beware reformers who want to keep the registry

Florida Action Committee recently published an execrable piece on its website. The writers, identified as members of FAC, titled their piece "Both Sides Now," though they present only one side. 

The two writers say they have found "several possible points of agreement with those who advocate for a [sex offense] registry." They make the weakest case possible against a registry by pointing out that most registrants do not repeat their offenses. From there, they launch a full-throated argument in favor a registry. So much for "both sides."

They say that "children need to be protected," that "there must be laws against the sexual abuse of children," that "society must end its exploitation of children..." Anodyne statements that do nothing to mitigate their intent to keep someone else--and someone else's family--on the registry. 

"We need to particularly protect [children] from violent offenders and repeat offenders."
This implies that repeat and violent offenders need to stay on the registry. We don't define violence; Legislators do. The same legislative bodies that have defined terms so that over a million people belong on the registry today will decide who belongs there in the future. 

"If we return to the registry as it was first conceived—a private registry used only by law enforcement  to track the most dangerous offenders—the likely harm to registrants and their families would be minimized." 
What would prevent this imaginary returned-to-virginity registry from morphing once again into what we have today? Absolutely nothing. The virginal registry these writers yearn for would still put registrants at risk for arrest for crimes that aren't crimes for anyone other than registrants, and all while providing no improvement of the public safety.

"We affirm that leaders should try to be concerned about all children, including the children of people on the registry." 
Rich irony, coming from writers who argue for the existence of the registry.

"We affirm the typical person on the registry."
Again, sorting out Us from Them! Who will sort the typical from the atypical? The violent from the non-violent? No matter who sorts, they will be deciding that some families deserve whatever difficulty and torment the registry brings them. 

We must resist the temptation to make laws on the basis of rare but extreme cases. 
The whole article is built on the basis of those extreme cases. The writers try to suck up to their dreamboat--the current registry regime--by reminding the dreamboat that there are worse people out there. 

Make no mistake: the two writers are arguing to keep the registry in place. They are perfectly willing to have you on the registry as long as the people they approve of are not listed, and even though they would leave the registry in the hands of the entities that keep making registry laws harsher.

Abolish the registry, not because people convicted of sex offenses are special, but because registries violate the human right to be left alone by the state, no matter which crime--DUI, arson, sex offense, gun crime--requires them to register.

The registry is not a problem because it lists the wrong people; the registry causes problems because it lists people.

without opposing testimony

The South Dakota Senate has been hard at work:

Bills to toughen the punishment for attempted human trafficking of minors and repeatedly failing to register as a sex offender continue to make their way through the legislature. 

Senate Bill 61 would increase the penalty for sex offenders who fail more than once to register after moving to a new address. Currently law penalizes second offenses the same as first offenses, a class 6 felony. Under the bill, a second offense and any subsequent offense would be a class 5 felony.  

South Dakota has about 4,600 people on its sex offender registry, said Attorney General Marty Jackley. The state has about a 98.5 percent compliance rate, where offenders re-register and follow the restrictions that come with being a sex offender. This bill is for the 1.5 percent who don't comply, he said. 

Why more punishment for something that the South Dakota Attorney General admits rarely happens...and for something that is not even another sex offense?

Because a lazy, unthinking Senator wants to propose a bill that will pass.

Because no one stands up for those on the registry.

Both bills passed unanimously and without opposing testimony. They will move to the house floor. [My emphasis.]

Because they can.

Follow what is happening in your state legislature and also at the national level and if you find a lazy legislator writing bills on the backs of registrants and their families, speak up. Protest.

Talk to your legislators and remind them that people on the registry are also their constituents.

Ask why they are willing to make life more difficult for their constituents.

Ask why they aren't protecting their constituents, their neighbors, their community.

It is hard to stand up the first time, to walk into a Senator's office and say that you are a registrant or a family member of a registrant. Do it once, though, and you might be surprised. With over 861,000 people listed on sex offender registries, it only follows that millions of people, some of whom work in legislative offices, know a registrant.

Make an appointment to speak to your legislator and tell stories about how the registry affects you and your family. That is the best way for legislators to see people and not imagine monsters.

Send letters to your legislator and remind him that you and your family are out there. Remind him or her that your family votes. If you are able to vote, make sure to say so. That is the best way for legislators to see votes.

Stand up, speak up.

Is it scary to do that? You bet it is. Do it once, though, and you might be surprised at the people who hear you and respond with their own stories about someone they know on the registry.

Find out how to testify in front of the legislature or a legislative committee. Google and Bing and Duck Duck Go and your community librarian are excellent tools. There are no stupid questions when you want to know badly enough.

You will not need to start from scratch because organizations all over the country are dedicated to changing sex offender laws--if not dedicated to abolishing the registry. Contact those organizations and ask how to prepare and deliver testimony.

• National Association for Rational Sex Offense Laws
• Women Against Registry
• Alliance for Constitutional Sex Offense Laws

Their very purpose is to work with you and help you make a difference in your state. Perhaps your state has its own organization and you will be able to meet other registry-affected families near you.

The registry is so obviously wrong that it is possible to change the stance of good people. Arm yourself with data showing that the registry protects no one.

Show them a scrapbook with all the news stories about sex offenses committed by someone not on the registry...and the stories about new sex offenses committed by registrants, if you can find any.

Be seen, be heard.

Do everything you can to make sure the next article about legislation to increase difficulties for those on the registry does not conclude with the sad, infuriating words, without opposing testimony.

neighborly behavior, NextDoor

NextDoor, a private social network for neighborhoods, is a popular means of letting neighbors know if you have a washer and dryer to sell or if you want to buy a camper. NextDoor lets people ask for plumber recommendations and post information about crime in the area.

A handy app for the neighborly...unless your address is on the sex offender registry.

No one who lives at a registered address is allowed to join NextDoor. Not the registrant, not the spouse. No one at that address.

The NextDoor member agreement says,

Nextdoor is the private social network for neighborhoods; we hope that neighbors everywhere will use the Nextdoor platform to build stronger and safer neighborhoods around the world....

Stronger, safer neighborhoods are especially important to those whose address is on the registry. After all, registrants and their families are the ones at risk for vandalism (1, 2, 3) attacks (1, 2), and even murder (1, 2, 3).

Convicted sex offenders, including registered sex offenders, and their households are not eligible for Nextdoor accounts; and we may also deny other account registrations we think would harm a Nextdoor neighborhood. [My emphasis.]

Others that would harm a neighborhood? As if the mere presence of people on the registry harm the neighborhood! Law abiding citizens do not harm the neighborhood.

 At Nextdoor, we believe that neighborly behavior is the foundation of healthy communities.

Neighborly behavior would mean recognizing the danger the registry presents to those whose address is on the registry and protecting the neighborhood from vandalism, from physical attacks, and from murder. 

The registry protects no one and it puts registrants and their families at risk. It is hypcritical--and downright unneighborly--for NextDoor to pretend that it is building healthy communities while setting the example of shunning some people in the neighborhood.

It isn't difficult to find the studies that show how little danger registrants pose. Almost as easy as finding names on the registry.

It also is not difficult to understand how wrong it is to exclude neighbors from your efforts to build stronger and safer neighborhoods, how cruel it is to label a home in a way that encourages neighbors to avoid the family in that home.

While NextDoor worries about people who live at a registered address, the next arrest in the community for a sex offense will most likely be of someone not on the registry.

of polygraphs, registries, minors...and everyone else

Let's talk about Zach Anderson again. He's the unfortunate and unwise young man who, at 19, had sex with a 14-year-old girl who said she was 17.

The South Bend Tribune reports:

The young man, Zachery Anderson, was sentenced harshly by a Berrien County judge who preached about the immorality of meeting partners online. The sentence included jail time and 25 years on Michigan's sex offender registry, attracted national publicity and was overturned several months later by a different judge.

Zach was days away from completing probation when he was arrested October 11 for violating his probation restrictions.

It was during a recent polygraph that Zach truthfully answered the question that led to his recent troubles: Have you had any contact with anyone younger than 18? Yes, Zach said.

Bam. His honest answer during a polygraph resulted in the arrest.

Courts are not allowed to use results of a polygraph exam because polygraphs are not scientifically reliable. If probation officers were required to treat polygraphs the way courts use them--which is to say, not at all--Zach would likely be off probation.

Instead, probation officers are allowed to mandate polygraph testing.

Elkhart County's probation department has required regular polygraph tests, at $300 apiece, and Zach has taken at least five. 

Zach wasn't arrested for violating parole because he failed the exam; he was arrested because the polygraph was an opportunity for the probation officer and the polygraph examiner to push him to incriminate himself.

Probation officers can use polygraphs to take away the freedom of a probationer. Veracity has nothing to do with it.

Zach's parents have raised holy hell to protect their son from the perils of the sex offender registry. What parent wouldn't do the same? Through their efforts, their son's story has been told far and wide.

It is easy to sympathize with Zach's situation and recognize that his punishment for unwise behavior has been far out of proportion to the crime he committed. It is also easy to wonder if a 19-year-old having consensual sex ought to even be a crime.

Nevertheless, their son is still mired in the criminal justice system.

Les [Zach's dad] has written a letter to President Trump that he intends to also send to Vice President Mike Pence and U.S. senators, asking for "Zach's Law," which would protect young people from sex laws that have such unintended consequences. 

It is worth remembering Radley Balko's suggestion that laws named after victims are usually an emotional response, not one based on reason.

Young people do need protection from draconian laws. The Tribune continues:

Tough laws on sex offenders don't take into account their calamitous effects on young people unwary of the electronic age and its consequences, said Amanda Anderson, Zach's mother. 

Absolutely. Inarguable.

"Has there been life lessons learned? You bet there has," Amanda said of her family's experiences. But "we will continue to pursue the rescue of minors under the draconian image of the sex offender registry law."

The one lesson the Anderson family seems yet to learn is that the registry is bad for everyone. 

Bad for families on the registry, bad for communities funding a registry quickly growing unwieldy, bad for law enforcement agencies who  squander resources enforcing registry laws that protect no one.

Leaving people on the registry because they committed crimes worse than teenage sex means that children of registrants are still at risk.

Every family living on the registry worries that their kids will suffer because of it. Too many kids do suffer.

Some families are torn apart by probation restrictions that prevent the registrant from contact with his own children, even when the children were not victims of the crime. Some families struggle financially because of the cost of probation. See above where Zach paid at least $1500 for junk science polygraphs.

Financial struggles continue after probation and parole are completed because employers are often reluctant to hire registrants.

Childhood friendships can be difficult when parents won't allow kids to visit the home of a registrant or when kids learn to taunt children who live on the registry. Schools can be willing to humiliate the children of registrants by refusing to treat their family as all the other families are treated. Places of worship are too willing to restrict the ability of a registrant to attend services with his family.

The registry inhibits a family that wants to overcome the trauma of a family member committing a crime.

After serving the sentence handed down by the court, a person deserves to return to be welcomed back into society. The registry prevents that.

Families in which someone committed a violent, non-sexual assault are better able to return to life as it was before that crime because information about that crime is not easily available. Families of those on the registry deserve the same dignity and respect.

The  Andersons would do much more good by advocating for the abolition of the sex offender registry.

Rescuing minors is shortsighted.



Previous posts about Zach Anderson:

bad for kids, bad for all; abolish the registry!

The sex offender registry is a bad idea for anyone. No matter how guilty or how unsympathetic, no offender deserves extra-judicial punishment long after serving the sentence handed down by the court.

Lenore Skenazy says sex offender laws are "Taliban-esque"

Families torn apart are all too common when sex offenses are involved, even when the offense used to be something for which parents grounded the kids and law enforcement was only rarely involved.

what happens when a molester moves in next door to his victim?

A man molested his niece when she was a little girl and 12 years later when he was released from prison, he moved in with his mother next door to the victim.

“I was pretty outraged, but I have channeled that rage into a more positive outlet, which, for me, is sharing my story and empowering other victims of sexual assault,” [the victim] says, adding her parents researched state laws in the hopes of blocking the move, only to learn they had no legal recourse.

I am no psychologist but this sounds healthy. This young woman's story can help other families to recognize what may be happening in their own homes. Some former victims may not be comfortable telling their story and we must respect that.

We must also respect the discomfort caused when her uncle moved in next door. When we remember that child sexual abuse most frequently happens within a trusted family circle, we can see that a great number of victims must have to deal with encountering their former abuser.

A family--and any counselors--would do well to help the victims learn to deal with those encounters and to help the former abuser understand how to respect the victim's boundaries.

“I was coming back from class and he was out mowing in my grandmother’s backyard, and it made me uneasy just being home,” Dyer tells PEOPLE. “I go to school in Edmond so I’m only home half the time, and I think twice before going home now. I have a very close family, so it’s hard for me to not constantly be with them.”

Her unease is easy to understand.

It is also easy for legislators to jump on board the outrage train.

[...the victim] and her family have been meeting with State Rep. Kyle Hilbert, who tells PEOPLE he is committed to introducing fresh legislation to bar offenders from living within a certain distance of their victims.

Hilbert's legislation will not be engineered narrowly to this particular victim and offender. It will apply across the board to all offenders and victims, even those who want to find a way to reconcile, and even those who simply want the offender to have a place to live.

Again, most child sexual abuse happens inside families, or inside the circle of trusted friends. There are many families who see the value in keeping the family whole and not burdening the victim with a trail of broken family relationships.

Dyer says she no longer wants anything to do with her grandmother because of her decisions; when she was in high school, her uncle was released and lived with her grandmother until he violated probation and “went right back” to prison.

“She is supposed to protect me, she is supposed to take care of me,” Dyer says, “so for her to turn on me like this, she obviously doesn’t care about me.”

This victim has already (understandably) lost a relationship with her uncle and now her grandmother.

The criminal justice system should try to disrupt families as little as possible and yet Hilbert's legislation will cause more disruption for families and victims who have made choices different from Dyer's family.

Child victims will go through several phases of understanding what happened to them, depending on their ages. A small child with no understanding of sex may know only that the molester did something wrong and has to go away.

As the child approaches adolescence and begins to experience his or her own sexuality, understanding of the crime will shift. The new understanding will answer some questions for the child and will almost certainly bring up new questions.

When the victim has children, the understanding of the crime may change again...and yet again when her children get into trouble and need her protection. At that point, the victim may understand her grandmother's actions much differently.

Legislators need to see that what a victim feels today will change over time. The legislation will almost certainly not account for those changes.

Each family will deal with victims and offenders in its own way. Some family members will let their own outrage frighten the child; some will make every effort to let the child deal with events at her own level of understanding. Protecting the child from the adult understanding of what happens is essential to some, though some are unable to accomplish that.

Legislation that tries to solve a complicated situation like this will almost surely make things worse for some families. When a family wants the offender to come back home and live a law-abiding life, finding a residence for the offender is the first priority. In some cities, it is nearly impossible for an offender to find a place to live. If his mother's house is where he can live, why should legislation get in the way of that?

Legislators are the ones who create residence restrictions. Without those restrictions, the offender has a better chance of living away from family that doesn't want him around.

That problem cannot be solved by creating even more residence restrictions. Complicating the lives of offenders and their families makes it more likely that former offenders will break laws and be returned to prison, even if the law broken is not another sex offense.

Legislators need to back off and let families make their own way.

child porn investigation damages the whole family

A story from Nebraska:

...Paul Nader was arrested, charged with seven counts of child pornography and held in the Sarpy County Jail for almost a month. His arrest was reported on TV and online, along with his booking photo. Reporters talked to his neighbors about how he interacted with his kids. 

Then, seven months after the arrest, the charges were dismissed. 

Now the Naders have filed a federal lawsuit against Papillion, Sarpy County, Sarpy County Attorney Lee Polikov and several Papillion police detectives, citing the anguish and embarrassment of the episode.

 An arrest on child pornography charges would cause anguish and embarrassment to anyone, guilty or innocent.

On March 17, 2015, Papillion police searched the Nader home and questioned Paul Nader. During the search they found chemicals and books on terrorism. Nader said the chemicals were used to polish jewelry. According to the lawsuit, he spent more than 15 years in the Air Force, where he worked in counterintelligence. At the time of the search he was getting his doctorate in strategic security, the suit says, which he said accounted for the books. But police called in a bomb squad before confirming that the chemicals were legal.

Papillion police found none of the images identified by the tips during their search, according to the lawsuit. Nader was arrested based “solely” on the tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the couple’s suit says. He was charged with six counts of possession of child pornography. The charges later were amended to seven counts, then later changed to three counts.

Eventually, the charges were dropped. No harm done?

No.

The Naders’ children were placed with a relative. And after Nader posted bail and left jail, he was denied contact with his children for 79 days.

Nader's wife, a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, suspects that she was passed over for promotions because of her husband's child porn charges.

Police seized computers, tablets, cellphones, thumb drives and hard drives, among other items, from the Naders. The seized items included equipment on which Nader had stored his thesis and research, which he spent four years working on. That work was “irreplaceable,” according to a motion he filed in Sarpy County District Court to have his items returned. Much of this property was destroyed, the documents indicate. It is not clear if Paul Nader got his thesis work back.

Think about the data stored on the digital devices in your home: contact information, tax and other financial records, photos, videos, music, business records. How much damage would it do if a tornado or a flood snatched all of that away from you?

For the Naders, it wasn't a tornado or flood that did the damage and it could have been reversed if the investigators or prosecutors had completed the examination of the confiscated equipment quickly and returned the "clean" equipment back to the family. The damage could have been lessened if copies of important files had been returned to the family.

For the sake of argument, let's pretend that Nader was guilty. We could argue about whether he deserves to have the equipment returned to him but does his family? 

His wife and children were not charged with any crime and yet they suffered enormous losses. Removing children from the home without evidence that they have been terribly mistreated--and without evidence that the wife will also mistreat them--is inexcusable. Keeping children away from their father even though none of his charges were for contact offenses, let alone contact offenses involving his kids, is also inexcusable.

Criminal investigations ought to be done while treating innocent family members as if they are innocent.

The government caused great unnecessary damage to the Nader family. I hope they win their lawsuit.

look at these strange women who stay with sex offenders!

Inside Edition ran a story by Maya Chung about women who stay in relationships with sex offenders.

My first thought is that I cannot remember seeing the same kind of curiosity about those mysterious people who stay in relationships with someone who stole cars or committed fraud or beat the convenience store clerk. The assumption in those cases seems to be that spouses will stay or go based on individual choices. Some people stay with car thief spouses and some leave.

Chung details a couple of relationships between sex offenders and their wives.

Josh and Susan:

"My husband came home early one day after having a big fight over the weekend and he caught Josh and me in the shower,” Susan said. “I did try to end our relationship a few times but the chemistry was just so strong that it was hard to let each other go. I didn’t mean for it to happen."

Jerry and Melissa:

She met Jerry at a charity event in 2006 – 17 years after his second offense. She said they became friends before becoming romantically involved. When he told her his status on the registry soon after they began dating, and she made a conscious decision to stay with him.

As with love stories told by other couples, some stories are boring, some are mildly interesting, some are sweet and some are a little shocking. 

While it may seem surprising to many, some women are willing to go through being outwardly shunned by family and their communities in the defense of the men because to them, love trumps all. 

Women--and men--have always been willing to go through hell for people they love. How is this surprising?

Their experiences being in a relationship with a sex offender may be different, but these women have another thing in common: An undeniable faith in their men.

Yes, being in a relationship with a registered citizen offers a different experience. A parent can lose custody of his or her children; neighbors will make terrible assumptions and gossip about them; family members cut ties.

All because a name is on a list.

Because a name is on a list, there is a real risk of prison time for missing a paperwork deadline. Most families of former lawbreakers do not have to live with that hanging over their heads.

Sex offenders are not fearsome monsters. They are people who committed crimes, made terrible choices, or got caught up in surprising circumstances. Spouses and partners can continue to love or dislike them, trust or mistrust as they choose, based on whether they are good parents, good cooks, good lovers, or based on any criteria that mean something to a specific couple.

There is no default 'Abandon Ship' setting on relationships with registered sex offenders, just as there is no default setting on relationships with adulterers or with people who cheat on taxes or with people who are boring or snore too much or are overweight.

We all see relationships that don't make sense to us. Why does he stay with her? Has he not seen what a tyrant she can be at the PTA meetings? Why does she stay with him? Does she not know that he has never in his life had a generous moment?

The reason we look at spouses and partners of sex offenders as something exotic is because the registry encourages the false idea that registered citizens are dangerous.

Abolish the registry.

Nevada about to blunder forward with a wrong-headed law

To comply with the federal Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, Nevada will be adding hundreds of names to the sex offender registry, starting July 1.

Not only will hundreds of names be added but the method of categorizing offenders will change. Currently, each offender is assessed to determine the risk of reoffense and categorized accordingly. Those in Tier 1 have been assessed as low risk and do not appear on the online registry.

Now, all sex offenders will be on the website.

Under the new law, tier levels are based on a conviction and age of the victim.

There will be no attempt to look at each offender to determine how likely it is that he will reoffend.

Because the law is retroactive to 1956, many offenders already deemed by a judge to be no threat to the community will have to register and have their names, photos and addresses available for public scrutiny.

Retroactive to 1956! Sixty years ago. Long enough to prove risk of reoffense by not reoffending. How much clearer can it be?

People who have lived law-abiding lives for decades will now be exposed on the registry. Families will need to explain crimes committed ages ago, long before children and grandchildren were born.

Registered sex offenders will lose jobs, lose housing, and almost certainly lose relationships because of the changes to the registry.

The interest of public safety is better served by making it  more possible for RSOs to have a place to live, a job, and community support--not by passing laws that make it less possible.

Under the old system, 1,923 were considered Tier 1, or low-risk offenders. That number declines to 1,646 under the new assessment. Tier 1 offenders are required to register for 15 years and appear annually in person at a local law enforcement agency to update and verify their information. 

The number of Tier 2 offenders goes from 2,648 to 1,790. They must report every six months for 25 years. 

Tier 3 offenders jump to 3,014 from 239 under the old classification system, and are required to report in person every 90 days.

Nevada will go from having 239 on the high risk tier to over twelve times as many on the highest tier. Not because the 2775 people added to the highest tier are more dangerous than they used to be, remember, but because categorization no longer takes into account anything about them except their crimes.

Critics argue the law does not take into consideration the age of the offender or circumstances. A bill to try to fix some of the problems was passed by the 2015 Legislature but vetoed by Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval because it also eliminated a requirement that certain offenders stay at least 500 feet away from schools, parks and other places frequented by children.

When a legislature starts down the path toward bad law, it seems they can only make it worse.

bad for kids, bad for all: abolish the registry!

Judith Levine and Erica Meiners write about sex offender advocates who use stories about kids on the registry to push for change. Stories about juveniles are often quite sympathetic. Josh Gravens and Zach Anderson are two cases that have drawn much attention to the cause of keeping juveniles off the registry.

...these “new” sex offenders are humanized: attractive, promising, law-abiding heterosexual sons and fathers who made some youthful mistakes and deserve a second chance. ... 

In one way, it makes sense to focus on extricating juvenile sex offenders from the registry. An estimated one-fourth of the people on the public sex offender registries were convicted as juveniles. Fifteen states post the names and photos of offenders who are minors on the online registries. Thirteen of the 20 states that lock up people in indefinite civil commitment—preventive, dubiously therapeutic detention for crimes not yet committed—include people who committed their offenses as juveniles. “The single age with the greatest number of offenders from the perspective of law enforcement was age 14,” according to the U.S. Department of Justice. 

As Raised on the Registry powerfully showed, with little or no intervention these young people are virtually guaranteed not to “reoffend,” mainly because so many of them are penalized for engaging in sex play—things that, even if not always entirely consensual, are common among children and usually without long-lasting harm. 

There is no question that getting some people off the list can be a first step toward getting others off—and a way of chipping away at the policy. 

Anyone who sees the damage caused by the registry celebrates any of the incremental improvements to the lives of registrants.

But there are also significant downsides to campaigns that construct children as exceptional and different from adults. The public may just as easily be left feeling that adults who break the law are bad and deserve all they get—or that guilty people do not deserve fairness or sympathy. This gives legislators a rationale for trading off youth-friendly criminal justice policies for harder adult penalties, as recently happened when New Mexico legalized sexting between teens but increased penalties for people 18 and older sexting with people under 18. Not just adults but some youth can be penalized by the focus on “children.” Call the person who breaks the law a “child,” and there’s a danger that any young person not demonstrably childlike will end up prosecuted as an adult. 

Exclusive focus on the young offender—rather than a rejection of the entire sex offender regime—avoids the larger, less politically popular truth. “Sex offender registries are harmful to kids and to adults,” says Emily Horowitz, associate professor of sociology and criminal justice at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, and a board member of the National Center for Reason & Justice, which works for sensible child-protective policies and against unjust sex laws. “No evidence exists that they prevent sex crimes either by juvenile offenders or adult offenders.” [My emphasis.]

The sex offender registry is a bad idea for anyone. No matter how guilty or how unsympathetic, no offender deserves extra-judicial punishment long after serving the sentence handed down by the court.

Who could quibble about an organization like Center on Youth Registration Reform (CYRR)? Why not work to keep juveniles off the registry? Why not start there?

When focusing on juveniles, it is easy to sacrifice adults with worse crimes as a sop to those who still believe registries offer some benefits to society.

Such a strategy can invite a wider range of supporters, but it also can mean inadvertent acceptance or even endorsement of policies that are antagonist to justice for wider groups, if not for everyone. For instance, CYRR is collaborating with Eli Lehrer, of the free-market think tank R Street; he is also a signatory of the conservative Right on Crime initiative. Flagged on the CYRR site is an article by Lehrer, published this winter in National Affairs, that argues for taking kids off the registry. But the piece also concludes that ending the registries would be “unwise” and suggests they’d be really good with a few “sensible” tweaks. Lehrer also proposes hardening policies—such as “serious” penalties for child pornography possession and the expanded use of civil commitment—that data reveal to be arbitrary or ineffective and many regard as gross violations of constitutional and human rights. 

In a more recent piece in the Daily Caller, as well as testimony before the South Dakota legislature this session, Lehrer repeats how important it is to punish “child molesters” harshly, and while he notes the low recidivism rate for juvenile sex offenders, does not mention that other adults with sex offenses show similarly low rates.

The registry is useless in the cause of public safety. Let's not pretend otherwise.

The registry does lasting harm to families who have a member on the registry and no family deserves that, not even families of someone who committed a crime that draws universal condemnation.

Levine and Meiners write about the argument that putting so many people on the registry makes it easy to lose track of offenders who really ought to be tracked. Some organizations like RSOL, Reform Sex Offender Laws, advocate for a registry available only to law enforcement. Changes like these could free many thousands from the registry but those changes would also abandon some families to the public humiliation of the registry and all its deleterious effects.

Offering to leave anyone on the registry is offering up families to suffer for the cause of the more likeable, more sympathetic offenders. No family deserves the registry. 

Incrementalism, or taking small steps, has often been posited as the pathway to justice–“Wait. We’ll make reforms now and work on the wider problem later.” Incrementalism can work. Reforms are necessary because they improve daily existence for the people inside the system—in court, in juvenile or immigrant detention, in jails and prison. But organizers must constantly calibrate the tension between reform and radical change, and the dangers of reform without a vision of radical change. By cleaning up a fundamentally corrupt institution, reforms risk legitimizing the institution, often just enough to make it politically palatable. As Martin Luther King wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, “Wait almost always means never.”

The registry, in any form, is not palatable. It does nothing to prevent sex abuse and does nothing to improve public safety.

Abolish the registry.

December 11, 2020

Edited to correct my mistake: Judith Levine's co-author is Erica Meiners (not Reimers).

lessons to be learned from teens charged with child porn felonies

In Bellevue NE, four teens and an adult have been charged with child pornography crimes. The article says the 20-year-old set up "an account online" and then lured a 17-year-old girl to send him sexually explicit photos of herself. The images were then passed around among the four teens.

Definitely nasty behavior, if this is truly what happened. The article gives very few details.

Amie Konwinski, of Smart Girl Style, was interviewed for the story and she has advice for parents.

Konwinski said it's a relatively new story but it's one she's heard before. Konwinski teaches teens and parents about the power of social media. 

"We really need to tell our kids that hey, this is a thing. Predatory sextortion is a possibility, and how easy it is for somebody to create a fake account and ask those girls for those pics," Konwinski said.

Predatory sextortion might be a thing but getting charged with a felony is a thing that might be more likely to happen and will do as much if not more damage to the teens involved. Konwinski ought to be educating teens and their parents about felony charges that can result from what teens see as private behavior.

Konwinski said parents need to have conversations with their children and keep an eye on their social media. She said one way to do this is making sure teens can't download apps without parental permission and to be aware that they may have accounts they don't want the parents to see. 

This is ridiculous advice. Teens using social media for private communication that may include intimate photos--no matter how unwise that is--need to know the dangers involved. They could be arrested, go to prison, and be on the sex offender registry for the rest of their lives.

"Parents need to sit down and say, 'Hey, what's your secret Instagram account?' And see what your kid says. If their eyes get big, you got them there," Konwinski said.

Well, there you go. Now that you know they have a secret account, you got them there. What are you going to do with that information? Parents who do not already know how easily kids can set up accounts without telling Mom and Dad are way behind in the game.

Instead of gotcha questions for teens about secret Instagram accounts, parents must educate kids about how impulsive behavior can be charged as a felony, how easily those crimes can be discovered, and the terrible weight of the punishment that can follow.

Instead of clinging to the belief that child porn always means unspeakable images of toddlers, parents need to tell kids that child porn can include images of teens who are definitely not children. Barring developmental issues, a 17-year-old is not a child.

Instead of teaching them the usual lesson that social media can be used to harm girls, teach them that both boys and girls can be charged with felonies for producing, sending, or receiving images meant only for significant others.

Instead of trying to catch kids at wrong-doing, educate them about how private behavior--exchanging naughty pictures or videos--can land them in serious legal trouble. Tagging kids with a sex offender label will hinder their ability to finish high school, go to college, get a job, raise a family of their own.

Perhaps most important of all, talk to your legislators about how easily kids can be caught up in the criminal justice system and how the laws need to change. Tell them that labeling kids with a label that will affect them for the rest of their lives is a grave injustice that must be righted.

Remember, too, that many families are already living that awful reality. Getting arrested as an adult instead of as a teen does not make the registry a more just punishment.

Tell your legislators that no family deserves to live on the registry. Tell them to abolish the registry.

surprised by WAR: "it takes a moment to digest that such a group exists"

The Daily News (TDN.com) out of Longview WA ran an opinion piece expressing shock at an email they received in response to an earlier story about a vigilante "sex abuse sting." After telling the reader,

Let’s be clear, The Daily News does not support vigilantism, we think local law enforcement does a great job and we should stay out of their way 

...TDN goes on to explain which vigilante operations they do support.

There have been all types of vigilantes throughout history. Some romanticized in fiction like Robin Hood, Superman and Batman. And then there are groups and individuals like the Guardian Angels and John Walsh.

No one can dispute the amazing work of people like John Walsh from his television program “America’s Most Wanted” and we aren’t going to start. Nor are we going to weigh in on the pros and cons of what Curtis Hart did this past week.

True to part of their word, they do not weigh in on the cons of what Curtis Hart did.

What we are concerned about is what happened after we ran the stories.

We received an email from a group called WAR, Women Against Registry.

And then...the belly laugh:

It takes a moment to digest that such a group exists, a group that defends the privacy of sex offenders and is against a national registry.

It takes a moment. Really? A whole moment??

Their entire organization is about educating the public as to how the sex offender suffers after they have been convicted of a crime of a sexual nature and stopping laws that are put in place to protect society from sex offenders. On the homepage of their website, the group tag line is “Fighting the Destruction of Families.” 

We found this quote on the brochure emailed to us, “We, the members of WAR, feel that it is time to stop the cruelty. It is time to reform the registry for the good of the over three million family members of registered sex offenders who live under the invisible punishments of the registry every day.” 

So it appears, at first glance that this group is claiming that it’s the registration of the sex offender that’s harming the offender’s family, not the act they are found guilty of committing.

WAR is also against the reauthorization of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act.  

Once they loosened their grasp on their pearls, it seems they did read the email from WAR and absorbed what it said. Until...

In the midst of a re-telling of the Adam Walsh story, they lose all sense of perspective. After detailing the gruesome crime:

The details of the crime are disturbing, yet sadly, not uncommon.

Not uncommon? After discussing the decapitation of a child, they pronounce it not uncommon.

No wonder they are shocked that anyone could oppose the registry! They are completely disconnected from reality.

Women Against Registry are opposed to the Adam Walsh Act. They claim this law harms the offender and their families because they might not be able to keep or find a job, they are threatened by members of the general public, the offenders suffer from depression, anxiety and are teased.

 Teased. Yes, sex offenders are teased. They are also murdered right there in Washington state.

We don’t agree with the public harming, harassing, assaulting, either verbally or physically.

They don't agree with tormenting sex offenders in the same way TDN "does not support vigilantism."

But what about the victim? What about the family of the victims?

If TDN is concerned about the family of the victim, have they considered what it must feel like for the family to hear details of the child's death over and over again?

Is society better served by the public knowing where these predators are living? [My emphasis.]

Now, there's a question a good journalist would love to dig into. Is society better served knowing where these predators are living? Much research has been done on this question, leaving us to wonder which studies will be cited to answer it. Their answer:

We thinks [sic] so and, as parents, we appreciate these laws.

Oh, TDN! You think so?

If that's the best they can do to answer a question easily answered with facts, then it is time for WAR to fire off another email.

Maybe this time TDN will absorb all of what WAR says.

You think so?

Law and Order: SVU surprises me

I wrote a piece for the National RSOL (Reform Sex Offender Laws) website: 

A friend asked me to watch this week’s episode of Law and Order SVU, a show I stopped watching years ago because its enjoyment of perversion–what awful crimes can we detail for our audience this week?–was disturbing. My friend told me this episode, “Collateral Damages” (season 17, episode 15), was about child pornography, so I expected the show to get the details all wrong. Television so often does. 

Stop reading now if you do not want spoilers. 

The episode begins with an undercover operation in which the cops set up a popular local celebrity so that he will commit a sex crime against an undercover cop posing as a girl “almost 16 years old.” In a bare few minutes, the celebrity meets the “teen,” tells her she is a bombshell, gives her alcohol, convinces her to pose topless for him, photographs her, and begins to unbuckle his belt. That’s when the cops move in to arrest him for producing child pornography and for attempted rape of a child. 

I rolled my eyes and settled in for more simplistic nonsense. Then the show gets interesting. 

The celebrity makes a deal to help the cops nail a “pedophile ring” in exchange for a lighter sentence. (The word “pedophile” is tossed around in the show in a facile way that makes it obvious the writers did not bother checking the definition.) He provides information that helps the cops identify IP addresses, and they move in to arrest several men. In a twist, one of the members of the pedophile ring turns out to be one of their own, the Deputy Commissioner no one likes. 

The Deputy Commissioner’s wife, though, is well-liked, and her work as a children’s advocate attorney is respected. She and her husband have two children. 

We watch as their home fills up with cops. We watch the cops take the husband and father away. We watch the confusion of the wife and kids. We watch as they are told to go to a hotel so the cops can search the apartment. 

I wasn’t rolling my eyes anymore. My heart was pounding. I remember this. 

I remember the chaos, the anger, the fear, the confusion. 

Law and Order gets the bad guy, as usual, but this episode, too close to real life, is not neatly wrapped up. 

To protect the children from the media firestorm, they are sent to live with grandparents. The wife is told to take leave of absence from her job. She moves to a hotel to avoid the press. 

The husband tries to kill himself. The wife wonders how she could have missed seeing that her husband was sick. 

The celebrity who actually did sexually assault kids? He will serve about six months. 

The Deputy Commissioner heads to prison for four years as part of a plea deal that includes heavy duty treatment and registration. His anguish and shame and self-disgust is obvious. This time it is clear that he, while disliked by the cops and while guilty of looking at child porn, is also a beloved father and husband. 

A good man whose family will suffer because of what he did. And his family is my family: collateral damage.

When TV shows begin to show the inequities in the criminal justice system and the effect on the families involved, change is on the way.

NY registry is 20 years old; offenders leaving the list

What can we learn from what is happening in New York state? The headline says,"Thousands of NY state sex offenders due to disappear from public registry".

State law requiring Level 1 offenders to report their whereabouts to the registy for a 20-year period was up Jan. 1, News 12 Long Island reports. The law took effect in 1996.

What a relief for those thousands of offenders and their families!

Laura Ahearn of the Long Island advocacy group Parents of Megan’s Law told the station about 60 to 70 Level 1 sex offenders in Nassau and Suffolk alone will come off the registry this year.

“We have a stack of Level 1 offenders that have committed serious offenses against young children — as young as 2 years old — and they are going to be dropping off that registry,” Ahearn told CBS New York. 

The Level 1 designation can include child molestation, rape in the first degree and sodomy, according to the station.

Serious crimes, certainly. Those serious crimes landed those thousands of offenders on the registry for 20 years on top of any sentence they were given by the court.

If only Laura Ahern had taken this letter to heart.

More from FoxNews:

Long Island Republican Dean Murray has introduced a bill in the Assembly that would extend the 20-year requirement to 30 years.

Is Assemblyman Murray perhaps...running for re-election? Why, yes. Yes, he is. At the link:

Dean believes in common sense, bi-partisan solutions to cut job-killing taxes to make it easier for Long Islanders to live, work and raise their families.

For someone who wants to make it easier for Long Islanders to live, work and raise their families, he is introducing a bill that will do the opposite for thousands. An Assemblyman represents everyone in his district, including any registered citizens and their families.

Why should those thousands of offenders get another ten years on the registry? Have a large number of those thousands committed new sex crimes? Statistically,we know that is highly unlikely.

That could explain why the Assemblyman makes no mention of those new sex crimes.

Congratulations to those in New York who no longer need to worry about registration.

how it feels to register

How does it feel to have to register? Sosen.org carries a piece written by a registrant and he includes registration stories from other people. 

The writer tells us what it is like to register every three months:

The last week before I must register my family notices that I am irritable and tend to snap at them a lot.   I lose interest in most everything and do not eat very much.  I look at the date as many as twenty times a day.  I can’t be late.  I get sick often and I don’t sleep. Depression set in and I find it hard to concentrate.

About two days before I have to register I start playing the what if game.  What if the law has changed and I didn’t know it?  What if they change it to a strict 90 days and not the three month calendar date?  What if they arrest me for something I don’t know about?

Is he paranoid? Not a bit. Laws change and often registrants are not notified of the changes.

The same scenario plays out every time.  I take my wife into my office.  I make sure she has all my internet passwords and accounts.  I make sure she has our lawyer’s phone number close at hand.

Four times a year, he prepares to leave his family. Just in case.

The registration routine varies. Every jurisdiction does things a little differently. This man goes to an office where he has to go into the jail to register.

While the jailer retrieves my paperwork I look around the room.  Concrete block walls, brown in color.  It is cool around 65 degrees.  There are three holding cells behind me and a shower in the open [cell] to my left.  On more than one occasion I have been there when a prisoner was stripped and showered by force, once it was a woman.  I felt so badly for her.  She cried as they removed [her clothes,] showered her and threw her into a holding cell.  The jailers, one man and two women laughed and made comments about her body.  I was sickened by it and ask myself, Who are the sex offenders?

I know a man who, when registering for the first time, was asked to describe the child porn he downloaded. The officer asked, what race were the girls in the videos? None of those details were needed for the registration record; the officers entertained themselves by humiliating the man in front of his wife. So, yes, one does wonder who the creeps really are.

The writer tells the stories of other people who register or have a family member who does.

A mother says:

Every 90 days when my child is forced to register as a high risk, violent predator, for consensual sex at age 16, I feel a fire burn through my veins at how callously his life has been destroyed not only by the ignorance of the politicians but the citizens of this country who are under the myth that registries protect children. As a mother, parent and citizen I realize I have a responsibility to educate others with the truth on these laws and find ways to truly prevent child sexual abuse by using facts, statistics and education and treatment.

States that adopted the Adam Walsh Act assign tiers based on the crimes. Everyone convicted of this crime belongs to this tier; the tier assignments are automatic. No one looks at each registrant to decide if he or she presents a risk to the community. Lives of registrants and their families are profoundly affected, and unfairly affected, by that automatic tier assignment.

A man says:

It feels like I have no rights, my country is waging war against me and my family, and nothing I have done in 23 years counts for anything. 

A woman writes about her husband:

As he gets older, he slips further and further away from feeling like he’ll ever find any kind of redemption on this earth.  He’s also distanced himself more and more from his family because they’ve given him little opportunity for redemption.  It’s very difficult to watch on a daily basis.

Registry laws do not offer redemption; instead the registry keeps them from finding it in the community. When someone is given the label that generates fear and disgust from the community, how is he ever to live down his past?

The rest of us get to move beyond the mistakes we made, big and small. For registrants, the country is waging war against them, passing laws willy-nilly, with no regard to the effect on the families of registrants...and no regard for the fact that those laws protect no one.

No one except politicians. When you vote for a candidate because he or she promises to keep your children safe, you aren't protecting children, you are protecting the politician's job.

Abolish the registry.

these women will never recover

What happens to the wife of a man convicted of a terrible crime? Shannon Maroney tells how her life changed when her husband raped two women.

He confessed to the crime; in fact, he called 911 to tell police what he had done. From that point, her life was turned inside out.

News of the crimes hit the media, and I couldn't return to my home, now a crime scene surrounded by police tape. Privacy was ripped away and replaced by public scrutiny. He has a wife. Who is she? What's wrong with her? Was she part of this?

She had done nothing wrong and yet she began paying for his crime immediately.

The police were clear in telling me whose side I was on, no matter what my feelings for the victims might be. When I asked if there was anything I could do to help them, the victim services officer looked me up and down and said sternly, "The victims don't need to hear from Jason's arena."

Some friends drew lines in the sand, too. "Shannon, don't you know these women will never recover? You can't have compassion for them and Jason." Others offered their sympathy and support, as they faced their own conflicted feelings toward the Jason they'd known and the terrible things he had done.

These women will never recover. Labeling the victims according to the role they played in his crime--the woman who was raped! the wife!--forces the victims into a narrative the public enjoys in a twisted way. You think Nancy Grace doesn't enjoy the stories she details exhaustively again and again, trying to draw the audience into her horror story? The audience of strangers, family, and friends does the same thing, telling and retelling the story, relishing the thrill of the gory details, The players in the drama are not allowed to step out of their assigned roles and be people with complicated emotions about the crimes. These women will never recover.

While Jason spent nine months in solitary confinement — or "protective custody," as it was called — I was left on the outside to deal with the aftermath, completely unprotected, an easy target for judgment and blame. My school principal banned me from entering the school without permission and forced me out of my job. I lost my salary, benefits, seniority, place of belonging, and, worst of all, my relationships with students, staff, and parents. I was made guilty by association. [My emphasis.]

 She had done nothing wrong. Remember that...because the principal did not.

I turned to victim services at the police for help, as surely they could let the public know I had nothing to do with the crimes, that I hated what Jason had done. ...

But there was no one to help me. The defense counsel was for Jason, the accused. Victim services were for the real victims, not the collateral ones like me. I didn't fit anywhere. All I could do was put one foot in front of the other and try to find a way through to the other side, whatever that would look like.

Other wives out there are nodding as they read this story, recognizing themselves in it. With 850,000 sex offenders and 2.2 million people incarcerated in the U.S., that leaves millions of people who are collateral victims ignored by victim services, left alone to deal with the aftermath.

At the end of it, after enormous pain and loss were expressed in victim impact statements, remorse and confusion were expressed in Jason's statement, and the facts of the assaults were reviewed by the judge, all that happened is that one person was sent to prison for the rest of his life and everyone else was just sent home. It was indescribably empty, with no peace or healing to be found. That was something, it seemed, we would each have to find on our own.

Even the real victims, the ones who were raped, are left with no peace or healing. While sending the rapist to prison is the right thing to do, that alone does nothing to resolve the ugly mess of emotions caused by the crime. We ought not pretend that fear of him doing it again is the only thing the victims must deal with. Putting him in prison does not help with the rest of their turmoil.

They put the state and the accused in the center and victims around the periphery, typically using victims' stories only to achieve a conviction and to influence sentencing. The focus is on retribution.

Retribution is not healing.

Because when we merely lock people up, we seal off much of our own chance to build understanding or have our questions answered. Victims can be plagued by questions their whole lives, questions that only the offenders may be able to answer: Why did you do it? What was going through your mind? Why me? Do you know what you've done? Do you know how you've hurt me and my loved ones? How can I know you won't do it again?

Neither the real nor the collateral victims deserve to be left with unanswered questions. Restorative justice programs, Shannon Maroney's passion, offer a chance for them to ask those questions of the perpetrator and for the perpetrator to answer. Answering the questions can be part of healing the perpetrators, too

Maroney refers to the conversations she had with her husband during prison visits as an "informal" restorative justice process. It is an interesting thought, that people like her have been engaging in restorative justice ahead of the professionals.

At the same time, though, she was being punished by her community for being the wife of a man who did something terrible. That is what the sex offender registry does to families: punishes them right along with the sex offender.

We lock down the families of offenders, typically into poverty, stigma, and shame. We often deem victims to be ruined for life. We make pariahs of people who have made mistakes right along with people who plan and carry out murder and harm "in cold blood," rather than getting to the root causes of either type of offending behavior. And all too often, we lock up people who suffer from mental illness, even as we know we cannot punish the mental illness out of a person.

Could professionals learn something from those informal restorative justice sessions that could lead to better help for the real victims?

These women will never recover. That's just wrong.

Missouri family speaks out against registry

The registry has an unreasoning reach. Eric Adler of the Kansas City Star writes the story of a Missouri man falsely accused of molesting his son. Twenty-six years later as an adult, the son is working to remove his father's name from the sex offender registry.

The story is compelling and the Midwest Innocence Project is considering whether to take this man's case.

The article provides information about how retroactive laws can affect a registered citizen and his family. This man has lived in his home since 2000 but a new court ruling may force him out. The registry does not recognize his law-abiding life. At all.

It knows only that registered citizens are easy targets.

If sex offender registries are about keeping close tabs on offenders, [Captain Mike Rogers of the Jackson County Sherrif's Department] said, forcing them to move would send the system into chaos.

Yes, if keeping track of sex offenders is important, letting them stay in place seems much simpler...unless we understand that the registry has nothing to do with community safety and everything to do with tormenting those whose offenses we find abhorrent.

“I think sex offender registries are an important part of an overall child-protection strategy,” said Staca Shehan of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Her division at the center helps authorities by collecting information on the whereabouts of “noncompliant” sex offenders, those who have failed to register. No clear number exists, but she estimated there are tens of thousands nationwide.

Note that no clear number exists, but let's assume that her estimate is close. Have those tens of thousands of offenders been out there committing more sex crimes? No.

Certainly national headline-grabbing stories have tended to reinforce the need for vigilance. 

Shehan offered the example of Jaycee Lee Dugard, the 11-year-old California girl who was grabbed off a street as she walked home from school. Dugard remained missing for 18 years until, in 2009, she was recognized and found in the company of convicted sex offender Phillip Craig Garrido, who had kept her captive. 

“There’s others,” Shehan said. “It is anecdotal, for the most part, but we have seen cases where registered and noncompliant sex offenders have re-offended and raped or murdered a child.” 

Case in point, she said, is John Albert Gardner, who in 2010 pleaded guilty to the rape and murder of 14-year-old Amber Dubois in 2009 and 17-year-old Chelsea King in 2010, both in California. Gardner was a convicted sex offender who had been imprisoned previously for molesting a 13-year-old girl.

Shehan could look at the research that shows that registered sex offenders are very unlikely to commit another sex crime but, instead, she tells stories of individual cases.

The two cases she mentions, Garrido and Gardner, both illustrate how the registry offers no protection. Both men were on the registry when they committed the crimes she talks about.

The reporter talked to the mother about how her son came to tell her that his father had molested him.

[She] said that it was in that moment that the notion he might have been sexually abused crossed her mind. She had been following the news, and in the 1980s, child sexual abuse was making national headlines. The McMartin preschool case — in which it was later determined that preschool workers were falsely accused of abusing some 360 children in their care — was still working its way through the courts. 

“All of sudden something hit me,” she recalled. “If you remember, that was about the time everything started coming out, saying, ‘Ask your kids if someone has touched them.’ ”

The 1980s were rife with stories of child sex abuse in day cares and preschools. Each story generated more fear, more false accusations. See here for information about several.

Here we are in the next century and the sex offender registry is generating the same kind of unreasoning fear.

I commend the Missouri family for coming forward with their story. The more people understand what it is like to live under registry rules, the better.

what does this hysteria teach our children?

A 74-year-old grandfather was denied entrance to a school where he had been invited to have lunch. His step-grandson had invited him to celebrate Grandparents' Day.

The hangup? The school uses Raptor, a system used to check identification; it alerts the school when it identifies a sex offender. The grandfather's crime was 16 years ago and he has committed no further crimes since then.

Listen to the hysterical tone of the article:

A Rutherford County elementary school was put to the test two weeks ago when a registered sex offender attempted to get inside Brown’s Chapel Elementary School during lunch. 

...attempted to get inside... 

Was he trying to break in through a window or picking a lock?

No, he was entering the school just like all the other grandparents were.

The man never made it past the front office on Sept. 11, thanks to a computer software system designed to keep sex offenders out. 

...never made it past the front office...

This old Hertz commercial comes to mind. The grandfather wasn't trying to get away with anything. He just came for lunch.

The incident occurred on Grandparents Day at the school. 

He was invited by his step-grandson. The grandson had not been told that sex offender grandparents were not welcome and there is a very real possibility that the boy did not even know about the crime that occurred years before he was born.

“An elderly person not really the standard that you would think you have to be concerned about,” said Principal Kellye Goostree.

Consider this: The person who made that unbelievably stupid statement is the principal of a school.

School personnnel should be better educated about sex offenses. 

Does the principal not know that a third of sexual assaults against children are perpetrated by children...whom her school welcomes with open arms? Does she not know that it is more likely that her students will be molested by someone on her staff--someone who has daily contact with students--than by a one-time visitor who stopped by for some chicken nuggets?

Schools accept those risks without blinking an eye and yet the risk of someone on a list--a list with an extremely low rate of reoffense--is seen as so great that it requires large investments in hardware and software.

The clueless principal blathers on:

“How amazing that we were able to prevent a convicted sex offender from having lunch with people’s children,” Goostree said.

Not "with people's children". With his grandson.

So far, Raptor has been a proven success.

How so?

“We’ve had four hits in the seven years,” Goostree said.  “It’s a huge safety feature for our students.”

If Raptor costs $6,000 per year (an estimate drawn from this), the school has paid $10,500 to catch each registered sex offender. Not to detect a sex offense, mind you; to identify someone on a list.

Was it worth $10,500 to single out this boy and make him known as the kid whose dangerous grandpa is not allowed in the school?

In all the years the school managed without the wonders of Raptor, how many times did a visitor to the school sexually assault a student or a staff member? 

What does the hysteria about registered sex offenders teach children? 

It teaches children that people on a list are the ones to fear. When over ninety percent of sex offense arrests are of people not on the list, we are directing children to be wary of the wrong people.

It teaches children that they are wrong to love and admire a grandparent who has come through a difficult time and has lived a law-abiding life since.

It teaches the community that it is acceptable to single out and embarrass children who love sex offenders.

Raptor stopped a man from having lunch with his grandson and the principal crows about the great success, without a single thought about the effect on the grandson.

Not a single thought that the boy might be hurt or confused by this turn of events. Not a single thought that exposing the grandfather as a registered sex offender may also expose the child to details of a crime he is too young to understand.

Instead of encouraging pointless hysteria, we ought to be upset about school boards deciding to throw away taxpayer funds on wrongheaded nonsense.

We ought to be upset about thoughtless principals who think it is acceptable to treat the children and grandchildren of registered citizens as if they do not matter.

struck down: Wisconsin law violated free speech rights of registered sex offenders

Sex offenders, cameras, children. The combination has been harmful when the resulting photos are pornographic. When the photos are not pornographic?

A Wisconsin law prohibiting registered sex offenders from photographing children in public violates their right to free speech, the state Court of Appeals held Tuesday. 

The decision by the Wausau-based District 3 court reversed the conviction of a 44-year-old Green Bay man who had been sentenced to 12 years in prison for the non-pornographic photos. It also found the law unconstitutional on its face, not salvageable by a narrowed interpretation or severing part of the statute.

The guy took pictures of kids playing outside.

[...pictures] of children outside his residence doing things like riding skateboards, jumping rope and dropping stones in a soda bottle. None involved nudity or obscenity.

In case you missed it, the guy got twelve years in prison for that.

In an opinion written by Reserve Judge Thomas Cane, and joined by judges Lisa Stark and Thomas Hruz, the court found that even sex offenders have free speech rights to take non-obscene, non-pornographic photographs of children in public places.

...even sex offenders have free speech rights...

While protecting children is such an interest, the court said, the law doesn't accomplish that. In fact, it could actually encourage offenders to make personal contact with children, in order to ask who their parents are so the offender might ask permission to take the photos. 

"Further, children are not harmed by non-obscene, non-pornographic photographs taken in public places," the court said.

Common sense truth-telling.

The court said it does not like the idea that some people might gain sexual gratification from ordinary photos of children, but that laws can't ban protected speech just because it might lead to crime.

If gaining sexual gratification from photos were a crime, Victoria's Secret and Pink catalogs have surely led many astray.

Prohibiting registered citizens from photographing children means no photos of homeruns, dance solos, and no photos of baby's first (or hundredth) time down the playground slide.

As usual, legislators were not thinking of families or the importance of normal family activities to someone returning from prison. Family connection is one of the factors that help registered citizens avoid new offenses of any kind.

I do not know how many other states prohibit RSOs from taking photos of children. This Wisconsin victory gives hope.

Sex offenders have the right to free speech.

Naturally. 

neighborhoods with more RSOs report fewer sex offenses

Surprise, surprise.

Amid a growing national debate over sex offender registries, researchers who studied years of crime data from Baltimore County have released a new finding: Neighborhoods with more registered sex offenders experienced fewer reported sex offenses. [My emphasis.]

Unexpected. Or is it?

[University of Michigan law professor J.J.] Prescott and co-author Amanda Y. Agan, a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton, say they wanted to test the assumption that the risk of victimization is higher in places where convicted offenders live — the basis, they say, for laws that mandate registries. ...

Agan and Prescott found that each sex offender registered in a neighborhood was associated with 7.5 percent fewer reported sex offenses.

The researchers suggest possible explanations for this.

Sex offender laws appear likely to increase the attractiveness of a registrant's offending away from home, they wrote...

Hang on, here. Does this suggest that all those residence restriction laws are pointless? Is it really possible that someone would travel farther than 500 or 1500 or 2500 feet to commit another sex offense? This explanation begins with the assumption that registered citizens are committing undiscovered crimes, hardly a benign assumption.

...and public registries may make residents better able to protect themselves from registered offenders who live nearby.

If looking at the registry improves our ability to protect against sex offenses, that would imply that the dastardly registered sex offenders target the registry watchers in order to give the neighborhood a lower rate of sex offenses. Those who don't watch the registry are, according to this theory, as able or as unable to protect themselves as they were without the registry, having no effect on the neighborhood rate of offense. This theory depends on RSOs knowing who watches the registry and who doesn't. It also depends on the assumption that registered citizens are trying to commit crimes.

Ryan T. Shields, a scientist at the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said a growing body of research shows state registries have little effect on sexual victimization rates.

Growing body of research, indeed. It is difficult to find any clear research findings that the registries have any good effect on sex offense rates.

He said he was not surprised by the most recent findings. Most sexual abuse is perpetrated by people who know the victim — such as relatives and family friends. 

"People who are not registered account for the vast majority of sex offenses in a given year," Shields said. [My emphasis.]

If those who are not registered are comitting most sex offenses, that means the registry is a list of people unlikely to commit another sex offense.

But state Sen. Jim Brochin, a staunch supporter of the state's registry, said it has given families an important tool they need to protect their children. 

Whoa, there, Senator. Protect their children against whom? How does the registry protect children against the people who are not registered but who account for the vast majority of sex offenses?

"We're not going stop every sex offender from doing the horrific things they do, but we have an obligation to our neighbors to make sure they have all the information that the courts and the judicial system have about where these offenders are," the Towson Democrat said. "You have a right to know, when your kids are outside playing, if there are predators nearby."

Sex offenders doing horrific things. Kids playing outside with predators nearby. Oh, stop, Senator! You frighten me so!

See where Senator Brochin is going with his wild imaginings? Probably toward the next election.

Occam's Razor says the simplest explanation is likely correct, so let's set aside unproven assumptions that sex offenders are committing or trying to commit more sex offenses and focus on facts to find the simplest explanation.

Even before registries, sex offenders were unlikely to reoffend. A neighborhood with a large number of RSOs is full of people--the RSOs themselves--who are familiar with the signs of sex abuse (or sexual compulsions) and its terrible effects on a family. This is why they tend not to offend again.

Simple enough?

Another simple explanation is that a neighborhood who sees how difficult life is for registered citizens and their families is less likely to report a sex offense.

Researchers should look at the possibility that harsh treatment of sex offenders encourages people to hide sex offenses that happen within the circle of family and friends.

Tucked into the article at the link are some encouraging words.

...a growing national debate over sex offender registries... 

The debate is growing because registered citizens and their families are standing up and speaking out.

...a growing body of research shows state registries have little effect on sexual victimization rates...

Research is proving us right: abolishing the registry makes sense.

who needs facts when you have sex offenders living near schools?

An industrious tv news reporter counted sex offenders who live near schools in Austin TX.

A KVUE Defenders investigation uncovered at least a dozen Austin Independent School District elementary schools with 50 or more registered sex offenders listed within one mile of school grounds. One of the campuses has 89 surrounding the school. 

According to the Center for Child Protection, about one in 10 children will be sexually abused before their 18th birthday. In July, Austin police arrested a man they believe sexually assaulted a young girl multiple times near the 3100 block of Parker Lane. According to the arrest warrant, then 22-year-old Jonathan Guzman met the girl at a school bus stop in December 2014.

Registered sex offenders as far as the eye can see. How dangerous are they? The example of a sexual assault provided in the story was by a man who was not on the registry, so why so much attention on the number of registered citizens near schools?

The guy accused of sexual assault...where did he live? Did he live within a mile of the school or did he travel farther than a mile to meet the girl at the bus stop?

Registry restrictions are ridiculous. Preventing a registered offender from living near a school does nothing to prevent the next sex crime because the next sex crime will most likely be committed by someone not on the registry.

The article tells us...

Blackshear Elementary has the most, with 89 offenders within one mile of the school.

...but does not follow up with a litany of crimes committed against school children by any of  those 89 offenders. If there were a long list of those crimes, the reporter would have led the story with that shocking news. But there isn't a long list. Why?

In his 17 years with the district, Austin ISD Police Chief Eric Mendez can't recall one incident involving a sexual offender living near a school. According to the Center for Child Protection, 90 percent of children who visit the center know the person who harmed them.

Ah. Finally, a fact parents can use when they want to protect their children from sexual abuse. Children are far, far more likely to be abused by someone they already know.

The reporter pays no attention, however, and tells us how the schools make it difficult for a registered citizen to participate in school events with his or her child as if that offers any kind of protection.

Each school visitor goes through a screening using electronic identification license readers, which check against the state's sex offender registry. The most frequent registered sexual offenders visiting schools are parents.

That must mean that random sex offenders are not invading schools, looking for opportunities to molest children. The reporter pays no attention to that, either.

"If they need to meet with a teacher, the teacher meets with in a conference room. If they need to see their student, the student is sent to the front office," Mendez said. "Those parents who may be sex offenders aren't given free access to the campus, but they are allowed to conduct the business they need for their children."

Since we are all about protecting the children here, how do these restrictions affect the children of the registered citizens? If the parents are singled out for special treatment, the children are singled out for special treatment.

Something else the reporter missed...the effect the restrictions have on the kids.

 The reporter shows no interest in facts for this story about sex offenders. Facts abound and yet he Texas two-steps around every opportunity to use them.