I think you’ve nailed it. Kind of a “Catch 22”.
There is a motive in the sense that strengthening sex crime enforcement is a vote winner, and keeping people off the sex offender registry is not.
The motive doesn’t have to be directly funds, but can be simple indirect:
Everybody wants to protect kids.
Having lots of names on the registry can be used against the uninformed public to claim “See how good a work we are doing, we caught so many bad guys and are watching them to make sure your kids are safe!” (More criminals => more cops => more funds in a general way might be used as argument)
The cops or who else puts people on the registry is safer by erring on the positive side: he covers himself in case somebody decides to sue. So if John Smith peed in public, and 20 years later rapes a woman, that woman might decide that the earlier incidence should have served as warning sign, and why weren’t steps taken? (That psychologists aren’t clear whether this is the case at all doesn’t matter).
So if John Smith is entered innocently, that’s a problem for John Smith, but if John SMith isn’t entered, it could become a problem for the cops. So better enter as many people as possible. (And John Smith trying to get removed faces an uphill battle with the public opinion about sex anyway).
Think of the converse - the registry getting smaller from one year to the next: what will the ignorant public assume, and how will they react? Will they say “Good thing the sex offenders are getting less” or will they say “The police is failing to protect us?”
I’m immediately dubious of any article which cites the Examiner as a source. That’s a blog that masquerades as a newspaper site, with most of the content coming from amateurs and not subjected to any editing or fact-checking. It’s glorified link-bait, in my opinion.
Sex offender registries are maintained under different laws in different states, so making blanket claims like this article does is misleading at best and in many cases, simply wrong.
In New York State, for example, you wouldn’t get put on the registry for peeing in public or for being a sexually active teen or for sexting.
Cite for any states that are different?
How many numbers do they have to be to become a problem to you? Isn’t every person whose life is permanently ruined because of taking a piss or having a high school romance one too many?
(Of course I find it ugly that men are pissing everywhere - because it’s polluting the enviroment and shows lack of restraint. REally, is it that hard to find a toilet esp. considering they pee standing anyway and so don’t have to worry about how clean it is? So I definitly want to see the pissers slapped with a fine - but not with sex registry).
How about a humour site with links to serious sites?
There was the case of a fellow from Nova Scotia (?) about 10 years ago who decided for some reason to go vigilante. He apparently took a gun, went down to Massachusets, and went looking for sex offenders. He looked up names on the registry, knocked on their doors and shot them point blank. IIRC he shot 4 before turning the gun on himself when police cornered him.
One of the guys he shot was a convicted a few years before as a teenager of having sex with his underage girlfriend, one of those 18-16 situations IIRC.
This is a GQ thread asking if certain tactics are used to inflate the numbers of registered sex offenders for political gain, not a GD thread or IMHO thread about the moral righteousness of unjustly punishing people in the manner described.
I’m not sure if anyone can find a cite to answer the OP’s question, but people have seem to taken it as a given that the question even has merit. I’ll I’m asking for, as a start, is if including playground urinators and Romeos in sex offender stats even makes a noticeable affect on the numbers. If the answer is “no,” then that answers the OP’s question as well.
And I again want to know how many numbers is “noticeable” enough for you?
Do you doubt that urinators and Romeos are registered at sex offenders at all?
Do you doubt that this inflates the numbers? Depends on how you define “inflate”, but if the original purpose of sex offender registries was to protect children and women from serial rapists and killers, then including people who don’t fit that category counts as inflation for me.
Do you doubt that it is done for a political purpose? What other explanation do you have? I have not heard a definite statement of fact or a study from respected psychologists that flashers (which is what urination is usually classified as to be considered a sex offense in the first place) increase to serious behaviour like rape. Rather, from what I read, the issue is still unclear.
It’d have to be more than a 1% increase in order for me to even start a discussion about if the numbers are inflated for political reasons. 1% is a pretty low threshold, wouldn’t you agree?
So find me a cite that says that greater than 1% of all registered sex offenders are urinators and Romeos.
Um, I’m not the OP - why do I have to find the cite?
And I no longer like playing your peoples “cite” game: go find a cite - let’s ignore the cite - no, that cite won’t do - no, if you can’t find it in google in 15 min. it doesn’t exist - no, nothing from the media because US media are untrustworthy (and other media don’t exist) - no, nothing from the media because all media is biased (even the BBC and similar) - and so on.
Cites are encouraged in GQ. If you don’t want to back up your assertions with even the scantest of evidence, then don’t respond.
This article discusses a lot of the issues in this thread. http://archive.guidemag.com/magcontent/invokemagcontent.cfm?ID=BF0FA813-7607-4666-B1F081D6A6C701CC
The Massachusets vigilate incident, one random data point, depending on which number you pick - between 1 in 34 and 1 in 4 of the offenders he targetted at was there for statutory rape of a girlfriend. so somewhere between 25% and 3% of registrants…
Got a better number?
It’s the bureaucratic mindset at its worst. Nobody gets brownie points for letting a sex offender off - “You are blatantly guilty of sexual offenses, violating the letter of the law, but we won’t prosecute you”. However, every slam-dunk case adds to the statistics - “we’ve identified 10,000 dangerous sex offenders so the public can protect themselves”.
Which line makes a better re-election commercial?
For every person who thinks a 4year difference in romance is OK, there’s some outraged parent or (possibly) uptight bystander who is outraged by the possibility.
Except if I’m right about the way this problem arises, it’s not a problem caused by positive specific intended action but by application of a broad brush. In other words, I don’t think anyone is intentionally targetting the 1% (if that’s the right number). There are just people making laws with very broad effect, and people being too spineless to dare to show concern about the unintentionally targetted collateral damage, lest they be accused of being soft on the intended targets.
And no, I don’t think any low threshold is acceptable. Why is it acceptable for *anyone at all *to be punished so incredibly harshly for doing almost nothing wrong? The more so when it is hardly a case where it would be difficult to distinguish between people who might be a danger to the community and those who are not, if the politicians concerned had the spine to want to do so, and the voters had the brains to back the politicians with such spine.
I would agree with this.
And now we’re out in left field again. Obviously there’s no “acceptable” percentage of bullshit sex offender convictions, but I never used that word.
Look, the OP asked what motivation states might have for inflating the numbers. As a specific example, he asked “Are states receiving federal funds based on how many sex offenders they have or convict?”
Come on. If there were a quota system and states were convicting playground urinators left and right in order to boost their numbers in order to get federal dollars, that would answer the OPs question. If states were boosting their numbers for some other reason, then that would also answer the OP’s question. But are states even boosting their numbers? Does anyone give a shit if a state convicts 3000 sex offenders per year instead of 1500? Do the raw numbers matter to anyone? Nobody has provided any evidence in this GQ thread to suggest that anyone is doing anything simply to increase their numbers.
Without getting too far into GD or IMHO territory, I’d suggest that no, states aren’t inflating their numbers for any reason. I’d go further and suggest that BS sex offender convictions don’t make up a meaningful percentage of total convictions. Worrisome? Absolutely. Alarming? Yes. Do they make for great news stories? Sure. But in terms of raw numbers, I’m guessing there’s more wrongfully convicted sex offenders (100% innocent) than people who are rightfully convicted of crimes that shouldn’t be considered sex offenses. And for both of those categories, the reasons are you state: overzealous prosecutors who don’t want to be seen as soft on sex offenders, and a public that’s not willing to stand up for people convicted on bullshit reasons. Padding numbers in order to reach some mysterious quota isn’t required to explain the obvious.
I disagree. I think that plenty of good examples have been provided of prosecutions that would definitely fall into the "bullshit"category - person convicted of an offense with no victim. My example is of a guy who was browsing a web site. Not some “darknet” child porn site, but a commercial Usenet picture archive of the alt.binaries.pictures groups. The only reason that he is in prison is that he ran out of money to pay his lawyer and had to take a plea bargain. The images were on his computer - one set of illegal images among several thousand other images. And he had the bad luck to be looking at that web site during a period when the site’s traffic was being monitored by the prosecutor’s office. Are you confident that your computer could survive the same scrutiny?
It makes up 100% of all the convicted sex offenders I personally know. I may be fairly unique in that I admit that I know one and come to his defense.
There was an article in Playboy back in the 1980s that asserted that the #1 distributor of child porn was the US Post Office. Distributor, not carrier. They actually ran carefully worded ads in magazines of the time, mailed seized child porn to the respondents, then assisted the FBI in arresting the recipients. The sting operation was so successful that they ran out of seized child porn and had to print copies from their archives.
Age of consent of 18 years is harsh.
steronz I never mentioned prosecutors. I’m talking about the statutes as they written.
In my view those statutes are, as a consequence of politics, written in a way that builds in inflation of the numbers. Not in the sense of someone deliberately trying to meet a quota, but as a consequence of politians writing statutes as broadly as possible to please the mob. The two possibilities perhaps have little functional or moral difference.
I don’t think the OP quite nails what is going on, but I think there is something not much different going on.
The OP at it’s broadest asks whether there is “a motive” for this overzealousness and I think the answer to that is “yes there is” but I don’t think the overzealousness lies where the OP assumes, nor is the motive quite what the OP thinks.
And when I give cites, you ignore them. Like I said, I know the game.
So the laws cited that urinators and High school lovers actually are indeed entered into the registry don’t count as evidence for you?
The OP mentioned funds as one possible explanation for a possible inflation; plausible explanations have been given in this thread for how inflation happens without funds; yet you deny it.
So you don’t have any numbers, either, just your feeling. Why don’t you use cites to back up your claim that urinators actually make up less than 1%?
Again, the OP didn’t declare this, he was proposing one possible explanation for the inflation. So you are batting against a strawman of the real OP.