Sex Offender Registery Underutilized? Or Underuseful?
Dean
Gallup notes, with some apparent dismay, that very few citizens make use of the "sex offender" registries available in most states.
Here's one reason why the registries might be underutilized: they are so broad and vague that they are not useful.
I have consulted the registry for my area. Tens of thousands of people live here, and about 70 of them are registered sex offenders. It probably amounts to less than 3/10ths of 1%--but that's still 68 or 69 more names than I know what to do with.
Worse, the descriptions of their crimes are so vague as to be almost meaningless. They were mostly men of course--we don't like convicting women of these types of crime--but based on the descriptions I have almost no idea what most of these people did.
A person living five blocks from me was convicted of a "class III sexual assault" back in 1992. What exactly is that? And what were the circumstances? Was this someone who got drunk and got too aggressive with a date 13 years ago, and then mouthed off to a cop? Or was it a brutal monster who raped a 17 year old? Or was it a 23 year old college kid who copped a plea because he didn't know his date was only 15?
I have no idea, and this registry doesn't help.
I know a guy who 25 years ago, when he was 18, intended to force someone to have sex with him, got scared and ran away, and immediately confessed to what he had intended to do when the cops caught him. It's been twenty-five years, his record has been spotless since then, and he's still a registered sex offender.
Why? What's the point? Who is this helping?
Furthermore, why are there no "registered dangerous driver" or "registered violent offender" categories? As a parent, should I be more worried about 1) the lady down the street with a 15 year old record for "class II sexual misdemeanor" or 2) the lady next door to her with 8 drunk driving arrests and a couple of narcotics possession charges? Well guess what? "Megan's law" will tell me about #1, and nothing about #2 at all.
Again: Why? Who is this helping?
Criminal convictions are matters of public record. As a matter of principle, I don't have a problem with making information of convictions a public record. But the records actually have to contain enough information--and ways to weed out irrelevant information--before they are in the least bit useful. Right now, they just aren't. "Megan's Law" turns out to be "a well-intentioned folly done in the name of Megan."
Related Posts (on one page):
- Sex Crimes and Kids
- Sexual Offender Registries
- More On The Modern Scarlet Letter
- The Unseen Side of "Sexual Offender" Registries
- The Modern Scarlet Letter
- Sex Offender Registery Underutilized? Or Underuseful?
Maybe it's just my general lack of sympathy for those legislators, bureaucrats, and their assorted myrmidons who would micromanage our lives, but when I hear of a sex offender registry, my initial expectation is that it probably contains all too many cases of that magnitude.
Makes me absolutely furious!
No doubt Steven Malcolm Anderson will be along eventually, to say it better than I can. Sheesh, and here I'm not even the sort of person that anyone would ever mistake for a libertarian...
I checked my area, and in our town, with 40,000 people or thereabouts, there are 74 sex offenders - about 30 of them live within two miles of my house. I'm not sure if that is because this is a prison town or what.
Yours,
Wince
I just wish the age of the victims were listed. I don't care so much if the girl is 15, you know? But I really care if the guy is going after pre-pubescent children. That's an entirely different level, and I think the intention of the list was to help parents protect their prepubescent children in the 1st place.
SMA undoubtedly hasn't seen this post yet, so let me give you my heated but admittedly substitute reply to all this hype and tripe about sex offender registries.
I see this stuff as a fundamental violation of the United States Constitution which is supposed to ban cruel and unusual punishment. The information you referenced, about a boy who just turned 18 having sex with his girlfriend, you was still 17, and him winding up on a sex permanent sex offender bulleting board, is a prime example.
What happens if they ever try to sort this stuff out where a couple of young teen age kids have their roll in the sack? Do they both get branded for life? What happens if they marry each other?
The longer I live, the less I like of the idea that one rule fits all contingencies. Because that then becomes a substitute for common sense.
Are there real heavy duty serial sex offenders? Of course there are. But what they do should simply be treated as felonies or misdemeanors, depending on the nature of their violation, and be subjected to the judicial system, and if necessary, the corrections system, accordingly. A criminal record does not need an auxiliary publicly-accessible register with which to hound these people to death for the rest of their lives.
I hope this makes sense to you.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I always thought the registers were established from fear of child molesters, based on the idea that recidivism was particularly high. I can't say I'm surprised that the "solution" greatly exceeds the scope of the problem. Nor would I be surprised to find out the actual problem was misrepresented.
This is a far cry from the average "sex offender," but of course the registries don't reflect that at all.
"International studies indicate a recidivism rate for pedophiles of 40-50 percent, as opposed to only 22 percent for all sexual offenders (Egg 2001). The probability is much higher for those attracted to boys, as compared to those attracted to girls."
For that matter, what fraction of people convicted of manslaughter have prior convictions for manslaughter? And does the question of whether we should deliberately tell everyone in the neighborhood "So-and-so just moving in to such-and-such address killed someone" depend on the answer to the last question?
Sorry, but my own position on this is firm. If you think molesting a child is a crime deserving a life sentence, then impose a life sentence. If you think people deserve to know when there are convicted child molesters in their neighborhood, do me the courtesy of simultaneously releasing all the names, addresses, and offenses of everyone convicted of anything in my neighborhood. It might be helpful, and it would certainly be entertaining.
But unfortunately the registries are also of questionable accuracy. For example, the list of offenders in Maryland contains the name of an individual who claims he works at the same educational insitution where I work. We've gotten inquiries from people who've seen the list and are concerned about this. In reality he's never worked there in any capacity, ever. However, he has made a nuisance of himself there, and because of his behavior he was asked to leave and never return. Maybe using our address was a crude form of revenge.
I've been told that our HR department has repeatedly attempted to get this corrected, with no success. I suspect that his home address and other information are also false. And, given the apparent reluctance of the system to fix a known problem, I imagine that there's a lot of other similar problems that aren't being corrected.
Second of all, however, is the more fundamental question of whether any such lists or records of a person's past crimes should be kept at all. My philosophy on crime and punishment is: I'm a hard-line retributionist. You do the crime, you do the time. If you're sentenced to 20 years, you serve 20 years, no less and no more, or as G. K. Chesterton put it: "Beat the man about with a great stick and then let him go free forever."
Referring to a case of a friend who was denied a license to sell flowers because he had once in his life been in prison for theft, G. K. C. writes:
"The modern philosophers say that they do not like the idea of everlasting punishment in the other world. Let them rest content. They have created everlating punishment in this world....
"....In reading the old records of religious communities, even the most ferocious such as New England or the Presbyterian Government of West Scotland in Burns's time, we always have a feeling that sin was punished and wiped out, savagely punished, perhaps, but also savagely understood; regarded as a thing that a man might do and that a man might recover from doing. It will be a terrible thing in the modern world if the making of punishment mild only means making it eternal. To be in hot hell for ever is bad enough; to be in tepid hell for ever and to be asked to admit the humane temperature -- that is intolerable."
-G. K. Chesterton, "The Perpetuation of Punishment", Lunacy and Letters
G K Chesterton, whom I estimate must have had a mind that made up much of his alleged 300 pounds of body weight, was one of the most brilliant and productive essayists of recent western civilization. (I find myself wondering how many more of his great essays he might have produced had he lived in the age of computerized word processing, but that's another argument for another day.) Humankind was robbed the day he died in 1936.
Even for unbelievers, Chesterton's wit and persuasiveness is enough almost to convert one to catholicism. So guard your paganism well, as you dig through the products of his mind.
You probably know, but most readers would not, that he was schooled not in letters but in art.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
That is precisely the Chesterton essay I can't get out of my mind whenever this question comes up. This business of making sure that a man's past follows him in perpetuity, this insistence on treating someone once fallen as forever marked as such . . . say anything you like about Catholicism, but at the least it never fell into that abominable trap, where practically every other system of belief in human history has.
Anyway, I also thought that the new pope, Benedict, deserves a break in what is admittedly an overwhelming pastoral mission. Seems to me a lot of folks are treating him like shit just because he's German. Even if they won't admit that.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Thank you!!!! And I feel the same way about you, too. And I wish I could write half or one-tenth as well as G.K.C..
I support Pope Benedict XVI. He may be a German, but he's a Catholic German, which is quite different from a Prussian. I trust that he will do his best to conserve the historic doctrines of the Catholic faith. As a "pagan", I support that. My Polytheism includes the G-d of Israel, and the Holy Trinity of historic (Athanasian) Christianity, the Holy Quaternity (the Holy Trinity + the Queen of Heaven) of which C. J. Jung wrote. And the deepest "pagans" today, in the original (etymological) sense of the word, are the deepest Christians and Jews.
You are correct SMA has a great mind with a brain that has a five gear stick shift with turbo engine. That is a compliment SMA.
Another blogger on another site once told me I was beyond repair (in language skills). I don't care, I'm an old buzzard and I can say what I wish.
Now getting back to Benedict XVI. Every word out this gentleman's mouth or on paper will be subject to every sort of vilification, hatred, scorn and derision from the ignor-a-masses in media land and the blogosphere more often than not from the faithful anti-church churchly political crowd.
Perhaps that might be why B 16 prayed before entering the Conclave not to be chosen as the Supreme Pontiff.
Everyone has their cross to bear, Arnold. Even yourself. I know I have mine.
Once upon a time there was a zen master who took his new american student out of the zendo. The zen master bowed at every opportunity especially at large trees. The student asked him why. The student said, I don't bow at trees, I spit.
The zen master bowed to the student and replied,
"Okay, You spit, I bow"
Peace
Thank you, too!!!! I say your language skills are terrific, and it's great to see you back here in Dean's World. We've missed you.
If I sound a trifle bitter it is because I am the guy Dean knows. When this law was passed in my state and first enforced my family and I were driven from our home as a result.
The hard part for me is that I understand the motivation behind these laws- I have children of my own. But as Dean said, they are so broad in scope as to be meaningless in most cases, and they generally serve no purpose but to punish in perpetuity.
I was 11 years past my sentence when my state passed its version of Megan's Law- the state made it retroactive, in clear violation of state and federal prohibitions against ex-post-facto law. But everybody hates sex offenders, so the courts allowed the argument that the law did not constitute punishment, rather it was merely a public saftey measure.
My wife knew of my past and knew that I was very much a changed man from when I was 18. We met when I was 19 and she hadn't liked me very much, and for good reason. But she saw me change over the years and one thing led to another and we married 6 years later. My record caused some problems (it's pretty hard to get a job with a violent felony on your record), but all-in-all life was good.
When that law was passed we were nearly forced to separate just to protect our children.
So yes, I'm bitter over it, but I live with it because I have to. I just wish my family didn't have to. To be honest, had I known such a thing might happen, I probably would not have married. I wouldn't deliberately put people I love through something like this. For that matter, were it only myself involved I'd probably not be half as disturbed about it as I am now. I can put up with anything except people messing with my family.
Re-reading this comment it sounds alot like whining and that's definitely not what I wanted to do. The law exists. I'm not required to like it, just to obey it, but it is hard to live each day and watch the news fearing that some heinous crime will be committed and whip the lawmakers into a new frenzy of "tougher on crime" such as what's happened down in Florida lately. It shames me to feel concern for my situation when others are suffering the loss of loved ones- that may be the cruellest cut of all.
To the extent that I identify with victims, which is narrow and rare, I do so most strongly
with victims of what has been referred to as the unintended consequences of the US legal and judicial systems. Because it is all to easy to become such a victim almost without knowing it.
I only wish I could write as well as G K Chesterton, whom we have been dwelling on at some length here. I thought his observation fit not only the plight of a now unknown flower seller but also of people like you, all of whom have been branded for life, condemned to live in a tepid hell and to thank their particular devils for the "tepid temperature".
I say again that these registries should be done away with. This is no substantive evidence that the recidivism of sex offenders is greater than that of armed robbers, drunk drivers, or other miscreants, all of whom can be adequately handled by the judicial and correctional system without being branded like animals. If is is sufficiently safe to allow someone to live among the general population, then by all means let him or her do so without wrecking any chance such a person may have to build a normal life.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI