The yellow star, the scarlet letter and ‘International Megan’s Law’

“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 …

Congratulations Emily!

“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.…

Are Sex Offender Registries Cruel and Unusual Punishment?

“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 …

Shutting Down Conversations About Rape at Harvard Law

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 …

Two Articles About the Sex Offenders of Pahokee Florida

“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 …

The Online–Sex Predator Panic

“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 …

First Amendment woes in North Carolina

“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 …

States Struggle With What to Do With Sex Offenders After Prison

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 …

Two articles critical of the sex offender registry

From the Cleveland Plain Dealer

Sex offender registries draw criticism from some unlikely sources

Sex offender says registry amounts to punishment for life…

The mysterious nature of the “juvenile sex offender”

“If you ask John Q. Public about the public safety risk posed by a juvenile who has been arrested for a sex offense, chances are he will estimate too high. The public is woefully uninformed when it comes to risk …