Sex Offender Registration Doesn’t Help Victims, Hurts Young Offenders

Jason was 14 years old when he met his first girlfriend, a 13-year-old neighbor of the foster family with whom he lived. After a few months of dating, his girlfriend’s mother walked in on the teenagers engaging in consensual oral sex and called the police. Jason was arrested and charged with child molestation. He was adjudicated delinquent in juvenile court and placed on the California Sex Offender Registry. Before he was old enough to drive, Jason was branded a sex offender on a public, searchable website. Full Opinion Piece

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Letter: The punishment must fit the crime

About 100 U.S. teachers, mostly women, are charged with sex crimes each year, although many others go unreported. Affairs between teachers and students are becoming more common in both the U.S. and Europe, probably because the rise of social media has made communication easier and more private. In most of Europe, the age of consent is 14, while in American states it’s 16, 17 or 18. But regardless of students’ ages, teachers may be considered predators because their authority implies a potential for duress. No coercion may have been used…

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What is the Purpose of Sex Offense Registries?

Two days ago, the Union-Recorder in Georgia published a bizarre editorial. The editorial board noted that the state’s sex offender registry system drives people into homelessness and deprived them of counseling and employment opportunities, but laments this fact only insofar as it allows registrants to “fly under the radar” and makes them “more difficult to track.” Georgia’s registry system, according to the authors, “places too much trust in the honor system” because requiring people to self-register “places too much confidence” in the registrant. They acknowledge that there are “strong penalties”…

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Remove Children from Sex-Offender Registries

There are good reasons to reconsider some aspects of the 1994 Crime Bill, because we’ve had a chance to see the unintended consequences. One feature of the 1994 law that has had baleful unanticipated effects was the adoption of sex-offender registries. At the time, experts advised that sex offenders never reformed. To protect the community from those found guilty of such offenses after their return to society, registries would require them to identify themselves (sometimes even with signs in their windows). Understandably, penalties were particularly harsh for anyone who harmed…

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The Problem with Sex Offender Punishment

Few crimes evoke such passionate and emotional public responses as do those committed by the sexual offender; yet, few crimes are as sensationalized and misunderstood as the sexual offence. Although many offences are exaggerated in terms of amount, those committed by the sex offender are often perpetually entrenched in hyperbole. And this is not some neo-liberal, new wave approach to understanding sex offenders. In 1965, the Institute for Sex Research published a lengthy analysis of sexual offenders and deviant sexual behaviours, resulting in the conclusion that there exists a wide…

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The sex offender registry should assess risk, otherwise it is purely punishment

A not-so-uncommon story: The sexual assault victim — a girl of 16. She’s now 37 years old, happily married to the love of her life, and the mother of three children. That’s right — the victim and her attacker got married soon after the girl’s mother, learning of the couple’s romance, reported the “assault” to prosecutors. Although he has a master’s degree, the attacker couldn’t find a teaching job because he was listed in the sex offender registry for life. His wife had to work multiple jobs to help support the…

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Kat’s Blog: We are More Than a Mugshot

Last week’s Miami Herald article bothered me. You know the one, “Karma caught up with these sex offenders and predators, Florida cops say”.  It was called Operation Karma, the totally unnecessary round-up of registrants, in this case, 26 of them,  whose only “crime” was neglecting to follow through with some tiresome registration requirement, listing a new home address, registering a motor vehicle, a media account, updating employment information, etc.  I suppose this “operation” served two purposes, it gave the police of Polk County, Fl. something to do that particular day…

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Want to build safer online communities? Drop the ban.

Creating safer and more equitable communities — both in real life, and online — is an important undertaking. Undoubtedly we are in agreement that those who cause harm and havoc should be stopped and made accountable for their actions. The broader (and more difficult) question comes in what we do next. To make this less abstract, in “real world” parlance, this is often called re-entry: the process of people returning to their lives, families, and communities after involvement with the justice system. Full Op-Ed — Guy Hamilton-Smith is a member of the ACSOL Board…

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Our cruel, counterproductive sex offender laws: Anthony Weiner is a window into what’s wrong with our system of punishment

[nydailynews.com – 2/20/19] Emily Horowitz is a member of the ACSOL Board of Directors and was a Speaker at the 2018 ACSOL Conference. Last week, Anthony Weiner was released from federal prison to a Bronx halfway house after serving 21 months for sending sexually-explicit messages to a 15-year-old girl. Next, like approximately 4.5 million others on probation/parole, he’ll spend 3 years on supervised release. Supervised release is no cakewalk; while on it, one is subject to unannounced visits and random searches, needs approval for travel and housing, and must regularly…

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Not all sex offenders are the same. It’s time we reform how we treat them – Opinion

Florida Bar Association President Michelle Suskauer recently penned a column published in FLORIDA TODAY about needs for reforming the criminal justice system. In her piece, she focused on a number of important issues about mental health, curbing recidivism, re-entry, sentencing and much more. Missing among these targets for reform, however, is the ever-present quagmire dealing with sex offenders, a topic most politicians and justice officials prefer to ignore. Suffice to say, the very term “sex offender” presents a vile image that calls for eternal condemnation of anyone within that category.…

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Are Sex Offenders Categorically Unworthy Of Rights?

It’s bad enough, both for substantive as well as factual reasons, that the Supreme Court in Smith v. Doe held that sex offender registration was not punitive, but civil, and therefore beyond the reach of the Ex Post Facto Clause. Not only was it grounded in utterly baseless statistics of recidivism, but it indulged in the fantasy that rhetoric was an adequate substitute for inquiry before destroying the future of an entire class of people. Full Article

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The modern Leper: Sex Offender Law reform

Everyone who is reasonable admits (nowadays) that homosexuality is not a disease, nor should the LGBTQIA+ community be treated as irredeemable. However, there is a growing population of people, starting as low as age 7, that the law and society have decided to treat the way it used to treat the LGBT folks: “Sex Offenders.” The Sex Offender Registry (SOR) laws are one of the last bastions of righteous indignation and medieval bigotry. It seems that, despite studies and statistics to the contrary, SOR folks are thought to be highly…

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On America’s Civil Death Penalty: The Sexual Offense Registry

Oscar Wilde, writing from his cell in the Reading Gaol where he was imprisoned for homosexuality at the end of the nineteenth century, observed that “society reserves for itself the right to inflict appalling punishments on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realise what it has done. When the man’s punishment is over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty towards him begins.” In America, few aspects of law…

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