Delaware Liberal

Sex Offender Registry: Good Politics=Bad Policy?

On Sunday, Read All About It In the Sunday Papers featured this as its lead story:

“LEAD STORY-The (UK) Economist: Unintended Consequences of Sex Offenders’ Laws?

It is easy for politicians to push for tougher laws on sexual offenders. It is even easier to demagogue against anyone who would dare suggest that, in many cases, there is more than a little nuance that is never taken into considerationMemo to all stupid people: There are tens of thousands of people on sex offenders registries all over the country from whom neanderthals like Saxby Chambliss does not have to  ”protect my grandchildren”. Saxby’s home state of Georgia has many of the cases that illustrate the unthinking nature of a ‘one size fits all’ policy:

Georgia has more than 17,000 registered sex offenders. Some are highly dangerous. But many are not. And it is fiendishly hard for anyone browsing the registry to tell the one from the other. The Georgia Sex Offender Registration Review Board, an official body, assessed a sample of offenders on the registry last year and concluded that 65% of them posed little threat. Another 30% were potentially threatening, and 5% were clearly dangerous. The board recommended that the first group be allowed to live and work wherever they liked. The second group could reasonably be barred from living or working in certain places, said the board, and the third group should be subject to tight restrictions and a lifetime of monitoring. A very small number “just over 100” are classified as “predators”, which means they have a compulsion to commit sex offences. When not in jail, predators must wear ankle bracelets that track where they are.

Despite the board’s findings, non-violent offenders remain listed and subject to a giant cobweb of controls. One rule, championed by Georgia’s House majority leader, banned them from living within 1,000 feet of a school bus stop. This proved unworkable. Thomas Brown, the sheriff of DeKalb county near Atlanta, mapped the bus stops in his patch and realised that he would have to evict all 490 of the sex offenders living there. Other than the bottom of a lake or the middle of a forest, there was hardly anywhere in Georgia for them to live legally. In the end Georgia’s courts stepped in and suspended the bus-stop rule, along with another barring sex offenders from volunteering in churches. But most other restrictions remain.

 Sex-offender registries are popular. Rape and child molestation are terrible crimes that can traumatise their victims for life. All parents want to protect their children from sexual predators, so politicians can nearly always win votes by promising curbs on them. Those who object can be called soft on child-molesters, a label most politicians would rather avoid. This creates a ratchet effect. Every lawmaker who wants to sound tough on sex offenders has to propose a law tougher than the one enacted by the last politician who wanted to sound tough on sex offenders.

This is a brilliant and thought-provoking article. It provides case studies in how the most draconian aspects of sex offenders law have destroyed people and families for no demonstrated public purpose. The article even lays out the costs of the most ill-considered aspects of these laws. Any legislator who takes their job seriously should really read this article before they do the knee-jerk thing next time. While strong laws protecting the public from sex offenders who represent a public threat are essential, draconian laws like those described in this article can empirically be shown to be counterproductive.” 

Today’s News-Journal  describes both the political attractiveness of pushing for tougher laws while also outlining some of the unintended (?) consequences of said policies. First, politicians are always angling to prove who’s ‘toughest on crime’:

In the first half of this legislative session alone, six bills dealing with sex offenders were introduced in the General Assembly, five of which have become law. One of those requires all offenders to register, while two increase penalties for various offenses.

 As (the ACLU’s Drew) Fennell put it, “I think it’s politically difficult for anyone to try to deal rationally with the very real public safety issues” surrounding sex offenders.

These are six new bills and five new laws over and above Delaware’s already-strong laws on sex offenders. It is not as if dangerous sexual predators are  running unchecked without these laws. It’s just that political demagogues (aka voter predators) run more effectively with these laws on their campaign lit and in their ‘newsletters’.  And for those who know that the new laws are BS and likely to be counterproductive, the path of least resistance encourages them to vote for these bills rather than having to explain something that takes more than a simple sound bite to their constituents.

And, make no mistake, ill-considered legislation like this can do and does real harm. From the Observer article:

Georgia has more than 17,000 registered sex offenders. Some are highly dangerous. But many are not. And it is fiendishly hard for anyone browsing the registry to tell the one from the other. The Georgia Sex Offender Registration Review Board concluded that 65% of those on the Registry posed little threat. Another 30% were potentially threatening, and 5% were clearly dangerous. The board recommended that the first group be allowed to live and work wherever they liked. The second group could reasonably be barred from living or working in certain places, said the board, and the third group should be subject to tight restrictions and a lifetime of monitoring. 

Despite the board’s findings, non-violent offenders remain listed and subject to a giant cobweb of controls. One rule, championed by Georgia’s House majority leader, banned them from living within 1,000 feet of a school bus stop. This proved unworkable. Thomas Brown, the sheriff of DeKalb county near Atlanta, mapped the bus stops in his patch and realised that he would have to evict all 490 of the sex offenders living there. Other than the bottom of a lake or the middle of a forest, there was hardly anywhere in Georgia for them to live legally. In the end Georgia’s courts stepped in and suspended the bus-stop rule, along with another barring sex offenders from volunteering in churches. But most other restrictions remain.

Greater access to the Delaware Sex Offenders Registry provides little additional useful information without some context. According to the News-Journal, “Like the old online registry, Delaware’s revamped site only shows offenders designated as moderate- and high-risk.” Fair enough as long as the public understands what defines ‘moderate’ for terms of the registry.

However, the different kinds of bans apply in many cases to all ‘offenders’, many of whom have never posed any kind of public threat.

Make no mistake: Dangerous sexual predators must be tracked and kept from placing the public at risk. However, that is no excuse for the General Assembly to enact a series of ever-more draconian laws when it has no demonstrated public benefit. 

The Beast Who Slumbers suspects that the ‘follow-the-demagogic-leader’ game that legislators all too often play will eventually lead to a rollback in ill-considered policy here. Much the same way that it has happened with the rolling back of minimum mandatory sentencing for non-violent drug offenders.

Like the minimum sentencing laws, it will only happen after years of unnecessary personal devastation courtesy of the ‘Honorables’ in Dover.

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