Group says 350 sex offenders in city

VICTORVILLE — The California Department of Justice might be under-reporting the number of registered sex offenders in the city by as much as 24 percent, according to a state and federally contracted counseling agency seeking to establish a presence here. “Currently, from the last numbers we ran, there are approximately 350 individuals who register as sex offenders that are in Victorville,” Scott Smith with Open Door Counseling Agency told the Planning Commission last Wednesday. … “There are so many people that’ve been let out of jail,” Smith said, “the least…

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Living with 290: About to Discharge Parole. Now What?

After being convicted of a felony and 3 misdemeanors, I served 50% of 5 years (2.5 years) in prison and am now approaching the end of my 3 year parole. For all of the negatives that can come with Parole, there is at least one positive: someone tells you exactly what you must comply with.  You’re told where you can and cannot live, you’re told what you can and cannot do for Halloween, and you’re told where you can or cannot be. I’m excited to have most of my limitations…

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Kids As Young As 9 Are on the Sex Offender Registry…for Life

Southwestern Law School Professor Catherine L.Carpenter puts it bluntly in her new research paper, Throwaway Children: The Tragic Consequences of a False Narrative. “Truth be told,” she writes, “we are afraid for our children and we are afraid of our children.” Being afraid for our kids has lead us to create ever harsher sex offender registration laws. We want to protect our kids from creeps. But this protection plan of ours has backfired. And now, Carpenter writes, whenever we arrest a minor for a sex crime, our fear “of our children…

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The Relationship Between Juvenile Sex Offender Registration and Depression in Adulthood

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies – Abstract: Accounts of sexual abuse appear daily in the media. Rightfully, this issue demands attention. Juveniles may be victims; they may also be offenders who are subject to sex offender registration and notification (SORN) policies. Growing research finds that SORN policies fail to achieve intended public policy outcomes. Little is known, however, about the unintended consequences of SORN for juvenile offenders. This study contributed to a more comprehensive understanding of the effects of these policies on this population. Merton’s concept of manifest and latent…

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My Voice: Sex registry ‘does more harm than good’ (Opinion)

As citizens, we must be aware of what is going on in our Legislature. Prison is “big business;” educate yourself as to what is really happening in our society before you demand to know where every sex offender lives. America (the land of the free) is number one for incarcerating more of its citizens than any other country. There are currently 2.2 million incarcerated citizens in the nations’ prisons and jails. There are 3,432 registered sex offenders in South Dakota. Full Opinion Piece

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NC: Sex offenders should be formally banned from NC State Fair, agriculture official says

Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler’s department says the state needs tougher laws banning registered sex offenders from the N.C. State Fair. Sex offenders were arrested around the State Fairgrounds twice during last year’s fair. A Raleigh man was charged with flying a drone over the fair, and a convicted child molester was charged with posing as a state ride inspector to get into an area reserved for children’s rides. Full Article

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MA: Mass. Forced To Remove Names From Sex Offender Database

BOSTON (CBS) – They are the faces of predators, with lists of their charges on public view in most police stations, and anyone can use the state’s registry to search for sex offenders in their community. But many of those names are now being removed from the internet database due to a Supreme Judicial Court decision that will grant many of these offenders new hearings about their classification. Full Article

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TX: Appeals court overturns seven convictions for online ‘dirty talk’ to minors

AUSTIN — The state’s top criminal court on Wednesday reversed the convictions of seven men who were sentenced to prison for talking dirty to minors online. Five men from Harris County, one from Collin County and another from Montgomery County are among the first to see their convictions reversed after a 2013 Texas Court of Criminal Appeals decision overturned a 2005 law criminalizing sexually explicit online communication with minors. Full Article

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Bill allowing cities and counties to adopt stricter sex offender ordinances voted down

A bill which would have allowed cities and counties to adopt sex offender ordinances more restrictive than state laws was voted down by an Assembly committee Tuesday. Assembly Bill 201, authored by Assemblymen William Brough, Mike Gipson, and Marc Steinorth, would have given localities the ability to enact not only more stringent restrictions on where persons required to register as sex offenders can live, but also “presence restrictions,” which would limit their ability to visit places such as parks, libraries, swimming pools, or arcades. “In addition to the myriad of…

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We Stopped AB 201!

Due to the efforts of registrants, family members and supporters Assembly Bill 201 was stopped today during a Public Safety Committee hearing. During a vote of its members, only 2 of 7 members voted in support of the bill while the remaining 5 members either voted “no” or abstained from voting. “We succeeded today because of letters sent and phone calls made to members of the Public Safety Committee,” stated CA RSOL president Janice Bellucci. “We sincerely thank you all for showing, standing up and speaking up on this important…

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HR 515 / IML Update from Registrant TAG

We ultimately met with six house legislative aides, mostly from the house foreign relations committee and also went to all the offices of cosponsors. We provided a copy of the talking points and a letter Janice Bellucci sent to the House Speaker. I will follow up tomorrow with an email to each of the legislative aides we had discussions with and aides with the other members that we left literature with. Before we met with the aids, it was clear there was little to no noise generated by the passage…

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California’s laws test whether sexual predators can ever be rehabilitated

At the foot of a fence around a small house in the desert, a protester cleared her throat. She wanted to scream loud enough for the man inside to hear. “Raaaaaapist!” she shouted. “Go away, rapist!” “No one in this world loves you,” her friend yelled. “You are a sexually violent predator!” The shrieks were met with silence from the white, two-bedroom home outside Palmdale where ____ _____ ____ has lived since his 2014 release from a California mental hospital. Full Article

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Reform the Sex-Offender Registry

In 1972, at the age of 21, Phillip Garrido had his first arrest. The charge: sexual assault of a minor. Four years later, he kidnapped and raped Katherine Callaway, a crime for which he received a 50-year sentence in the federal Leavenworth Penitentiary. During his trial, Garrido testified to masturbating while sitting outside middle schools and going on drug binges. After serving 11 years in federal prison and an additional seven months in Nevada State Prison, he was released in 1988 to parole authorities in Contra Costa County, Calif. For…

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MA: Sex offenders set to be delisted by court ruling

More than 500 sex offenders are expected to be removed from the state’s public online registry after a controversial high court ruling that has caused a massive backlog of cases, according to officials. … The Herald reported yesterday that a Supreme Judicial Court decision rendered last month has forced the SORB to temporarily remove sex offenders from the online database that allows the public to track them. The hearings to determine the risk that offenders pose have also come to a halt. Full Article Related http://www.myfoxboston.com/news/mass-court-decision-removes-sex-offender-info-from-public/13701168 http://www.lowellsun.com/todaysheadlines/ci_29359122/sex-offender-ruling-blasted-by-advocates http://www.bostonherald.com/opinion/editorials/2016/01/editorial_sex_offender_snafu

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Labeling sex offenders’ passports is overkill (Editorial)

Say you slept with your girlfriend when you were a senior in high school and she was a freshman. That’s enough to get you labeled a sex offender in some states. Or say you streaked across the football stadium buck naked in college, or urinated outside when you were drunk, or clicked on the photo of a naked 17-year-old. Strange as it may seem, all these “crimes” have the same punishment in the end: After serving time, doing probation and/or paying a fine, the people who committed them get on…

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