Source: scholarworks.waldenu.edu 8/23/23
Abstract
The Adam Walsh Act created sex offender notification and registration requirements to encourage state compliance toward federal guidelines and assigned threat levels to registered sex offenders using mandated assessment processes. Researchers have pointed out that the transition by states using tiered assessment processes to the federally mandated guidelines has led to operational changes to state registration procedures.
The purpose of this quantitative study was to understand the effects and impacts on jurisdictions transitioning the designation of registered sex offenders’ threat assessment levels from a formal risk-based assessment process to the mandated Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act conviction-based assessment tool on all currently registered offenders.
The innovation and diffusion model was used to relate state policy, practice, and process transition to similar federal guidelines. Data obtained from sex offender registration data sets were analyzed using pairwise comparisons to establish the preferred entity, which pair possessed more quantitative property, or whether the two entities were identical.
The results indicated varying degrees of changes in registration requirements between high-, moderate-, and low-level offenders, including major increases in areas of moderate to high offender categories. The positive social change implications of the study include limiting the overassessment and related mandated periods of registration for registered offenders and ensuring equal and fair treatment across states and jurisdictional boundaries for assessed offenders.
:strip_exif(true):strip_icc(true):no_upscale(true):quality(65)/d1vhqlrjc8h82r.cloudfront.net/10-14-2021/t_39c8eecbe07041d1b9b9742b750785a2_name_image.jpg)
This might be an interesting read. I skimmed through it, but it is very lengthy with a lot of jargon. It is strange that under Federal Law, my fiancé’s offense is not even registrable, yet under California’s new law, he is now a Tier 3 when even before the new law, he was never publicly listed. How do they justify deeming him a serious threat now when for decades he was not, and under Federal Law, he would not even have to register at all. That is how idiotic this whole system is.
Can someone please explain 🤷♂️
It’s an academic paper that compares the classification tiers between North Dakota’s system against SORNA. Both have three tiers: Tier 1 is 15 years, Tier 2 is 25 years, and Tier 3 is Lifetime. ND tier system is based upon risk assessment and priors. SORNA tier system is conviction based.
Query: What happens when ND registry transitions to SORNA registry tier classification?
Result: There was a 61.5% increase into Tier 3 classification from ND to SORNA reclassification.
Conclusion: The reclassification to SORNA’s conviction based model identifies a huge flaw as significant population of Tier 1 and Tier 2 were reclassified into Tier 3. This ballooning of Tier 3 draws more attention to the public into believing there are a huge mass of highly dangerous registrants. And because there are far more Tier 3, more money is needed to fund monitoring and registering.
Apparently, using SORNA’s conviction based tiered system is abhorrent because it falsely identifies 61.5% of the low (Tier 1) and moderate (Tier 2) risk registrants as high risk (Tier 3). The underlying culprit is state funding will be denied if a state doesn’t fully encapsulate the federal SORNA requirements.