Writing for the majority in Smith, Justice Anthony Kennedy took it for granted that collecting and disseminating information about people convicted of sex offenses made sense as a public safety measure. But that premise was always doubtful.

The vast majority of sexual assaults, especially against children, are committed by relatives, friends or acquaintances, and the perpetrators typically do not have prior sex-offense convictions. That means they would not show up on a registry even if someone bothered to check.

It is therefore not surprising that research finds little evidence to support Kennedy’s assumption that publicly accessible registries protect potential victims. Summarizing the evidence in a 2016 National Affairs article, Eli Lehrer noted that “virtually no well-controlled study shows any quantifiable benefit from the practice of notifying communities of sex offenders living in their midst.”

To reinforce the logic of registries, Kennedy averred that “the risk of recidivism posed by sex offenders is ‘frightening and high.’” He was quoting his own opinion in an earlier case, which in turn relied on an unsubstantiated estimate from a source who has publicly and repeatedly disavowed it.

According to Kennedy’s paraphrase, “the rate of recidivism of untreated offenders has been estimated to be as high as 80%.” By contrast, a 2003 Bureau of Justice Statistics study found that the three-year recidivism rate for sex offenders was 3.5%.

Studies covering longer periods find higher recidivism rates, but still nothing remotely like 80%, even for high-risk offenders. Despite its empirical emptiness, Kennedy’s “frightening and high” claim has been quoted again and again in legal briefs and judicial opinions across the country.

Although registries are ostensibly based on the risk of recidivism, they apply indiscriminately to broad classes of people, even when there is little reason to think they pose an ongoing danger. Dissenting in Smith, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted that Alaska’s law “applies to all convicted sex offenders, without regard to their future dangerousness.”

One of the men who challenged Alaska’s law, Ginsburg pointed out, “successfully completed a treatment program” and “gained early release on supervised probation in part because of his compliance with the program’s requirements and his apparent low risk of reoffense.” A court determined that “he had been successfully rehabilitated,” based partly on “psychiatric evaluations” indicating that he had “a very low risk of re-offending” and was “not a pedophile.”

That man nevertheless was required to renew his registration four times a year for the rest of his life. The online registry included his name, photograph, criminal record, address, physical description, date of birth and place of employment, along with the license plate numbers of vehicles he used.

Kennedy minimized the consequences of publicly branding people as presumptively dangerous sex offenders, calling it “less harsh” than revocation of a professional license. But as Justice John Paul Stevens noted in his dissent, there was “significant evidence of onerous practical effects of being listed on a sex offender registry,” ranging from “public shunning, picketing, press vigils, ostracism, loss of employment and eviction” to “threats of violence, physical attacks, and arson.”

Those predictable costs, combined with legal restrictions on where registrants may live and which locations they may visit, undermine rehabilitation and continue to punish registrants long after they have completed their sentences. That is why several state and federal courts have concluded, contrary to what the Supreme Court said in Smith, that registration schemes are punitive in effect.

Activists who oppose registration will call attention to that reality during a vigil at the Supreme Court on Tuesday morning. They are clearly right in arguing that the illusory benefits of public registries cannot justify the burdens they impose.

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine.

So it’s no surprise that people search the sex offender registration website to make sure that no one convicted of a sexual offense lives near them or more worrisome, their children’s school, day care or neighborhood park. The premise is simple: to make people feel safer in their community. But are they truly safer? Have we been relying on the wrong system?

Long before the world was introduced to the predatory behavior of people like Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, lawmakers across the nation worked to deter victimization and protect citizens from sexual assault. They enacted policies governing individuals convicted of sexual offenses — known as sex offender registration and notification (SORN) laws. These policies allow for law enforcement to maintain a list to track and monitor sex offenders, and registry websites provide the public with registrants’ addresses and identifying information.

But do registration and notification policies actually deter individuals inclined to commit sexual offenses and protect citizens?

A new study of ours shows that these policies are not effective in deterring crime or protecting citizens. We summarized 25 years of research and 474,640 formerly incarcerated sex offenders. We found that such policies do not reduce sexual or non-sexual recidivism.

No reduction. At all.

If the policies are ineffective, then why do we have them?

These policies exist as a governmental response to community fear and outrage. There is political pressure to increase public safety. The problem is that these laws were enacted very quickly after child murder cases and became wide-reaching governmental mandates without research to back their existence and effectiveness. Fast forward 25 years, and the public and politicians are relying on window-dressing to feel safe.

This false sense of safety comes with real consequences.

First, sex offender registration and notification policies have had a net-widening effect, making more registrants eligible and for considerably longer periods of time even though individuals convicted of sexual offenses age out of crime, as do others.

Second, these policies use a “one size fits all” approach and misallocate resources and supervision to offenders with lower risk levels. The ever-growing registry has become a fiscal burden for states.

Finally, sex offender registration and notification policies continue to label and stigmatize individuals after they have served their time. Subsequent dehumanization disrupts any meager attempts to reintegrate the person back into society. Despite what seems like common sense, these policies create obstacles to the factors that promote law-abiding behavior: jobs, secure housing and social support.

There are better ways. We need to educate the public, law enforcement and policy makers that governmental oversight of registrants is not a feasible solution to protecting potential sexual abuse victims. This is not a call to “go soft” on crime, it is an encouragement to “go smart” on crime and use data to make informed decisions. This reimagining requires us as a society to confront the uncomfortable truth that those who commit sexual offenses are usually not strangers — they are more likely to be the most trusted figures around us — our loved ones, our babysitters, coaches, teachers and close family friends.

In the end, parents, community members, and potential home buyers and renters will continue to frequent the sex offender registration website, gathering a false sense of safety — potentially at their own peril — until we as a society are willing to address who the perpetrators of sexual violence are and accept the fact that sex offender registration and notification policies demonstrate little value in making a meaningful impact. Tough-on-crime policies are not always smart policies. It is time to do better.

Meghan M. Mitchell (mmitchell@ucf.edu; @MeghanMMitchell) is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Central Florida. Kristen M. Zgoba (kzgoba@fiu.edu) is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida International University. Alex R. Piquero (axp1954@miami.edu; @DrAlexPiquero) is chair of the Department of Sociology and Criminology and Arts & Sciences Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami.

Source: Tampa Bay Times

There will be an update on the status of the NARSOL conference held in June 2020.

As usual, even though not required, we ask that you register your intention to attend so we will have an idea of how many callers to expect.

The phone number is 605 313-5169, followed by 957605#. You may call in directly with a telephone or, if you have a speaker and microphone or a headset with a mic, you may access the call through your computer by going to  https://www.freeconferencecallhd.com/dialer and following the on-screen directions for inputting the number and the code.

We also are going to live stream the call on You Tube. There won’t be any video, just an audio stream, so you can try this if you’d rather not call in. You can use your Roku, AppleTV or ChromeCast to have the call played over your TV.

Disclaimer

Keep in mind, responses provided on the program are merely intended to offer guidance and should not be construed as legal advice. We cannot cover the specifics of any individual’s situation sufficiently to know what the most prudent course of action is, so NARSOL advises all participants to consult with an attorney in their jurisdictions to determine the best course of action.

By MICHAEL HOBBES . . . The first time Damian Winters got evicted was in 2015. He was living with his wife and two sons in suburban Nashville when his probation officer called his landlord and informed him that Winters was a registered sex offender.

She lists off the offenses that could put a person on a public list of social outcasts widely seen as pedophiles, predators and rapists:

You could be a sex offender if you go to a prostitute. You could be a sex offender if you urinate in public. You could be a sex offender if you go streaking. You could be a sex offender if you touch a stripper. You could be a sex offender if you dated a 15-year-old when you were 19-years-old.

What’s worse, “there are a lot of wrongful convictions in sex cases. A lot of wrongful accusations,” says William Dobbs, lawyer and civil libertarian based out of New York City.

Skenazy and Dobbs want sex offender registries eliminated in the United States. And they’re not alone. Although the vast majority of the American public supports the idea of using registries to keep a close eye on sex offenders, there are voices rising in opposition, saying that sex offender registries are ineffective and often horribly cruel.

The original goal of publishing a list of sex criminals was to protect communities. Parents who worried about the safety of their little ones could pull up a map of sex offenders in their area, and feel more secure knowing which neighbor was more likely to give their kid roofie-laced Halloween candy.

But the maps served the opposite purpose. Instead of feeling more secure, parents freaked out. They’d find that they’re surrounded by sexual deviants — that each dot on the map represents a sex offender, and their map is more speckled than a Jackson Pollock painting.

“It makes you think everyone who’s a dot raped a baby. It makes you think anyone convicted of a sex offense is a fiendish, depraved, child-pouncing predator who when given the chance will drag your child into the bushes,” Skenazy says.

Read the rest of this article on Rooster.

Our Opinion: Sex offenders’ social media ban needs a rewrite

Not all sex offenders are created equal.

A well-intentioned but overreaching state law barring registered sex offenders from using Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media — whether or not their crimes involved either children or the internet — is headed for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Durham resident Lester Gerard Packingham appealed his 2012 conviction of maintaining a social media profile as a sex offender, arguing that the state law is unconstitutional. The N.C. Court of Appeals agreed with Packingham in August 2013, but the state Supreme Court upheld the statute last year in a 4-2 ruling.

The federal high court agreed last month to let Packingham plead his case that the law violates the First Amendment by squelching ex-convicts’ online speech.

Under N.C. General Statute 14-202.5, sex offenders are prohibited from accessing commercial social networking websites that extend membership to minors. That sounds reasonable and necessary for pedophiles, but it’s a head-scratcher for offenders who have groped or sexually assaulted other adults.

Writing for a unanimous three-judge panel, Court of Appeals Judge Rick Elmore wrote in 2013 that the vague law “fails to target the ‘evil’ it is intended to rectify” — namely, child sexual predators trolling the internet for their next victim.

The state Supreme Court reversed the appellate panel, finding that the law regulated conduct rather than speech and that its definition of verboten websites left offenders with “ample alternative channels for communication.” Justices even provided examples, including recipe-sharing sites, job boards and a television news station’s website.

There’s likely to be a lot of legal hairsplitting over the state court’s “ample alternative channels” language, which is also the focal point of a friend-of-the-court brief filed by First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh.

Rather than getting into the weeds of that technical argument, we’ll appeal instead to common sense. What good does it do to arbitrarily ban all sex offenders from Facebook when most of those convicts have no interest in scoping out young users?

Registered sex offenders are about as reviled as any category of criminal. But the same label applied to rapists and child molesters is also used to tag teenagers who share racy photos or are punished for sexual relationships with slightly younger classmates.

Not only is North Carolina able to distinguish the former from the latter, it already does. The state applies the term “sexually violent predator” to those convicted of certain crimes and “recidivist” to those who reoffend. Those designations are included on the publicly searchable sex offender registry.

Instead of wasting taxpayer money to defend a carelessly crafted law in the nation’s highest court, why not revise the statute to exclude only child sexual predators from social networking sites?

Lawmakers have two choices: Stand behind sloppy work and risk a ruling that could open the floodgates to all sex offenders or fix their mistake and protect children by shutting out those who pose a genuine danger.  (Source)

A new law that went into effect Sept. 1 bans the more than 17,000 registered sex offenders at the 163-year-old event. Supporters of the law say it protects children attending the fair from harm.

“It’s a place where there’s a lot of children, a lot of children running around, without direct parental supervision, who may be at risk if predators are around,” said Sen. Buck Newton, a Johnston County Republican who sponsored the bill. “It made sense to me. I don’t remember anyone voting against it.”

But the head of a new group that advocates on behalf of the state’s registered sex offenders says the law deprives an entire class of people of their civil rights. Robin Vanderwall, who co-founded the North Carolina chapter of Reform Sex Offender Laws (NCRSOL), said the group intends to file a lawsuit in federal court before year’s end seeking to have the new law declared unconstitutional.

The bill was introduced at the urging of state Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler, who earlier this year said the state needs tougher laws to ban sex offenders from the fair. During the 2015 State Fair, Wake County sheriff’s deputies arrested four registered sex offenders at the fair, including someone who was initially charged with flying a drone over the event and a convicted child molester who was charged with posing as a state inspector to get into an area reserved for children’s rides.

Only one of the four was wearing an ankle bracelet that some sexual offenders are required to wear, said Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison. The bracelets are equipped with global positioning systems that enable probation and parole officials to monitor the wearer’s movements.

Harrison said his office is working with probation and post-supervision officers across the state to identify sex offenders who may try enter the fair. If a sex offender wearing an ankle bracelet gets within a certain distance of the event, someone will call the sheriff’s office, Harrison said.

“If the person is inside the fairgrounds, we will pass that individual’s picture out to our officers,” he said. “It’s a good game plan, and it’s evidently working. We haven’t had any arrests.”

State Fair spokesman Brian Long said the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services supported the bill and monitored its progress in the General Assembly, where it passed unanimously in both chambers and was signed by Gov. Pat McCrory on July 21.

“We wanted to make it clear because of the number of children who come here,” Long said. “It’s a child-oriented, family event. We wanted to keep it that way.”

But Vanderwall said it’s unfair to violate the civil rights of registered sex offenders who have served their criminal sentences and fulfilled all of their probation or post-release supervision obligations. He likened the new law to old Jim Crow laws.

“For the first time since 1891, thousands of North Carolina citizens and taxpayers are legally prohibited from attending the state fair,” Vanderwall said in a press release. “African Americans were officially ‘uninvited’ to attend in 1891 and remained ostracized from fair activities until the creation of so-called ‘Colored days’ in the early Twentieth Century.”

Vanderwall said that of the state’s more than 17,000 registered sex offenders, only 28 have been determined by the courts to be sexually violent predators. Vanderwall said the designation has to be declared by a judge who has reviewed expert testimony that shows an individual’s sexual predilections are untreatable and the person is mentally ill and likely to repeat the offense.

“I’m sure Donnie Harrison can flag 28 people to keep them out of the State Fair,” he said. “That’s easier than banning 17,000 people.”

Newton said state legislators who supported the law had “difficult decisions to make.”

“We have to respect the rights of people with a history [of sex offenses], against the legitimate work of trying to protect children against those who might commit future acts,” he said.

Source: The News & Observer