Have Sex Offender Laws Gone Too Far?

[Agschmid]

Our draconian policies about sex offenses reflect our ignorance of them.

On Oct. 22, 1989, 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped while biking home from a convenience store. A masked gunman approached him, his brother, and a friend, and ordered the three boys off their bikes. After demanding to know their ages, he ordered Jacob’s brother and the friend to run into some nearby woods and threatened to shoot them if they looked back. The boys ran. By the time they turned around to see what had happened to Jacob, he was gone. Nearly 25 years later, Jacob remains missing, and the identity of his kidnapper is unknown.

“I was a stay-at-home mom,” Patty Wetterling, Jacob’s mother, recalled over the phone last month. “I knew a lot about parenting, but I knew nothing about sexual abuse of children.” Determined to educate herself, Wetterling became “a sponge, trying to learn anything about this problem.” Soon, one thing stood out: Minnesota, where Jacob had been kidnapped, did not have a database that might help the police identify a list of potential suspects. Other states, such as California, had been keeping sex offender registries for decades. Wetterling also learned that Congress had never tried to craft a national approach to sex offender registration. She was determined to change that.

-snip-

The upshot, experts say, is that the United States has the most draconian sex registration laws in the world. As a result, the number of registrants across the nation has swelled—doubling and then doubling again to 750,000—in the two decades since Jacob’s Law passed, according to data collected by the Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Is the American approach to sex registration working? Who goes on the registries, for how long, and for what kinds of crimes? Do the answers suggest that they are helping to keep kids safe—or sweeping in too many people and stoking irrational fears?

Full Article on Slate.

[LittleBlue]

1. Uh oh

[Agschmid]

2. Well I think it's a valid question, I won't pretend I know the answer...

But this article seems to suggest one.

[chervilant]

3. Final straw...

Trash and IL. Bleh.

[Agschmid]

4. Good lord...

If this gets me on your ignore list you've lost it.

[Jake Stern]

5. There should be guidelines to Sex Offender Registries.

They are a valuable public safety tool BUT it can be taken way too far. Working at an adult bookstore or getting caught peeing behind a dumpster at 2AM or an 18 year old sleeping with his 16 year old girlfriend shouldn't land someone on a sex offender registry.

[nomorenomore08]

6. The standards for getting on the list should be stricter, and more specific.

That much I can certainly agree with.

[davidpdx]

7. Some very interesting questions as to the effectiveness of sex offender laws

In seeking answers to those questions, over the last several months, we were surprised to find that one of the sharpest—and loudest—critics of the ballooning use of registries is Patty Wetterling. “These registries were a well-intentioned tool to help law enforcement find children more quickly,” she told us. “But the world has changed since then.” What’s changed, Wetterling says, is what science can tell us about the nature of sex offenders.

The logic behind the past push for registries rested on what seem like common sense assumptions. Among the most prominent were, first, sex offenders were believed to be at a high risk for reoffending—once a sex offender, always a sex offender. Second, it was thought that sex offenses against children were commonly committed by strangers. Taken together, the point was that if the police had a list, and the public could access it, children would be safer.

The problem, however, is that a mass of empirical research conducted since the passage of Jacob’s Law has cast increasing doubt on all of those premises. For starters, “the assumption that sex offenders are at high risk of recidivism has always been false and continues to be false,” said Melissa Hamilton, an expert at the University of Houston Law Center, pointing to multiple studies over the years. “It’s a myth.”

Remarkably, while polls show the public thinks a majority, if not most, sex offenders will commit multiple sex crimes, most studies, including one by the Department of Justice, place the sexual recidivism rate between 3 and 14 percent in the several years immediately following release, with those numbers falling further over time. Which number experts prefer within that range depends on how they define recidivism. If you count arrests as well as convictions, for example, the rate is higher, because not all arrests lead to convictions. And if you distinguish among sex offenders based on risk factors, such as offender age, degree of sexual deviance, criminal history, and victim preferences—instead of looking at them as a homogenous group—you may find a higher or lower rate. Rapists and pedophiles who molest boys, for example, are generally found to have the highest recidivism rates. Nevertheless, the bottom line is clear: Recidivism rates are lower than commonly believed.

And in contradiction of the drive to crack down after a random act of sexual violence committed by a stranger, the data also shows that the vast majority of sex offenses are committed by someone known to the victim, such as a family member. In the case of child victims, that number climbs closer to 93 percent. In other words, Jacob’s case and others like it were terrible exceptions, not the norm. And yet, “It’s become a part of our culture that there are predators waiting around corners,” Hamilton said.