Celebrated Sex Offender Laws Doing More Harm Than Good
As some of you may have noticed this past week, I've begun a new tradition of posting a new blog daily at midnight (Cleveland, Ohio time). Since this evening Jamie and her fiancé are at our house for dinner and a movie, I'm taking the easy way out and posting someone else's article as the heart of tonight's blog. The following opinion piece by Neal Peirce of the Washington Post Writers Group appeared in our Elyria newspaper on Monday (though I just got around to reading it on Tuesday). Its one of the best articles I've read on why the "Current Celebrated Sex Offender Laws" are "Doing More Harm Than Good." I know this is a sensitive subject - and some of you may be tired of hearing about it - but if you're going to read only one blog or article about these laws, I think this is the best and most important one. And for those of you who still want to read more, you're always welcome to check out my blog archive, if you haven't already.
Without further ado, here's Neal's excellent article:
Celebrated Sex Offender Laws Doing More Harm Than Good
(10 February 2008)
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| [Neal Peirce] |
Everyone wants children protected against sexual predators. Few crimes are more heinous than rape or murder of a child. Even lesser molestation can spell years of depression, anxiety and nightmares for victims. Some even suffer self-mutilation and suicidal tendencies.
But the national surge of states adopting Megan’s Law and Jessica’s Law — online registries of convicted sex offenders and stiff restrictions on where they can live — is going way overboard and causing more harm than good.
The statutes are named after young girls who were abducted, raped and murdered by convicted child molesters. Now there’s federal law virtually forcing states to set up publicly accessible Internet registries showing sex offenders’ residential addresses.
But the laws are turning out to be crude instruments with disturbing impacts.
First, they don’t differentiate between truly serious sex offenders and others convicted of lesser charges such as urinating in public, or teenagers having consensual sex, or kids who expose themselves as a prank.
For one and all, there’s a "scarlet letter," notes Human Rights Watch, a nonprofit monitoring group. The Internet registry sites can be accessed by anyone and use often-misleading criminal justice language — for example, "indecent liberties with a child" — to depict simple teenage sex. Former offenders have a tougher time getting a job or adjusting to normal life. Vigilante violence has led to instances of stabbings, houses burned, even targeted killings by strangers who found names and addresses through online registries. Other registrants have been driven to suicide.
Now things are turning even worse with a spate of laws restricting where former sex offenders can live. Twenty-two states, plus hundreds of municipalities, are setting minimum distances — from 500 feet up to 2,500 feet — that a former offender’s residence must be from such places as schools, daycare centers, parks, movie theaters, stores, swimming pools, even public transit.
The result, all too often, is to make most — or in some cases virtually all — of a community off-bounds for a former offender to live. An expose last spring by reporter Isaiah Thompson of the Miami New Times revealed a whole colony of former offenders camping out under the noisy Julia Tuttle Causeway because a stiff Miami-Dade County residency requirement left them practically no other place to live.
The offenders are still there, cooking with small portable stoves, using battery-powered televisions and radios, stowing their belongings in plastic bags — and living in fear of vigilante attacks.
One resident was "Big Man" — a 6-foot, 250-pounder forced to leave his home because 23 years ago, when he was 19, he was charged with sexual assault on a minor. Big Man’s wife regularly showed up with food and supplies, telling Thompson: "Look at this place! There’s no running water to take a shower; there’s no toilets. My husband can’t work now; nobody’s going to hire him."
Big Man departed before Christmas, his case resolved by his parole officers. But with newcomers, the under-the-bridge census is still more than 30. Dade County officials continue to profess no concern.
Which in fact is not unusual. Pressing a residency requirement in Georgia, state House Majority Leader Jerry Keen said: "My intent personally is to make it so onerous on those that are convicted of these offenses that they will want to move to another state."
Mayors and county officials who press harsh residency restrictions are doing the same — effectively banishing individuals who’ve already been punished by the law. Talk about violating constitutional rights.
Reports from Iowa, which enacted stiff residency restrictions for sex offenders in 2000, show the statute may be promoting conditions that easily lead to crime. Ex-offenders are listing their residence at such spots as "the Raccoon River" or "behind the Target on Euclid." Close to half have simply disappeared, so police no longer know where they are.
Human Rights Watch doesn’t underestimate the horror of many sex crimes, or the need for close controls on dangerous offenders. But neither states nor localities, it argues, should pass blanket restrictions on all released individuals. Instead, as a model Minnesota law mandates, restrictions should be based on a careful evaluation of the offender’s personal and family situation by a panel of law enforcement, victim advocacy and specialized treatment providers.
The Megan and Jessica cases are deeply tragic, but they miss a glaring fact: that over 90 percent of sex crimes against children aren’t committed by outsiders at all, but rather by family members or family acquaintances. If there’s prevention work to be done, that’s where it should be focused. Not by Internet scarlet letters, and certainly not by residency laws that hound ex-offenders out of their communities, separate them from their families, and quite possibly drive them into isolation and new criminal behavior.
[To read more about Neal Peirce and to access recent articles by him on politics, the economy and more, please visit his Washington Post Writers Group page at http://www.postwritersgroup.com/peirce.htm.]
you're right. this is the best article i've read so far, and since getting to know you, i've read a lot of articles.
you know i've written a lot of letters as well, letters to the editor of your local paper, letters to my own state officials. today i actually started getting replies back from some of the letters.
i just wrote a reply to a comment on my own blog about how virginia is a mostly democratic state. i'm keeping a close eye on what's going on here.
i think i feel a letter to the editor of the washington post coming on...
*hugs*
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Thanks, mb! I'm very grateful for your friendship and support.
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Just when I was starting to feel better again.....DAMNIT!!! How homeless is TOO homeless??? Where is this going to go? And when will it STOP?? My letter is right behind yours, Susannah!!
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Thank you, Barbie! I'm very grateful for your friendship and support as well.
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This article has it right. The restrictions placed on an offender need to be placed at the time of sentencing and have the ability to be reviewed or changed later based on circumstances.
Being the father of two girls I can certainly understand the desire to protect our children from harm but at the same time we can not destroy peoples lives on the mere chance that they may repeat a past mistake for which they have already paid for.
On the other hand if their crimes are of such a heinous nature or they have shown the propensity to repeat then they should be incarcerated until the threat is resolved.
I have no problem with life sentences for those that rape and murder a child (the justification for most the sexual abuser laws now in effect) or those that rape a child and their psychological evaluation shows they may repeat their actions when they are in society.
These laws show a problem with our current legal system in that they not only don't rehabilitate but that they also release people who are likely to repeat their past offenses.
Our current time based incarceration system shows that our legal system is a revenge based system. The goal of any legal system should be to rehabilitate and restitution to the victims where possible.
Legal systems have two main goals. Prevent crime and clean up the mess after a crime has occurred.
It is plain to see that our system lacks in both these goals. It's time we do something about it intelligently rather then trying to patch things with laws passed on the heels of emotion.
MM
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Thank you, MM! You make some very valid observations. From the point of view of an inmate, we'd sometimes marvel at who the parole board decided to release and who not to release. Guys who seemed to be rehabilitated, truly remorseful for their crimes, and no longer a threat to society were routinely "flopped" (given more time by the parole board), while guys who were still thieving and acting like predators in prison were routinely released after their first parole hearing. It seemed to some degree like the system was more inclined to release folks who were likley to return to prison and keep them "in business" than folks who were unlikely to return. Ohio did appear to take steps to address this in the 90s, with the passage of Senate Bill 2, which removed the parole board (and indefinite sentences) from the equation in most cases and set "flat" sentences for offenders. But they didn't apply S.B. 2 retroactively - which meant guys convicted after its passage were serving one set of sentences and guys convicted before its passage were serving another. While this bill was designed to fix certain sentencing inequities, it seemed to create another whole set of problems. The case of my friend Dave demonstrates one of them. Under the "old law," he was serving a sentence of 20 years to life for a non-violent drug offense. A few years later, guys convicted of the same crime as him were getting sentences of something like 3 years flat (and some rapists were getting a maximum of 10 years). These new guys were coming to prison and going home, whether or not they took advatage of any rehabilitative programs, while Dave, who was a model prisoner and who had used his time to better himself, continued to sit in prison for well over a decade, waiting for a parole board to make up its mind to release him (and even when the parole board recommended a commutation of his sentence, two different governors refused to grant it.
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YOU'RE RIGHT! IT IS A VERY GOOD ARTICLE AND I AGREE WITH IT WHOLE HEARTEDLY 100%. OUR GOVERNMENT HAS WENT WAY TOO FAR.
WE ALL NOW LIVE UNDER LABELS DON'T WE?
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Thanks, Dana! It certainly seems so... and I've never been a fan of labels of any sort. Labels are generalization that gloss over the complexity of the truth - and as the poet William Blake wrote, "To generalize is to be an idiot." I appreciate your comment.
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Comments that stick out as important to remember: not only many prisons don't rehabilitate but that 90% of sex crimes are not committed by outsiders but by members and friends of the family. I hope and believe that the courts will find this law not only punishing offenders retroactively but will see it as unconstitutional as well. Also isn't evidence important? DNA labs have found that some long term incarcerations have been overturned and that the accused are the victims of false or of no evidence.
The testing of DNA has been the latest reason to release some accused of rape
and overturn the convictions. Good blog, JC!!
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Thank you, Elena! And thanks to Neal Peirce. I do hope everyone will visit his site and maybe read more of his columns - if he gets more readers as a result, maybe I won't feel so guilty for borrowing his article... lol.
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Unfortunately, the repugnancy of the act of sexual misconduct, (especially in the case of children) seems to qualify the "system" for its abuses. The laws need to change and CHANGE NOW!!! There are too many people out there who have suffered beyond any kind of criminal conviction. (The homeless people being evicted from under the bridge is an excellent example.) I am currently researching the protocol to start a petition to the Government....whoever THAT might be. barbie
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Thanks, Barbie! I don't really know much about the petition process beyond signing them. Wish I could offer some suggestions....
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Re: your recent thoughts and article replay of homeless people accused of sex offenses... I have a couple of friends who I believe were wrongly marked in rape trials... I'm a very instinctive guy when it comes to truth and falsehoods... I think my friends were wrongly convicted due to inadequate legal support... but the long and short of it is they have both gone underground to escape the positing of their (bogus sex crime) histories in any locale they may choose to live in... One friend actually went to Alaska because he heard they really didn't enforce that penalty...
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Thank you for sharing this, my friend!
Peace....
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I support you 100%! To think of the thousands of people who have fallen victim to our National Sex Offender Registry is mortal outrage. How can a person who has done their time and paid their dept to society have to turn around and pay it again? Is this what you call dual prosecution? What about the offender's families with children who are now in danger themselves? Where is the justice when protecting one child harms another? The registry to me is like putting all the murderers in the same catagory, whether it was intentional or self defense, don't matter, you killed. I do believe the biggest part of the problem is that people don't know the facts. They are basing their fears on myths. Walk up to most people and ask what image comes to mind when they hear the words sex offender. Most people picture a older man forcing himself on a small child or worst yet killing them. Why and how can we allow so much time and money to be spent on the registry when we have bigger problems to deal with, like child abuse. That's where the real harm is. Most people on the registry, 90% as a matter of fact, are not dangerous people at all, and by no definition a pedophile. Do people ever realize that these so-called offenders have families that love them? Most of society don't even believe that the offender deserve the air they breath, and that's sad.
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Thank you, Tru! And welcome to the discussion. I think you make some excellent points, and I am grateful for your support. Peace....
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I don't use the registry to protect my child. I strongly disbelieve it could ever help protect him, and I believe that people should not have to have people thinking about the worst thing they ever did all the time. Only proper supervision and education can protect my child.
I strongly disagree with putting juvenile offenders on any sort of registry, especially. To me that is child abuse, even if it doesn't hit until adulthood. It brings back childhood traumas for life. Juvenile offenders are innocent in my eyes, because they are mainy influenced by their family situation and development level, which they did not ask for. The Adam Walsh Act is a travesty and Bush and Alberto Gonzzales should be held accountable and the Act revoked.
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