NCMEC: now 851,870 registered sex offenders in U.S.

We now have 851,870 registered sex offenders in the United States and its territories, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, NCMEC. See this map for state-by-state information.

California has the largest number of registrants at 103,534. That's what happens when all sex offenders in the state must register for life: only the dead drop off the list. That is, if we can believe that the list is up to date and names are cleared near the time of death.

Texas has the next-highest number of registrants at 87,189 and Florida follows at 68,845.

Those three states are the most populous, so maybe those large numbers make sense. However, if those numbers make sense, how can New York, only half a million short of Florida's total population, have less than a third of Florida's registrants?

What's wrong with Florida? Why does the Sunshine State convict its citizens of sex crimes at the rate of 340 per 100,000 Floridians but New York maintains decorum with only 150 per 100,000?

Even California--the land of nuts and flakes and Hollywood where we all expect crazy stuff to happen--convicts at the rate of only 240 per 100,000.

Does it make sense that Arkansas (515/100,000) or Delaware (503/100,000) has that many more people committing sex crimes? Is there something that makes sex crimes much less likely in Connecticut (149/100,000) or in Oklahoma (160/100,000)?

Oregon is shocking. Quiet Oregon--where tree-huggers occur naturally, like rain--convicts for sex offenses at the rate of 713 per 100,000. What the heck are those lumberjacks and fishermen up to out there on the west coast?

People are people. The laws, though, differ far more than human nature does.

If Americans are supposed to be able to use the registry to decide who the dangerous people are, this map may help them understand that they have been sold snake oil. Cures all ailments! Protects children! Except, no, it does not. Sex crimes still happen though they are committed by people not on the registry.

If the registry were necessary because sex offenders reoffend so frequently, at some point its growth would slow down because the new crimes would be committed by someone already on the list. That is not happening.

New first-time offenders all the time but the laws do not recognize this reality.

Watching the registrant across the street means missing the sex offenses committed by someone not on the registry.

Preventing registrants from living near a school does nothing to prevent first-time offenders from committing sexual assaults inside the school.

If we could advertise how many people are on state registries, who would visit Oregon, knowing that the state has the highest rate of sex offense arrests? Perhaps then, state legislatures would begin to look at the kinds of crimes and the number of crimes that require someone to register.

851,870 registrants, unlikely to commit another sex crime, yet likely to be looked at with suspicion.

It is past time to abolish the registry.

legislating can be easy; legislating wisely requires more thought

Rachel Marshall, a public defender in Oakland CA, talks about how awful sex offender laws are. 

... many of my clients would choose to take on more jail time, more fees — anything to avoid being labeled a sex offender for life. That's because our current sex offender registration laws apply an unbending and inhumane one-size-fits-all approach that does not prevent future sex crimes and in fact makes us all less safe.

Imagine. Anything to avoid registration. We have so much evidence to show the registry does not prevent sex crimes or increase community safety that it is next to impossible to understand why registration is still required of anyone.

Registration sounds simple enough. All you have to do is to make sure the registry lists your current address. Marshall explains:

Registering itself is a cumbersome process. Oakland Police Department's current voicemail message for sex registration-related inquiries states that in order to register, one must make an appointment at least a month in advance. It is hard to understand how one can be expected to register within five days of changing addresses if an appointment takes a month to set up. 

And even if one secures an appointment, he must often wait many hours at the police station — jeopardizing any job he was lucky enough to find — to be seen for the appointment. And when the appointment begins, there are rarely interpreters around or people to assist with reading the technical language. So even if you are, like many of my clients — homeless, mentally ill, and too poor to own a phone — you are nonetheless expected to either call a police station or show up in person, make an appointment over 30 days in advance, wait for hours at the police station on your appointment day (hardly a comfortable place for most of us, let alone someone with a criminal record), read and understand legal jargon on lengthy documents, and continue to do so every few weeks for the rest of your life. 

The rest of your life can include getting old, which presents added difficulties that the law does not accommodate.

...I've had clients who continue to get arrested regularly for failing to register simply because they cannot remember to do it as frequently as they are required to and end up back in prison, where their health continues to deteriorate.

Our prisons are already overcrowded and overburdened by sick and elderly inmates, yet sex offender laws are set up to increase the number of sick and elderly inmates.

But public safety! Surely keeping an eye on convicted sex offenders makes our neighborhoods safer! Sadly, no. Emphatically, no.

Supporters of sex registration laws claim they promote public safety by ensuring that police can track offenders' whereabouts and keep them away from children. But no evidence supports the premise that public safety is thereby enhanced in any way; to the contrary, registration laws frequently lead to homelessness, instability, and more time in prison, all of which lead to a greater risk of future crimes. [My emphasis.]

If tracking these particular offenders is important, why write laws that lead so many to homelessness, a circumstance that makes tracking even more difficult?

Some jurisdictions have additional laws in place to prevent RSOs from living too near places that lawmakers imagine would lead them to re-offend. Such fevered imaginings crowd out any logic.

In Miami, Florida, local residency restrictions are so harsh — prohibiting sex offenders from living with 2,500 feet of any place children are likely to gather — they have rendered sex offenders homeless; because of the requirements, offenders have nowhere to live, other than remote, isolated places, like under a bridge or on train tracks. This doesn't exactly provide the support and stability research shows they need to avoid future sex offenses.

Again and again, we see that the registry gets in the way of employment, of housing, of a decent recovery from breaking the law.

Being deemed a sex offender for life carries with it other unwritten penalties. Not only is it infinitely more difficult to get a job or a place to live once one has been labeled a sex offender, but many mental health programs and drug or alcohol rehabilitation programs have policies banning sex offenders. Again, this lack of support and services only furthers the chances that these individuals will end up committing future crimes.

'Future crimes' rarely means sex crimes. Even faced with the difficulties caused by registration, registered sex offenders are still unlikely to commit another sex crime. When the registry shows a registrant who has more than one offense, remember that 'failure to register' can be categorized as a sex crime.

A registrant listed as having been convicted of three offenses on three different dates will certainly look like a dangerous neighbor (he just won't stop!) unless you know that the first offense was actually consensual sex with his younger girlfriend and the second and third offenses were failure to register.

Reading the whole thing will help you see why Marshall's clients would rather be incarcerated than to be on the registry.

To tempt you to read it all, I will tell you that Marshall discusses the Brock Turner case. You know the one. She says:

... the fury over the Brock Turner case has created a risk that we shift toward harsher penalties for sex offenses, without looking closely at what kinds of crimes are included in that category. We must avoid "one-size-fits-all" labels for those convicted of a broad range of offenses.

At a time when we are seeing the beginnings of bipartisan progress toward sentence reform that will reduce our incarceration rate and break up fewer families, do not let your legislators glom onto the emotional appeal of community safety or protecting the children in order to pass sex offender laws. Demand that they use evidence or data to back up proposed legislation.

As complicated and difficult as the registry is now, there is always the possibility that legislators can make it worse.

Do you know how to contact your state legislator?

complicated grief and ambiguous loss

A friend sent me a link to the June 23 episode of the NPR program, On Being. Krista Tippett interviewed Pauline Boss, who wrote Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief.

Boss uses "ambiguous loss" to refer to the loss of people we lose without being able to say "They are gone." Families of Alzheimer's patients, for example, or families of soldiers missing in action mourn the loss of someone before the person is gone or without knowing if that person is gone.

Because of a natural disaster like a tsunami or because of an event like 9/11, people mourn the loss of someone who is dead--but without a body to identify.

Krista Tippett called it that trauma of people not being able to say goodbye, not being able to bury their dead.

From the interview:

MS. TIPPETT: One thing that you say is that the kind of grief that's involved in ambiguous loss is distinct from traditional grief. So how is it different? 

DR. BOSS: Yes. Well, with ambiguous loss, there's really no possibility of closure. ...

Not even, in fact, resolution, whichever word you prefer to use. And therefore, it ends up looking like what the psychiatrists now call “complicated grief.” 

MS. TIPPETT: Right. 

DR. BOSS: And that is, in fact, a diagnosis, complicated grief. And it's believed that it requires some kind of psychiatric intervention. My point is very different, that ambiguous loss is a complicated loss, which causes, therefore, complicated grief, but it is not pathological. Individually, that is. It's not a pathological psyche; it's a pathological situation. And as clients frequently say back to me, “Oh, you mean the situation is crazy, not me,” that's what exactly what I mean. 

It's an illogical, chaotic, unbelievably painful situation that these people go through who have missing loved ones, either physically or psychologically. And if they have some symptoms of grief that carry on, let's say even for five or ten years, if it's a caregiver of an Alzheimer's patient or the parent of a missing child, there is nothing wrong with them. That is typical. That is to be expected, that they would grieve along the way for the various things that they are missing. For example, if a child is kidnapped, they may have an extra grief when this child's friends are graduating. 

Complicated grief. Families of inmates will recognize this. How to mourn the  absence of someone when people around you will not talk about him?

If you know someone who has a family member in prison, recognize that what you see in them could be complicated grief.

DR. BOSS: And in order to understand this, though, we have to make a difference between depression and sadness. 

MS. TIPPETT: Right, right. To say that sadness is not depression. 

DR. BOSS: And so far, that hasn't been made. [laughs] 

MS. TIPPETT: Right. 

DR. BOSS: Yes. Depression is an illness that requires a medical intervention. It's the minority of people who have depression. And yet, with the ambiguous loss of let's say Alzheimer's disease and 50-some other dementias, caregivers are said to be depressed. Most of the caregivers I have met and studied and treated are not depressed; they're sad. They're grieving. And this should be normalized. And sadness is treated with human connection. 

MS. TIPPETT: Mm. So, one of the things that you say — and this makes so much sense, but it's the kind of thing that makes sense — we have to say it — that people can't cope with the problem until they know what the problem is. 

DR. BOSS: Yes. 

MS. TIPPETT: You've said with ambiguous loss that once people have a name for it, just that... 

DR. BOSS: That helps. 

MS. TIPPETT: ...that the stress level goes down a bit.

Like those who lose loved ones to  illness, accident, or age, those who lose someone to prison will appreciate a friend who recognizes that their lives have been turned upside down, that they are experiencing a complicated grief.

Let them grieve. Keep them company.