Source: news.yahoo.com 3/24/22
What’s happening
During confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, Republicans hammered away at her record in cases involving sex offenders. Much of that centered around misleading claims about sentences she handed out to people convicted of possessing child pornography. But GOP senators also repeatedly questioned Jackson on her views on sex offender registries, a topic she wrote about as a law student in the 1990s.
In 1994, Congress enacted a law mandating that all states create registries of people convicted of sex offenses and crimes against children. Two years later, it passed what’s known as Megan’s Law, a follow-up bill that made information in those registries available to the public. Since then, a broad slate of new laws has been passed, which expanded the types of crimes that classify someone as a sex offender and imposed strict rules they must meet to avoid further criminal punishment. As of 2018, there were an estimated 900,000 people in the U.S. listed on sex offender registries.
The vast majority of Americans believe sex offender registries make their communities safer, according to polls. A growing body of research, however, suggests otherwise. A long list of studies using decades of data have found no significant evidence that registries prevent sex crimes. Some even indicate that the laws imposed on sex offenders may make them more likely to commit crimes in the future.
Unlike most criminals, sex offenders face strong restrictions on where they can live, work and travel that last long after their sentence has been completed — often for the rest of their lives. Many report experiencing “social death” that makes it difficult to maintain employment or be part of their communities. For example, sex offenders are often barred from living within a certain distance of schools or other areas where kids gather. In some dense areas of the country, that rule can make entire cities inaccessible and, in the most extreme situations, force sex offenders to remain in jail or live clustered together in makeshift encampments.
Here’s a pretty thorough article… and, at the end, it cites other sources / opinions
Why try to fix something that the public doesn’t even use? Our right to privacy trumps any supposed “right to know” from the public anyway. Because, our rights are actually enumerated in the constitution.
Here is why they don’t work! The ones who have not committed yet are not worried about the list.
The simple answer is, no, they cannot be fixed because the premise that it is needed, or works is inherently flawed. It cannot be fixed because there is no substance to the foundation and a house built on a substance less foundation is invariably flawed and doomed to fall.
I found myself forced to reflect on the ridiculousness of the “logic” behind CP crimes and others just as heinous today. For some reason I could not stop myself from pondering this dichotomy. No one would deny that CP is heinous, just as no one would deny that murder is heinous. The logic behind criminalizing CP is that viewing it creates a market for the production of it and therefor contributes to the creation of more CP. That same logic applies to snuff videos. To watch a snuff video creates a market for the creation of more snuff videos and thus contributes to the creation of more snuff videos. Both have an underlying crime which causes trauma and victimization of the subjects, but only viewing CP is a crime. If to watch CP makes you guilty of the crime of Child Molestation, why does viewing snuff videos not make you guilty of murder? Why has no one pointed out the obvious dissimilar treatment regarding very similar activities in court/challenges of the laws on the books?