“I’m Not Unemployed, I’m Unemployable”: Challenges Finding and Sustaining Work for People Required to Register as Sex Offenders

Source: qualitativecriminology.com April 2023

Many individuals convicted of a sexual offense (ICSOs) experience various collateral consequences due to registration requirements, including income loss, unemployment, harassment, social isolation, homelessness, and more. Finding employment post-conviction is a difficult endeavor for many reentering citizens with criminal records, but for ICSOs, the difficulty increases due to their label as sex offenders. When these individuals are unsuccessful in obtaining steady, living-wage employment, it can result in mental health impacts such as depression, hopelessness, and other reactions. This paper seeks to analyze participants’ emotional and mental health reactions to their direct experiences with employment struggles due to registration. What feelings are participants experiencing as a result of these struggles? Using qualitative responses from over 550 ICSOs, this paper uses thematic content analysis to examine perceptions of their success within the system, their mental health reactions to this success, and ways in which the participants seek to mitigate the damage caused by their self-perceived failures in finding employment. The qualitative findings and policy implications are discussed.

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More infuriating to me is when a registrant on paper does find a good paying job, often his POS PO won’t let him take it. Heard that more than several times.

Oh I know all about this. I’ve been living this for 10 years now. I wish I could say that things have been getting better, but truth is, I’m actually dealing with the latest fallout of how bad it’s gotten over the last few years. Not directly registry related, just “unintended collateral consequences”. Doesn’t involve the State or cops, not going to get arrested, no reason to. Nothing like that, it’s all just the reality of living exactly the life this paper is talking about.

Turns out if you live a life of anxiety based self imposed isolation, with nobody even caring that you’re doing it, things can get really bad in a wide variety of ways. 😉

Yet another way the registry is completely counterproductive. Instead of just giving me the wakeup call I needed to be a competent, productive, now totally law abiding person contributing to society, it turns people into…Me. How is that helping anyone?

Excellent article with great data points for reference in future arguments with those who are ignorant of the facts in LE, the legal system, advocacy groups for harsher punishments, elected officials, etc.

As @AlsoMe and I wrote in the other @ACSOL thread 3 Myths About Hiring People with Criminal Records this article illustrates how society makes the registry punishment even w/o it being intended as such in the passed law by elected officials who put it into place.

Society does the elected officials dirty work as those who are smart legal minds, e.g., RBG, Judge Matsch, et al, saw when it came to the punishing effects of the registry. When the impacts felt by ICSOs is detailed as seen in the article here then the intent is more than just notification of a conviction by a person for all to see. It is then taken to a higher level with the tools given to society to use, e.g., open records, collating of the open records, and then publishing of those open records for all to see with unlimited consequences for the duration of time via free speech. This is the door elected officials and the legal system hides behind when it comes to the intended v unintended consequences of the registry. Knowing what society would do, will do, and does with the information, the elected officials condone such unnecessary behavior via this power play in the name of public safety without any other thought as to the reality of it all or even any care of such.

They want eye for an eye and to stand on a bully pulpit pounding their chest in power over others while crowing in self-servicing mindsets. Where they allegedly care about public safety in one vein, they are dismissing or caring about public safety in another by those who are registered…and when they want to show they care about the latter vein of public safety, they make the path so long to being free that it is more than necessary to make the public safe because they can.

Much of society is nothing more than sheep who follow the those wolves who think they know best but are both the most ignorant of what society is today and only getting worse daily. Those who are willing to buck these people are truly the ones who need to be listened to for they’re the one will help society move forward positively for the betterment of all, not just one section of the populace.

I’m not the bad guy, but I’m forced to role-play the “evil enemy of children” Online as a result of the misinformation and safety propaganda lawmakers have brainwashed society with.