The trouble with sex offender registries

A court decision barring retroactive punishments has removed some 1,500 people from the Maryland sex offender registry.

As the Baltimore Sun reports, many of these are vile unsympathetic people. However, the courts decided that they are also people who served their time in prison and then were released before sex offender registries were commonplace.

Does that mean they should be punished again, if they have committed no crimes since then? What is the purpose of these lists, which operate in 50 states and in Washington DC? Is it to inform the public, or to sooth their panic about a horrific but relatively uncommon type of crime?

There are nearly 750,000 people on sex offender registries throughout the U.S. today.

The reasoning behind them is clear, sex offenders — rapists, child molesters, foul, awful people — are dangerous and they are not to be trusted in the general population. If they are to be placed in the population, their neighbors, and anyone in the public should be able to know exactly what they look like, and where they live.

Yet, it’s not that simple. Not even close.

In the past half decade, as tough on crime politics has been dialed down a bit, horror stories of blameless or relatively minor criminals having their lives ruined have been in the news more and more.

In the movie “Horrible Bosses,” Dale Arbus (played by Charlie Day) winds up on a sex offender registry because he was caught urinating in a playground next to a bar, after midnight.

Reasonable people can agree that public urination, sexting, or a 14-year-old having consensual sex with an 18-year-old should not doom someone to sometimes an entire life of reporting his address, shaming him in front of neighbors, or preventing him from living next to schools and playgrounds.

Certainly children and young teenagers shouldn’t be anywhere near this list.

But that’s the problem with law and order in America today. It rarely allows for rational, reasonable exceptions.

Now, like the bulging TSA no-fly list or the ridiculous number of Americans who have an FBI file, the sex offender registries are too long and too badly done for anyone to figure out who is the real threat. Bloating the registries has sabotaged them as useful tools, even as they hurt untold numbers of people who don’t deserve draconian punishments.

Sex offender registries are justified because of recidivism worries, but these fears appear to be overblown. Recidivism rates for sex criminals were estimated in a 2003 Department of Justice survey to be about 5.3 percent. Human Rights Watch put the number at a high of 13 percent — much lower for children who committed sex crimes.

In other words, the most worrying statistics are still still well below the recidivism rate for most other offenses.

Perhaps that’s because we’ve expanded what is meant by sex offender to include people who are clearly not sex offenders. Some of these offenses are very minor indeed.

More than 29 states put people on the list for consensual sex between teenagers. Soliciting a prostitute or other prostitution-related offenses can land you on the list in six states. Twelve states will add you for relieving yourself in public. These and other crimes like indecent exposure earn you a permanent scarlet letter.

The legal requirement that sex offenders confirm their address — with the most serious ones doing so for life — began with the big, beefy federal crime bill in 1994. Two years later, Megan’s Law gave us the first public registries of offenders.

The 2007 Adam Walsh Act divided offenders into three levels of dangerous — with only the worst of the worst being obligated to report for life. But it hasn’t worked out that way in many states, only a few of which are in compliance with the law.

Some states, such as New Jersey, are considering losing the tier system altogether and lumping every sex offender together — thereby making the cudgel of law and order even more blunt that it already is.

Other controversial aspects to the Walsh law included making lifers registration retroactive. If you committed a severe enough sex crime 80 years ago, you’re going on the list Mr. 100 year old.

This could create perverse and dangerous incentives. Punishing people by making them more antisocial, and preventing them from getting more than a meager job may not be the best way to make them less dangerous. What do you have to lose if you are branded a monster for life – a pariah anywhere you live and work?

Why not just give in to those deviant impulses if, say, as in Georgia, failing to update your address twice can put into prison for up to 30 years?

Homelessness is no excuse there, either. And yet if you are restricted from living near schools and even obligated to move if one is built too close to your home, what kind of normal, good citizen can you ever hope to become?

Sex offenders’ addresses can be under bridges, like modern updates of nightmarish fairytales, or they can be nowhere at all, but they still need to report. Felons have a difficult time finding work already. Sexually-based felonies make it near impossible.

This post-prison punishment might be enough to make some people pine for “civil commitment,” which is indefinite commitment of dangerous sex offenders after they served their sentences. Twenty states and DC allow for this endless punishment system.

None of this should be mistaken as a call for leniency for the worst people on the lists. Violent sexual abusers certainly deserve extremely long prison terms. Yet there are a lot more people than these on the registries.

The rolls need to be purged of such people. And if that can’t be done, the registries should be abolished as dangerous to the liberties of far too many folks who pose no threat to society.