sex offenders will have trouble working on relapse prevention when their focus is on where to sleep each night.  Lack of treatment effectiveness prevents a reduction in the risk of sexual recidivism, which prevents the threat posed by sex offenders from being diminished.

Despite these issues, proponents of Jessica’s Law and Megan’s Law have argued that sexual recidivism has decreased and, therefore, the laws have been successful.  However, studies of the rates of sexual reoffending have produced varied findings.  Scholars even disagree about how to measure sexual recidivism.  Even if it can be proven that these laws cause a reduction in sexual reoffending, it is unclear how each of the laws’ provisions factor into the decrease.  Thus far, there have been no studies that conclusively support the claim that residency restrictions reduce sexual recidivism.

All things considered, the two thousand foot residency requirement serves no purpose.  In fact, it is detrimental to the effectiveness of Megan’s Law and the other provisions in Jessica’s Law.  The residency restriction must be repealed so that sex offenders can obtain permanent housing.  GPS electronic monitoring will ensure that sex offenders do not access schools and parks, while sex offender mental health treatment will reduce their threat to society.

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Another Sign of Our Own Cowardice

From: From The Editor, http://fromtheeditr.blogspot.com/2012/05/sex-offender-laws-another-sign-of-our.html

Sex Offender Laws: Another Sign of Our Own Cowardice

The NYTimes this morning has yet another sterling example of what a nation of irresponsible, hovering cowards we are becoming.

In its story about crackdowns on sex offenders across the nation, we are told that localities are passing "feel good" ordinances that remove citizenship rights from people convicted of crimes as serious as peeing in a park 25 years ago. That is a sex crime by definition ("public exposure"), it never goes away, and our citizens want to throw these pervs in the clank and toss away the key. Since the Constitution won't allow that, we simply forbid them to drop off their kids at school or take them to Little League games, fish from the local pier, go to the library or even work in some communities.

"Sex crime" is a broad term, so broad in fact that it is often misleading and sometimes a bald-assed lie. Localities have acted with a little more sense in stripping the rights from people who have already paid society for their crimes, but others haven't. Those localities equate a love affair between a 17-year-old and a 16-year-old that includes sex (and my guess is a hell of a lot of them do) with raping a three-year-old. "Sex crime." It's not pretty, even when it is.

Love between consenting teenagers is often a highlight of sweet emotion for many of us. But these paranoid parents who want the government to watch their kids, taking the potential blame burden from them, make me ill. If you take your kids to the park or the pool and don't watch them, whose fault is it if something bad happens?

According to investigative reporter Diane Diamond, "The sexual abuse of kids doesn’t usually come from outside their circle and murder is extremely rare ... Most often the perpetrator is a relative, a family friend or a trusted authority figure," and not likely a guy relieving himself on an oak tree in the park after his second beer at a company picnic or a woman who is sunbathing nude in her backyard.

So much of what is provocative and even "porn" is a matter of personal belief. I once had a woman give me a wonderful painting (on an animal skin) of a native Colombian, smoking a pipe and posing bare-breasted--which is how she lived her life--because it was "pornography." The only pornographic element was the attitude of the woman who gave me the painting.  She'd love these new sex crime laws.

Overzealous state legislators introduced more than 1,500 bills dealing with sex offenses during a recent year and 275 were passed. We're not even going into local ordinances here because the numbers aren't available. But they must be huge.


No wonder al-Qaeda laughs at us when all it has to do is threaten in order to send us into a blind, irrational panic and change a nation of eagles into one of chickens.

Constant Suspicion

From: Technically That's Illegal, http://technicallythatsillegal.com/tag/sex-offender-registry/

Constant Suspicion

One of the points I like to make on this blog and in public talks is that our societal impetus to create laws for everything has actually led to more paranoia instead of the safety that we covet. Unfortunately, people are no safer with the accumulation of more laws, we just think we are safer and that all accidents can be prevented.  Along with that is the constant paranoia that happens when we see something slightly suspicious or dangerous.
Today’s example of that is a man who was forced out of a Barnes and Noble store because he was committing the horrible crime of shopping in the children’s section.

Omar Amin, 73, said store worker Todd Voris told him that a female shopper had complained about him being in the children’s area May 4 in the store at Shea Boulevard and Loop 101 in Scottsdale.
Amin, who was alone at the time, said he was in Barnes & Noble to buy books for his two grandchildren who live in Wisconsin.
“Men alone cannot be by themselves in the children’s area,” Amin said he was told, adding that Voris said other bookstores had encountered problems with child molesters.

Being a man while shopping for kids’ books isn’t, technically, a crime.  But, it is somehow suspicious enough for someone to complain to management?  And somehow the management agreed that this was suspicious enough to ask him to leave?
We should keep our kids safe, no doubt.  We should do so by teaching them the difference between normal and abnormal human interaction with people you don’t know.  Evidently, the woman who complained has never been taught the difference because I think encountering a person browsing books would fall under the “normal” category.  Did this man attempt to lure kids into a secluded area of the store (a restroom or something) with the book?  No.  Did this man touch any children in any way?  No.  Did this man even speak to a child?  No.
I’m tired of all of this paranoia in society.  Personally, I would find it refreshing to see a man in a children’s section of a book store.  Similarly, I would find it refreshing if men started teaching elementary school from time to time.  Our kids need adult interaction from men and women.  But, some people will always be against this because they see every man as a potential molester even though the news is riddled with stories of female teachers having inappropriate relationships with male students.  I’m tired of it.  I’m tired of our society giving up our freedoms for some nebulous feeling of safety.  It has to stop before we’re all suspects.