I support three strikes laws, but they should be only for serious crimes or violent crimes. And I’d prefer three strikes, or even two strikes laws, for serious sex offenders, than a registry. All registries really seem to accomplish is to draw threats of violence.
Good behavior is not being monitored, it’s really not getting caught *or *good behavior.
That’s true of all crimes, although I’d venture to guess that the only people who don’t get caught easily are people who prey on their own family members. “stranger” pedophiles get busted, because when a child accuses a stranger of hurting them, they are believed. Family predators are smart enough to know that children that accuse them won’t be believed in most cases.
In my state not only does lewdness need to be an overtly sexual act not just exposure, it’s not even a Megan’s Law offense.
I maintained our list for 5 years. Out of about 40 offenders I had doubts about one of them being on the list.
Nothing even close to any of that ever happened in my experience. I know things vary from state to state so I’m not doubting that it’s happened. Here sexting between teens is not handled with charges. The only times it was even an option was when one party exposed the pictures online to others or spread them around school. Even then it never lead to being registered. All the training I got emphasized not handling underage sexting in the courts. At this point we could lock up most of the high school.
Then yours is a very enlightened state; however, intelligence and state prosecutors are not necessarily correlated. This is just the first two in Google…
Or this one:
In many (most?) states, virtually any court action is a matter of public record. Several years ago, I got a DUI (traffic violation for the first offense here). It’s right there on the web for anyone to see, which is awesome when you’re looking for a new job…
I’ve read articles about studies that say the recidivism rate is actually quite low. In fact the researcher who is most often quoted when people claim the rate is high has said his statement was misinterpreted - he was just making a guess about a specific population who dropped out of a program he was running at the time.
In my more cynical moments, I believe it’s more that we think some victims are more terrible than others; that ‘good kids’ from ‘good families’ deserve to protected because we are more sympathetic to those kids: they could be us, or our kids. It’s a Sexual abuse within a family? Not MY family, because I’m a good parent and my family members are good people, so I’m not as heated up about preventing it. My outrage is more abstract, like my outrage over genocide in Mynamar. It’s tragic, but it’s not My Kid, it couldn’t be My Kid.
The irony of course is that it could well be my kid. If we really wanted sex offender registries to be useful, it’s not the neighbors that need to know, it’s the cousins and other family members. But who looks them up? You can’t search by family connections. Is there an App that searches your Facebook friends?
If you count the people who have child porn on their computer or phone (like those teenagers) the re-offend rate is negative, since they have not even actually molested a child once.
I’ve mentioned this before, but when my son was in 4th or 5th grade, he told me a girl in his class sent him a picture. He handed me his phone and I nearly shat myself; there was a picture of a little girl, topless.
I explained to him that he did nothing wrong. I also explained why situations like this were troublesome. I told him I should contact the girl’s parents and discuss the situation. I considered calling my lawyer for advice before placing the call.
And then he handed me his phone again, this time with a picture showing the kid’s face. It was a little fat boy with boy boobs. Gotcha moment.
This 1997 SCOTUS case may also be of interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_v._Hendricks
Note then, the permanent incarceration is regarding a defendant who “had an extensive history of molesting children”. This is what the Kansas act appears aimed at - habitual dangerous offenders with no control of their urges. A subsequent case of an exhibitionist who commited two acts the same day (no other offenses mentioned) and threats in one of those instances - was considered insuffficient reason for permanent incarceration.
But, never underestimate the tendency of a prosecutor to use a sledgehammer to swat flies.
There is a tool called Static-99 that is used to predict recidivism for child molesters. It takes into account age at conviction, other offenses, including non-sexual offenses, whether or not the victims were family members, whether or not any of the victims were male, and some other things.
Regards,
Shodan
Which is exactly my problem with these registries. I don’t need to get to all the other questions , like who gets on the registry and just how likely are they to reoffend. What the registry results in now is people complaining that a sex offender lives 990 feet from the school rather than the required thousand, as if the ten feet makes a difference. Or people claiming they need to know where the sex offenders live because they would never let their child walk past a sex offender’s house. People just don’t look up their cousin, or the new classmate’s older brother, or their sister’s new boyfriend or the woman who runs the childcare at church or … And they wouldn’t check if there was a Facebook app - even people who know their brother/father/grandfather/boyfriend is a convicted sex offender often act as if they weren’t.
I checked the sex offenders in my area and none of them are really a threat. These aren’t the types of people who grab random children. One public urination, one public nudity, one statutory rape of a 16-year old, and a couple who abused their own kids. I don’t think that’s really what concerned citizens are looking for.
As I mentioned I know that you can find examples. The is not the direction law enforcement is going in. It is recognized that sending nude pictures of children is a big issue but not because of a teenage boyfriend having them in private. It’s because way too often they are exposed publicly for revenge of other reasons. Teenagers can be real shitheads sometimes. The prosecutors are too busy to even listen to anything less. It’s usually one of the parent’s pushing.
I wonder what state? If you look at the statf report linkrd above you can see that it’s extremely unlikely that someone would be on the list for peeing.
Also remember that you are seeing what they pled down to not what they did. In my state most people aren’t even aware that there are many on the list they can’t see. We have a 3 tier system. Tier 1s who are deemedleast likely to reoffend have to report in yearly but are not on the public list. The charge they are convicted of is only one factor in determining the likelihood of reoffending.
This must vary from state to state. In a search of my area (Maryland) most of the offenders listed were Tier 1.
I’m not seeing any constitutional issue here. If you can put a person in prison for the rest of their life, why can’t you put a person on parole for the rest of their life?
Permanent parole may not be a good idea but that’s for the legislature to decide. Courts are only supposed to decide if a law is constitutional or unconstitutional, not whether it’s good or bad.
Yep, in PA I searched several zipcodes near me. They have Tier 1,2,3 listed as well as “Dangerous Sexual Predator” shudder. I found a “dangerous sexual predator” working at a local automobile mechanic. Guess where we’ll never take our cars?
Oh, and several of the people listed (two men, one woman) had done time for “luring a child into their car”.