How Sex Offender Laws Fail to Protect the Public

Information Problems

Sex offender registries are perhaps the best-known aspect of sex offender regimes. Since the passage of the Jacob Wetterling Act in 1994, every state has been required by federal law to maintain a sex offender registry. By making the names and addresses of sex offenders readily available to the public, often with interactive maps, the goal is to empower people with information so they can take appropriate steps to protect themselves and their families.

However, this information does not really prove useful for enhancing safety. If there is a sex offender in your neighborhood, you can tell your kids to stay away from the creepy guy’s house, but that’s about it. Most sex offenders are not under house arrest, so unless you memorize every face pictured in the directory, you’re in the dark when you go to a public place. Furthermore, since most sex offenses are committed by first-time offenders who know their victims, not strangers who have previously been convicted, the registry could not have provided useful information for prevention in the majority of cases. However, this information is useful for community members who wish to engage in violent vigilantism or harassment of sex offenders. While most people don’t have much sympathy for sex offenders subject to harassment, innocent people have also been hurt due to mistakes or misunderstandings of the registry, such as this 78 year-old man who was beaten to death with a baseball bat because his name was similar to a convicted sex offender’s.

Another problem with some states’ registries lies in the overly broad classification of crimes as sex offenses. In at least ten states, you can earn the sex offender designation from fairly innocuous forms of public indecency like streaking, mooning, or urinating in public. None of the registries provide any factual details of the offenses, just the names of the crimes (and sometimes not even that). So if a registry lists the offense of indecent exposure, for example, the public has no way of distinguishing a high school prankster who streaks a football game from a creep who purposely goes to a playground and waves his member at children to achieve sexual gratification. Many registries also contain numerous purely statutory offenders who are often also minors at the time of the offense, such as a 17 year-old who engages in consensual sexual activity with his 15 year-old girlfriend. In many jurisdictions, this would be labeled “sexual assault against a minor,” which makes this person look like a greater threat than the circumstances suggest. By effectively diluting the sex offender registry with people who pose little threat to public safety, it is more difficult to identify and keep track of the high-risk offenders. California, as an extreme example, has the largest registry in the country with over one hundred thousand registered sex offenders. This is an overwhelming amount of information to sift through, and can make it appear a sex offender is lurking around every corner – just look at the map of Los Angles county. Rather than providing useful information, it just scares and furthers the misconception that the risk of sex offenses is increasing at an alarming rate.