More on sex-offender registry flaws

California's sex-offender registry is growing much faster than the number of law enforcement people who can monitor the people on it, the Wall Street Journal reports. Not all offenders on the list pose the same level of risk, and law enforcement people say that much more helpful than a list of every possible level of offender on it would be one listing only the highest-risk offenders. "California's sex-offender registry has ballooned to more than 90,000 people now from about 45,000 in 1994," the Journal reports, adding that a December study of some 20,000 RSOs on parole found that only "9% posed a 'high risk' of reoffending, and 29% posed a 'moderate-high' to 'high' risk." Meanwhile, "law-enforcement officials and academics say vast resources are spent monitoring nonviolent offenders rather than keeping closer tabs on more-dangerous ones."

In "Prevention of childhood sexual abuse," soon to be published in The Future of Children, David Finkelhor refers to sex-offender registries as representing one of the main strategies our society has for preventing abuse and points to its flaws. It's "based on an overly stereotyped characterization of sexual abusers as pedophiles, guileful strangers who prey on children in public and other easy-access environments and who are at high risk to re-offend once caught. In reality," says the director of the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center, "the population is much more diverse. Most sexual abusers are not strangers or pedophiles; many (about a third) are themselves juveniles. Many have relatively low risks for re-offending once caught." Dr. Finkelhor adds that possibly the greatest shortcoming of current "offender management" efforts is that "only a small percentage of new offenders have a prior sex offense record" that would have put them in sex-offender registries. As if to confirm the findings in the Wall Street Journal piece above, Finkelhor "recommends using law enforcement resources to catch more undetected offenders and concentrating intensive management efforts on those at highest risk to re-offend." This preview of Finkelhor's article is at CALCASA.org. [See also my earlier post about a recent report on this in The Economist.]

US sex-offender laws, registries not conducive to child safety

The US's burgeoning sex-offender registries are becoming more of a problem than a solution. "Because so many offences require registration, the number of registered sex offenders in America has exploded," The Economist reports in a thorough look at the subject. "As of December last year, there were 674,000 of them, according to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. If they were all crammed into a single state, it would be more populous than Wyoming, Vermont or North Dakota. As a share of its population, America registers more than four times as many people as Britain, which is unusually harsh on sex offenders."

The problem is when people "assume that anyone listed on a sex-offender registry must be a rapist or a child molester. But most states spread the net much more widely. A report by Sarah Tofte of Human Rights Watch found that at least five states required men to register if they were caught visiting prostitutes.... No fewer than 29 states required registration for teenagers who had consensual sex with another teenager. And 32 states registered flashers and streakers." Only a small minority of registered offenders are the "predators" so widely referred to in the news media. Take Georgia, for example. That state "has more than 17,000 registered sex offenders," according to The Economist. "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 state's Sex Offender Registration Review Board found that “just over 100” of the 17,000 could be classified as “predators,” "which means they have a compulsion to commit sex offences."

Disinformation and fear are not conducive to calm, constructive discussion about young people's online activities - in families or in policymaking circles. Overreaction by parents causes kids to go into online stealth mode (which gets easier and easier with proliferating access points and connected devices) at a time when child-parent communication is very much needed. Focusing too much on registered sex offenders causes people to forget that most child sexual exploitation is perpetrated by people the victims are related to or know in their everyday lives, most likely people who haven't been arrested, much less convicted, and therefore not people in sex-offender registries (see "Why technopanics are bad").

But the trend is bigger and bigger registries. "Sex-offender registries are popular," the Economist reports. "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."

Writes parent and public-policy analyst Adam Thierer, "If you want to keep your kids safe from real sex offenders, we need to scrap our current sex-offender registries and completely rethink the way we define and punish sex offenses in this country." For example, a case I mentioned last April: 18-year-old Phillip Alpert will be in his state's sex-offender registry until he's 43, CNN reported. He is no predator, the way CNN tells the story. He had just turned 18 when he made what turned out to be probably the biggest mistake of his life. He and his 16-year-old girlfriend of two and a half years had had an argument. He told CNN he was tired, and it was the middle of the night when he sent a nude photo of her (a photo she had taken of herself and sent to him) to "dozens of her friends and family." Under current child-pornography and sex-offender laws, this scenario could be repeated in many other states. "Thirty-eight states include juvenile sex offenders in their sex-offender registries," according to CNN. "Alaska, Florida and Maine will register juveniles only if they are tried as adults. Indiana registers juveniles age 14 and older. South Dakota registers juveniles age 15 and older."

iPhone app pinpoints sex offenders

"Offender Locator" is the 4th most popular paid application in Apple's App Store, according to USATODAY. Users can type in their zip code and get a map pinpointing the addresses of the registered sex offenders within five miles of that location. The app also provides the offenders' names and photos and the crimes for which they were convicted. Users can also request text alerts saying when a registered sex offender moves into their area. The iPhone app costs 99 cents. A BlackBerry version costs $2.99. "Laws in many states limit where convicted sex offenders can live, and ... such laws have been criticized as being so restrictive that they force offenders underground," USATODAY adds. Users might want to note that the app can only provide info on convicted and registered sex offenders and that research shows that the vast majority of child sexual exploiters are people the victims know, so this app shouldn't provide a false sense of security. But it's equally important to note that, according to the latest figures available from the National Data Archives on Child Abuse & Neglect, overall child sexual exploitation decreased 51% from 1990 to 2005.

Sex offender registries inaccurate: Study

It makes one wonder how accurate the email part of a federal sex-offender database, required by a new federal law, can be. As they are now, "sex offender registries are often inaccurate and incomplete," the Idaho Statesman reports, citing a recent study by the US Justice Department. "The national sex registry is missing information on 22% of state-level sex offenders, the federal investigators found. Driver's license information, Social Security numbers and basic addresses are regularly absent," the DOJ's Office found. The FBI maintains the national sex offender registry. "As sex registry information becomes more widely accessible via the Internet, investigators sound alarms about the databases used to monitor the nation's 644,000 registered sex offenders," according to the Statesman. "The concerns coincide with more fundamental questions about whether the stigmatizing registries go too far." The new federal law requiring that sex offenders provide their email addresses in addition to other contact data was signed last October (see this Wired blog).

Young sex offenders branded forever

One of the scary things about the social Web is how much exposure its users bring to their everyday lives and innermost thoughts. But think about the impact of mixing exposure - to public view or just to law enforcement - with impulsive, unthinking adolescent behavior that involves sexual exploration with peers. For example, in the state of Washington alone, "since 1997, more than 3,500 children in the state - some as young as 10, though on average about 14 - have been charged and convicted as felony sex offenders, a mark that remains on their records forever, barring them from careers in medicine, teaching or a host of other professions that serve the vulnerable," the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports. A 13-year-old (now 23) whose story led the article was arrested at home by himself and handcuffed to a plastic chair while his mother was called and told her "pervert son was going to jail." The vast majority of these young felons are rated least likely to reoffend, the article continues. Even so, the Post-Intelligencer reports, "Washington is among the few states to include juveniles in its sex offender management plan, assessing youths with tools designed for adults and funneling them through the courts with adult-sized punishments."

'Sex offender label problematic'

That's the view of former FBI agent Ken Lanning, WAAY TV in Huntsville, Ala., reports. "Lanning spent 35 years as a special agent for the FBI. He now trains law enforcement officials across the United States on how to investigate allegations of sexual abuse. But even though he's seen and investigated some of the worst cases in the country, he doesn't like the title of sexual predator." Lanning "said the public shouldn't try to fit all [sex offenders] into the same category. Also, he said that not all people convicted of sex crimes should be required to wear electronic monitoring bracelets, and move 2,000 feet from schools or day cares, under laws like Jessica or Megan's Law." And the story doesn't even mention teen-aged convicted sex offenders, young people convicted for acts that may have been crimes, yes, but also possibly may have been huge mistakes made by adolescents who, by definition, don't yet have the impulse control of fully developed adult brains (see "Teenage Brain: A Work in Progress" at the National Institute of Mental Health ). [See also "Juvenile sex offenders & Net registries," "18-year-old registered sex offender," and "Teens to be sex offenders for life?"

18-year-old registered sex offender

He was 17 when he downloaded child-abuse images. From the news reports, we don't really know why he did so. We do know that when he was interviewed by prosecutors, he "made full admissions," saying "he had no idea why he had done it," and "had no previous convictions, cautions, warnings or reprimands," the Hemel Gazette reports. We also know that "he had been spending a lot of time isolated and alone on his computer" because, his attorney said, "he had been bullied at school. At the beginning of 2006, when he was 16, he was beaten unconscious in the street by a gang, including bullies from the school." His sentence is a fine and two years of community service, and he will be on his local sex-offender registry for five years.

US sex-offender registries: Update

If anyone wonders how law enforcement people around the US will be handling sex offender registries, see this article in Police Chief magazine. Any day now, the Justice Department will be issuing guidelines on how law enforcement agencies can implement the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, which established "comprehensive standards for sex offender registration and notification" across all 50 states (before it, standards and practices were up to individual states' discretion). The US attorney general's office issued guidelines last May which were then open to public comment, ending August 1. The final guidelines are "expected to be released 60–90 days after closing of the comment period," Police Chief reports. [See also "Young sex offenders" and "Juvenile sex offenders & Net registries".]

Teen jailed for posting nude photo

A 19-year-old was sentenced to 30 days in prison for posting a nude photo of his ex-girlfriend on MySpace, the Associated Press reports. "Anthony D. Rich pleaded no contest Tuesday to child abuse and attempted child abuse. Prosecutors reduced the charges from sex crimes that could have branded Rich a sex offender for life." He was 17 when he posted the photo of the 15-year-old girl after they broke up. The AP reports that the girl consented to having her picture taken but not to having it posted.

Juvenile sex offenders & Net registries

As if to punctuate an important New York Times Magazine article on juvenile sex offenders this Sunday, CNN reported that two 7th-graders in Oregon were charged with felony sex abuse after running down a school hall after lunch, swatting "three to four" girls in the rear end (the mother of one of the boys said in an interview that one of the girls had done the same thing to her son earlier but hadn't been charged). A student hall monitor took them to the principal's office, and they were later taken from school by the police in handcuffs. They were held in juvenile detention for five days, according to the CNN report, and they face up to 10 years' detention. Under Megan's Law, if they're convicted as sex offenders, they could be placed in a public sex-offender registry for life.

A decade or so ago, probably the harshest punishment immature, impulsive behavior like this would've received would be school suspension, maybe expulsion. But times have changed. Our children are living in a time when such behavior can lead not only to arrest and adjudication but also public notification via online sex-offender registries. And some parents – thinking minor's records are sealed, kids need to learn lessons - are unwittingly exposing their children to this new reality. The New York Times looks at all aspects of this in "How Can You Distinguish a Budding Pedophile From a Kid With Real Boundary Problems?"

Here's the current environment for kids deemed sex offenders:

"Juveniles are subject to the same [sex offender] registration requirements as adults without the benefit of a jury trial or similar protections."

"At least 25 states apply the sex offender community notification law to juveniles," which means "their photos, names and addresses and in some cases birth dates and maps to their homes" are in public Web sites for any school peer to find and ostracize them with (kids love to "stalk" each other - do casual background checks on each other - in social sites; see this).

"States that have excluded adolescents from community-notification laws may no longer be able to do so without losing federal money" - within about two years from now. So the other 25 states may follow suit.

Under the 2006 Adam Walsh Act, a teenager adjudicated for a sexual offense "will remain on the national [sex offender] registry for life. He will have to register with authorities every three months. And if he fails to do so — not an unlikely prospect for some teenagers, especially those without involved parents — he may be imprisoned for more than one year."

All this even though for more than 100 years minors' records have been sealed from public view by juvenile courts. That was long before we even knew that adolescent brains aren't fully developed until people are in their mid-20s. "The last part of the brain to develop is the frontal lobe, which is responsible for impulse control, moral reasoning and regulating emotions - the things that adolescents lack when they decide, if they make a conscious decision, to molest a younger kid," the Times reports, citing the National Institute of Mental Health.

Ninety percent or more of young people who have been through the courts for sex offenses won't become adult rapists or pedophiles, according to an expert the Times interviewed. The recidivism rate for juvenile sex offenders is "about 10%," compared to 25-50% for adult offenders (50% or higher is the rate for "the most serious offenders"). Not all, but many of these young people are "naïve experimenters," a term therapists use for "overly impulsive or immature adolescents who are unable to approach girls or boys their own age; instead they engage in inappropriate sexual acts with young children," sometimes because they have been abused themselves, the Times reports. And then some of these - "how many is unclear" - are in the legal system "for what some therapists would say is 'playing doctor' or normative 'sexual experimentation',” inappropriate behavior that has always been a part of teenage reality but is getting reported and adjudicated a lot more now.

A huge problem is the fact that we - society - know almost nothing about the impact on minors of placing them on public registries on the Web, at the same time that research is beginning to show that they are different from adult offenders in several ways. One thing we do know: Public humiliation tends to marginalize people, particularly adolescents, which in turn tends to harm more than help kids and society. Check out the article to see how they're different, to see how and why minors need different kinds of treatment from what adult offenders receive, and to read the stories of individual teenage boys and girls who have been adjudicated for sexual offenses.

Related news

Arizona's new sex-offender law. Starting in September, registered sex offenders in Arizona will have to disclose their social-networking and instant-messaging screennames as well as their email addresses because of a new law in that state, the Arizona Republic reports. "Anyone can go to the state government site and search an individual or screen name against its database" of sex offenders.