The Harm and Falseness of the Sex Offender Regulations

Every year it is estimated that 81,000 children are sexually abused, 300,000 women are raped, and 3.7 million people are met with unwanted sexual activity (Kelly 412). Although the solution to minimizing the amount of unwanted sexual activity may sound simple, over the past couple of decades it has been quite difficult to create a policy, in which all states agree upon, that keeps populations safe from sex offenders. In order to minimize the amount of sexual crimes committed annually, states need to mandate the rights of sex offenders in order to cure the false sense of security the public gets from sex offender registries, to reduce the recidivism of sex offenders, and to protect the public by limiting the amount of sexual offenses.

As an attempt to minimize the amount of illegal sexual activity taking place, the Wetterling Act was passed in 1944, requiring a mandatory sex offender registry to be established in every state. Still, community notification of sex offenders was discreet, calling for the signing of Megan’s law, further requiring states to make information about sex offenders that was “deemed relevant to public safety” available to the public (“Legislative History”). Shortly after, national standards for sex offender laws, including standards for what crimes should be registerable offenses and whose information should be available to the public, were created through the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA).

Even though these implications were made, people were still given a false sense of security from sex offender registries. When a sex offender is registered, it is commonly thought that whoever they live near will be alerted, but in reality this does not happen. Certain states that do not monitor sex offenders closely will usually just type an offender’s name into a database and most of the time the people they live near or work with will never be informed of the crime their neighbor or coworker has committed, therefore putting them at a higher risk for harm. An example of when something like this happened was in Michigan over a span of almost five years. Sixty-one year old Robert Keith was previously convicted of three sex crimes in Florida in 1997 and was even named a “designated predator” throughout the state of Florida (Sparks). He then moved to Michigan and was transferred on to Michigan State's sexual offender registry where he was monitored less closely. Keith then began holding private karate lessons at his house which he was then charged for touching three boys inappropriately between 2009 and 2013 (Sparks). If the state of Michigan would have provided more information about Robert Keith’s criminal history to the public, surely the parents of these three boys would not have allowed them to go to Keith’s house. However, because the sex offender registries in Michigan give people a false sense of security, three boys were susceptible to unwanted sexual activity.

Recently there have been more ways to become aware if a registered sex offender is nearby, but simply just being able to identify the whereabouts of an offender does not make people less susceptible to a sexual attack. Shannon Smith, a sex crimes attorney, found it has been proven that “child molesters tend not to pick a random child and attack,” but instead focus on creating a relationship with a specific child before they commit their crime (Smith). Clearly, it is easy for a previously accused offender to act once again with the regulations that are currently in place, which is why action needs to be taken in order to implement stricter regulations for sex crimes, even for first time offenders.

Furthermore, a study done by the U.S. Department of Justice shows that 67 percent of all sex offenders are arrested for at least a second time within nine years of their release (Alpher & Durose, 1). Within this 67 percent of individuals who were arrested for a second time, 54 percent of them were charged with another case of sexual assault (Alpher & Durose, 14), proving that sex offender rights need to be mandated. A solution to this problem was the implementation of Megan’s Law in 1996 in hopes to decrease recidivism rates, which is the tendency for a criminal to repeat a crime or be charged with another offense. States that have strongly enforced this law, or have made repercussions to the violation of it, have shown a great decrease in the amount of recidivism. Grant Duwe and William Donnay completed a study in Washington State that held two control groups of released sex offenders. When the first group was released, the community was not notified of the sex offender’s release; but with the release of the second group in 2000, there was broad community notification due to the application of Meghan’s Law. Once finished tracking the amount of recidivism within all of the sex offenders released, Duwe and Donnay found that “broad community notification significantly reduced the risk of time to a sex [offender’s] reoffence” (Duwe & Donnay, 411).

Similarly, a study was done by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy to track the amount of recidivism in sex offenders. They tracked 8,359 released sex offenders from multiple different prisons in Washington to track the effectiveness of Megan’s Law and the amount of recidivism as a result of it. After analyzing the results of the study, the outcome agreed with the results found in the study done by Duwe and Donnay. The findings in this study found that after the implementation of Megan’s law recidivism rates decreased five percentage points, which is “equivalent to a 70 percent reduction in felony sex recidivism” (“Sex Offender Sentencing,” 1).

Opposingly, some may say that the limitation of sex offender rights is “based on false assumptions” and may even go as far as to say that these restrictions violate the offender’s natural or human rights (Condon). Privacy is a human right that is allocated to every single individual and some human rights activists argue that through sex offender registries this natural right is being taken away or violated. On the other hand, although privacy is a right given to every citizen, it is also important that innocent individuals are not put in harm's way when it comes to the effectiveness of sex offender registries. Along with sex offender registries, the government has put into place many laws and regulations “yearning for safety” and to protect the public (“No Easy Answers”). Not only did the government enforce SORNA and Megan’s Law, but in 2007 President George W. Bush signed the Adam Walsh Protection Act (AWA), which additionally placed even stricter implications on “the tracking of sex offenders and notification requirements” in order to “protect the public from registered sex offenders who are likely to repeat their offenses” (Kelly 413).

Questions as to how strict sex offender laws should really be have been asked over the past couple of decades and the reality is that sex offender registries do not do enough to keep the public out of harm’s way. Sex offender registries do make the public more aware of the individuals around them, however this simply is not enough. To limit the amount of sexual offense crimes committed every year, sex offender rights need to be mandated in order to cure the false sense of security the public has from present registries, to reduce the amount of recidivism, and to protect the public by limiting the amount of sexual crimes committed every year.