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Home Reform Sex Offender Laws

 

 

 Does Registering Sex Offenders Do Any Good?

 

Out of 747,408 Registered Sex Offenders, How Many Are Actually Dangerous?

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) reports that the number of registered sex offenders in the United States has increased by nearly a quarter in the last five years. The total in the most recent survey was 747,408, up from 606,816 in 2006, the first year NCMEC did a count. That was the year when Congress enacted the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act (currently up for reauthorization), which imposed new requirements for state sex offender registries and created a national database incorporating information from those registries. NCMEC CEO Ernie Allen says registration "is a reasonable measure designed to provide important information to authorities and to help protect the public, particularly children." Yet his group does not say how many of the 747,408 people listed on sex offender registries are predatory criminals who actually pose a threat to public safety, probably because it does not know.

The usefulness even of properly focused registries is debatable, since Justice Department data indicate that almost nine out of 10 sex crimes are committed by people with no records for that kind of offense. Furthermore, as I explained in a July Reason article, registered sex offenders include people convicted of nonviolent crimes such as solicitation, public urination, streaking, and consensual sex with teenagers (even teenagers they subsequently marry). Allen avers that "these registries are especially important because of the high risk of re-offense by some of these offenders" (emphasis added). As I note in the Reason piece, recidivism rates for sex offenders seem to have been greatly exaggerated. In any case, if protecting potential victims is the raison d'etre for the registries, shouldn't they be limited to people who are likely to commit crimes against others?

 

Are Sex Offender Laws Backfiring?

Photo: pena2(A map of registered sex offenders in L.A.)

A pair of new studies raise questions as to whether sex offender registries and community notification laws actually reduce recidivism of sex offenders, or even lead to lower sex crime rates overall. Both are published in the University of Chicago’s Journal of Law and Economics.

The first study by Jonah Rockoff of Columbia Business School, and J.J. Prescott, a law professor at the University of Michigan, parses out the effectiveness of the two basic types of sex offender laws. While they find that the registration of released sex offenders is associated with a 13% decrease in crime from the sample mean, public notification laws proved to be counterproductive, and led to slightly higher rates of sex crime because of what the authors refer to as a “relative utility effect”:

Our results suggest that community notification deters first-time sex offenders, but may increase recidivism by registered offenders by increasing the relative attractiveness of criminal behavior. This finding is consistent with work by criminologists showing that notification may contribute to recidivism by imposing social and financial costs on registered sex offenders and, as a result, making non-criminal activity relatively less attractive.
…[C]onvicted sex offenders become more likely to commit crime when their information is made public because the associated psychological, social, or financial costs make crime more attractive.

The second study comes from Amanda Y. Agan, a PhD student at the University of Chicago, who throws water on the whole notion that sex offender registries work in the first place.

Agan compared arrest rates for sex crimes in each U.S. state before and after registry laws were implemented and found no appreciable changes in crime trends following the introduction of a registry. As for recidivism, she looked at data on over 9,000 sex offenders released from prison in 1994. About half were released into states where they needed to register, while the other half did not need to register. Agan found no significant difference in the two groups’ propensity to re-offend, and that those released into states without registration laws were actually slightly less likely to re-offend. Analyzing Washington D.C. census data, Agan went block by block and found that crime rates in general, and sex crimes in particular, do not vary according to the number of sex offenders in the area.

 

 

 

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