Registries help feed nation’s thirst for mass incarceration
By Rick Anderson . . . The September 1988 rape and murder of 29-year-old Diane Ballasiotes in Seattle, Washington, followed by the 1989 rape and sexual mutilation of a 7-year-old Tacoma boy, were the seedlings of today’s nationwide sex offender registry laws – a 50-state network that tracks over 805,000 registrants and whose usefulness as a crime-prevention tool has been questioned and criticized.
Other cases from that same era – including the widely-reported 1989 kidnapping, sexual assault and murder of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling in Minnesota, which was solved only late last year – led to a series of 1990-2000 state and federal statutes that established central registries for sex offenders, as well as residency restrictions and civil commitment laws.
Attorneys and advocates for change wonder how many of the nation’s more than 805,000 registered sex offenders are in prison or jail on any given day just for violating registration requirements – which are technical violations rather than sex crimes, and did not even exist before 1990. And how much does that, and registry enforcement efforts, add to the rising costs of tracking and monitoring sex offenders? In Palm Beach County, Florida, one officer said 20 deputies are assigned full time to check on sex offenders and confirm their residences.
After a quarter-century, are sexual predator laws and nationwide sex offender registries delivering the benefits they promised? Or have we overreacted to the threat of “stranger danger” with throw-away-the-key excesses, damn the cost?
As even pro-registry crusader Patty Wetterling (Jacob’s mother) has said, wondering if things have gone too far: “We’ve cast such a broad net that we’re catching a lot of juveniles who did something stupid or different types of offenders who just screwed up. Should they never be given a chance to turn their lives around?”
Americans generally express belief that the registry system, which has federal oversight, helps to protect them, their families and their children from sexual predators. In reality, however, researchers and officers of the court such as Eric Tennen, a Boston criminal defense attorney who specializes in sexual assault cases, say registries fail to achieve their professed goals.
For starters, according to Tennen, “because of the myth that sex offenders reoffend at very high rates, many people believe that most sex offenses are committed by repeat offenders. In fact, up to 95 percent of all sexual offenses are committed by first time offenders,” who obviously are not required to register until after they’re caught.
Research has found that sex offenders have lower average recidivism rates in comparison to other offenders, though they are more likely to commit another sex offense than non-sex offenders (just as drug offenders are more likely to commit another drug-related crime, thieves are more likely to commit more thefts, etc.). According to an often-cited 2003 study published by the Department of Justice that examined recidivism rates of 9,691 sex offenders released from prison, the three-year arrest recidivism rate for sex-related crimes was 5.3 percent while the overall recidivism rate for any crime was 43 percent. As many sex crimes are not reported, however, resulting in incomplete data, recidivism rates for sex offenders are often questioned.
Eli Lehrer – president and co-founder of the R Street Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank – said that while the registries are intended to track predatory strangers who could reoffend, studies show that roughly 90 percent of sex offenders know their victims. “Random kidnappers, like the man who took Jacob Wetterling, are quite rare,” he explained. By most estimates, about a third of victims are family members of their abusers and most of the rest are victimized by someone their parents know.
Pedophiles, Lehrer noted, seldom kidnap their victims despite suggestions to the contrary in movies and novels. “The Polly Klass Foundation estimates that fewer than 100 children are kidnapped by strangers each year in the manner that Jacob Wetterling was,” Lehrer wrote in a recent study entitled “Rethinking Sex-Offender Registries,” published in the quarterly journal National Affairs.
“Many of these ‘stranger kidnappings’ involve children who were sitting in the back seats of stolen vehicles or interrupted another crime in progress. Parents wanting to protect their own children should worry much more about their own friends and relatives than random strangers.”
Fifty-three-year-old Danny James Heinrich, who killed Jacob Wetterling, was an exception. But he became the poster boy for child sex predators. His highly-publicized case helped inflame the belief that strangers were the ones children should fear most rather than people they were close to. Further, Heinrich had gotten away with his crime – until he confessed in 2016, almost 27 years later.
Please continue reading this excellent piece in Prison Legal News
Great article. This has a good overview of many of the problems we face. It would be a good brief (with citations) for doe v snyder when the scotus most likely accepts the case.
Excellent article! Can we get this article in front of people that can actually change the laws though?
Sure you can send it to those who have the power to change laws, or their staffers at least, but getting them to read it or listen to it is another story. A bullet background paper as a coversheet would be easiest for them to read with the actual article attached for further info.
This sex offender registry sure is one of main key contributors to the mass incarceration even worse than the war on drugs. All you have to do is use propaganda to convince the public of the worst case scenario of sex offense to make them believe in passing tough laws that are controversial and make a registrant’s life miserable and they can’t get help because they’re claimed to be dangerous to society, and they make it difficult for registrants to comply to certain protocols that if they screw up they are headed to prison, and prison is extremely dangerous for registrants because they are exploited to other inmates and are attacked and killed. It’s no wonder how the prisons in America are making a lot of money, which is not only from “war on drugs” but also the sex offender registry, not to mention how the US mass incarceration has violated human rights, and the Geneva convention.
Thanks for the article. Concerning citing the 2003 Department of Justice study, it has been shown to have erred on the side of caution — more recent studies indicate that the recidivism rate is much lower than that including several that place it at lower than 1%.
We need to get current factual data out to the public and the justices deciding these all-important cases and not simply cite an outdated study, especially one conducted by the Justice Department although at the time it was eye-opening. There is a wealth of information over at SOSEN.
While I was doing time at the state prison, I talked to the lieutenant of my building about how many inmates were there on sex offenses. He stated to me it was nearly 70%. So, are sex crimes contributing to mass incarceration? They most certainly are. In fact, in our state, they outnumber every other crime if what the lieutenant was saying was true. Incidentally, I asked other high ranking staff and they echoed the same figure. It’s stunning that the local news and politicians state that drug offenses are the main reason for overcrowding in our prisons and jails when this is apparently not the case. Yet another lie upon the pile of constant lies coming from our media and politicians.
And of course, you all know WHY there are so many people in prison. In my state, it’s $45,000 an inmate on average per year. That’s a lot of money. And, according to the budget of the prison I stayed in, 96% of that money goes straight to staff pockets.