GA: New bill would bar sex offenders from living near their victims

I sent this email today to the sponsor of that bill and cc’d the rest of the bill’s co-sponsors.

Senator Jackson,

I have recently read an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution overviewing Senate Bill 35 (https://www.ajc.com/news/gen-politics/new-bill-would-bar-sex-offenders-from-living-near-their-victims/MpYGaJqiqzURivg3zg8tCJ/), sponsored by yourself, and have a few questions and concerns.

First, regarding the inspiration for your proposed legislation, was the incident reported and prosecuted? If not, the bill does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to alleviate the circumstance that inspired it, as is common in nearly every law written in response to isolated incidents rather than trends in societal behavior. If so, the matter is best addressed by the individual’s parole/probation officer and local law enforcement, not the legislature.

Second, is there a basis for the proposed 2000 ft. residence restriction, or was it just a number pulled out of thin air? Or simply double that of existing residence restrictions (also, just pulled out of thin air)? How exactly does the proposed residence restriction prevent registrants intent on harassing their former victims (an extremely low number of individuals, I would think) from doing so? Would they not simply leave their residence, wherever it may be, for that purpose? Wouldn’t a permanent restraining order as part of the sentence (already a routine practice, if not law) accomplish the bill’s intent?

Third, how does a registrant who is not on parole or probation comply with your proposal? Are the local sheriff’s departments expected to find and locate victims and immediate family members prior to determining whether or not a registrant can move to any particular place? I would think that would be particularly burdensome to most already over-worked law enforcement agencies. Are registrants expected to know the whereabouts of their former victims and immediate family members? How would they find those whereabouts without violating the no-contact order routinely made as part of the sentence? That sounds like forcing registrants to break one law/rule in order to comply with the one you propose, in turn increasing the recidivism this and similar laws were supposedly written to prevent.

Fourth, who is liable if whatever authority approves a residence in error? Using the bill’s inspiration as an example, the registrant’s parole/probation officer or sheriff’s sex offender unit should have been aware that the registrant’s victim resided nearby (or could have found through reasonable means) and could have disproved the residence prior to the registrant moving there. In such cases, the responsibility for the error entirely belongs to the law enforcement agency. Doesn’t fairness dictate that an errant or delinquent approval authority should bear the burdens of correcting their mistake? What’s fair about forcing the registrant to correct the official’s error or charging him with a crime if he fails to do so? 

Despite popular opinion to the contrary, recidivism among sex offender registrants is among the lowest of all classes of criminal – second only to those convicted for murder. Over 95% of new sex crimes are committed by individuals without criminal records, a figure relatively unchanged from similar studies conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice prior to the adoption of Megan’s Law. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of registrant recidivism is not for the commission of new sex crime (or crime of any kind, for that matter), but for violations of the myriad of restrictions and obligations imposed strictly on registrants, few (if any) of which are empirically sound or have any impact on future offenses, such as your proposal. Even rarer are instances of a registrant committing another crime – sexual or otherwise – against the same victim for which they were convicted after release.

With all due respect to the individual for whom you wrote the bill and all other victims of sex offenses, SB 35, should it become law, will only serve to unnecessarily complicate the lives of registrants and their family members, as well as over-burdening the officials and their budgets tasked with enforcing it, without having any impact whatsoever on the potential recidivism of the aforementioned registrant or the social class to which he belongs. While it is an unfortunate reality that picking on a particular social class of individuals is politically expedient, it is equally true that no person or society as a whole is made safer or more secure by the criminalization of routine activity solely applicable to that particular social class. Such matters can only be effectively remedied on an individual basis.

Please reconsider your proposal in light of the above. Thanks in advance.

Suggest flooding the senators’ email boxes. Their addresses can be found here:
http://www.legis.ga.gov/legislation/en-US/Display/20192020/SB/35