Category: General News

The other day, I came across an article about ____ ____, a former Missouri state senator who was recently released from a 1-year stint in federal prison. Years earlier during a failed congressional run, Smith’s campaign violated election law by sending out anonymous postcards attacking his political opponent. When the violation surfaced years later, Smith was caught on tape conspiring to cover it up. Not to make light of election law, but a year in prison for conspiracy to cover up postcards? Even if the punishment were fair to Smith and his family, is prison really the best…

Research Brief by the U.S. Department of Justice – Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking (July 2015). Full Brief

In the early 1980s, rehabilitation counselor Robert Longo could hardly have known that his work with convicted sex offenders would make him a minor celebrity. At the time, he was running a program at the Oregon State Hospital to treat and rehabilitate prisoners who had committed sex crimes. It was a new field, and Longo says they were using what at the time were considered innovative approaches: aversive conditioning, administration of Depo-Provera to reduce testosterone levels, and penile plethysmography to measure arousal. Full Article

Trying not to scream about this article in the Toronto Star, “Child Abduction and Murder Paint a Chilling New Portrait.” As reader Frankie wrote: Just the WORST kind of scaremongering!!  They use these huge scary numbers but the bottom line is that in all of Canada, coast to coast, there have been an average of THREE kidnappings a year over the past 50 years.  THREE.  Seems they had to go back 50 years to get enough data to even do a statistical analysis.  More pedestrians were killed just in Toronto…

More than 750,000 Americans are currently registered as sex offenders. That is a fact. But that is just about the only hard fact when it comes to sex offenders, a group that social scientists struggle to secure funding to study and that communities react to with predictable opprobrium. It’s an untenable situation and it’s getting worse. Trevor Hoppe, a sociology professor at the University at Albany, has documented the growth of the sex offender class between 2005 and 2013 for Law and Social Inquiry and found compounding failures on the…

After the near-death of her 1-year-old son, Wyatt, at the hands of a child abuser, Erica Hammel set out to change Michigan law. Full Article

The U.S. Senate passed legislation championed by Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley to keep communities informed of the whereabouts of convicted sex offenders and to expand and protect the rights of sex assault victims.  The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act Reauthorization passed the Senate by a vote of 89-0.  Full Article

One percent of all black men in the U.S. are registered sex offenders, and black men enter the sex offender registry at nearly twice the rate of white men, a new University at Albany study finds. Full Article

Theresa Robertson of York County said “pariah” is the word most people think of when the sex offender registry is mentioned, and she and the group Women Against Registry feel that needs to change. Full Article

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision today stating that a registrant’s Fifth Amendment right to remain silent was violated when the government sought to return him to prison because he refused to answer questions regarding his sexual history during a polygraph exam.  The questions the registrant refused to answer are (1) after the age of 18, did you engage in sexual activity with anyone under the age of 15, (2) have you had sexual contact with a family member or relative, (3) have you ever physically forced or threatened anyone…

Why does the USA have a sex offender registry, but no murderer registry? reddit discussion

2012 – New York’s Sex Offender Registration Act (SORA) imposes a lifetime of police supervision on tens of thousands of persons who have already served their sentences. It is applied retroactively to people whose offenses were committed before its enactment. A person pleading guilty to a SORA-eligible offense need not be told that this additional sanction will be imposed. His or her risk level may be assessed based on charges that were dismissed as part of the negotiated plea. Statements that he or she has never had the opportunity to…

Florida sex offender registry: double-digit growth More than a dozen people a day walk into the Orange County Sheriff’s Office and register as sex offenders. The county is home to more than 2,200 of them. The Orange County Sheriff’s Office has a dozen people on staff — including four detectives – who do nothing but register and track sex offenders, who are required by law to register. Full Article N.Y. sex offender numbers outstrip nation’s New York state’s number of registered sex offenders has exploded over the past decade, ballooning…