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“Recidivism rates — the rates at which juvenile sex offenders re-offend — are so low as to be indistinguishable from the rate that non-offenders offend. But that’s not what the public believes. Instead, it believes that juvenile sex ‘criminals’ (including a slew of teens who had consensual sex) can never stop pouncing.” Read the article… Continue reading Kids As Young As 9 Are on the Sex Offender Registry…for Life

“There is something truly odious — “Scarlet Letter”-esque, one might say — about requiring people to bear, for their entire lives, this conspicuous badge of dishonor, whatever their prior crime (for which they have already been duly punished) may have been. And the fact that the category of “covered sex offenders” includes many thousands of… Continue reading The yellow star, the scarlet letter and ‘International Megan’s Law’

“Protecting Our Kids: How Sex Offender Laws Are Failing Us by Professor Emily Horowitz has been named among the Outstanding Academic Titles of 2015 by Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.” See this post at the Crimcast blog.

“And what is absolutely mind-blowing is that the SOR’s have been proven not to work, and they cost the taxpayers gobs of money (see reference ‘a’ above). But now that they’ve become institutionalized in the justice system, they’re a political football. Now we have lots of people whose livelihoods derive from the SOR’s, and an… Continue reading Are Sex Offender Registries Cruel and Unusual Punishment?

Photograph by Gretchen Ertl / The New York Times / Redux “We have seen recent high-profile instances in which that article of faith has led to damaging errors, as in Rolling Stone’s reporting of a rape at the University of Virginia, or the prosecution of the Duke lacrosse case. The extent of the damage comes… Continue reading Shutting Down Conversations About Rape at Harvard Law

“Today, though, the town of Pahokee does more than tolerate the sex offender colony. It has come to embrace it. And nowhere is that turnaround more evident than at the United Methodist Church, where many offenders attend service.” Read the full article by Anne Schindler in First Coast News. “Travis Russ is founder and artistic… Continue reading Two Articles About the Sex Offenders of Pahokee Florida

“And then there are the patent absurdities created by such laws—signs that legislators, in search of novel ways to torture so-called sex offenders, have abandoned consideration of efficacy or justice. In the case of underage sexting, for instance, a person is both offender and victim at the same time.” Read the full article by Judith… Continue reading The Online–Sex Predator Panic

“I’ve said it many times before — these sex offender cases are of the deepest importance, not because of any special concern we might have for convicted sex offenders but because they’re the despised minority du jour, subject to the harshest treatment that legislators and law enforcement officials can dream up, and unless the courts… Continue reading First Amendment woes in North Carolina

Tim Gruber for The New York Times “But now Minnesota’s civil commitment program — which detains more people per capita than any other state — is facing an overhaul. Earlier this year, a federal judge found it unconstitutional, calling it ‘a punitive system that segregates and indefinitely detains a class of potentially dangerous individuals without… Continue reading States Struggle With What to Do With Sex Offenders After Prison

From the Cleveland Plain Dealer Sex offender registries draw criticism from some unlikely sources Sex offender says registry amounts to punishment for life