Good News Concerning Upcoming Legistative Bills

Well I meant to post this a couple of weeks ago. The review committee has rejected all 5 of the bills that were introduced for this session. There is some rumblings that there maybe a committee formed that is going to review all bills that weren't accepted, so we still may have to fight one or more bills this session. And we also need to keep an eye out for emergency bills being introduced that concern changes to Sex Offender laws. But for now things seem to be quiet.

Upcoming Bills effecting Maine RFSOs

Ok all this is what we are facing so far during the next Legislative Session that starts in January. Can anyone tell me what constitutes a Class D sex offense here in Maine? (see LR: 2383) Three of the proposed bills deal with changing the 750 foot residency restriction limit passed last session. Notice the first two would add Day Care Facilities to the places limiting where you can live as an RFSO . And the last one who is going to vote against little old ladies being raped in the nursing home? But my thought is why are they trying to add a new category, when I am pretty sure these are already sex offenses. It will be interesting to see the full bills and how they are worded.

Bills Being Requested as of yesterday.
LR: 2189: An act to Limit the Distance from a Day Care Facility within Which a Registered Sex Offender May Reside

LR: 2142: An Act to Increase the Maximum Distance from a School and a Day Care Center That May Be Set by Municipal Ordinance beyond Which a Sex Offender May Reside

LR: 2180: An Act To Provide to Certain Municipalities a Waiver of the Requirement To Adopt a Comprehensive Plan and Allow Those Municipalities To Enforce Their Ordinances

LR: 2383: An Act To Provide Full Accountability for Convicted Class D Sex Offenders

LR: 2105: An Act To Require Persons Who Commit Sex Offenses Against Dependent or Incapacitated Adults To Register under the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act of 1999

Citizens for Change-Maine
Po Box 611
Bridgton, ME 04009

State Coordinator
Maine Citizens For Change
http://mecfc.blogspot.com

OK Will Force Women Who Get Abortions to Be On Internet Registry!

Too Much Information, Not Enough Common Sense

Link

A new Oklahoma law will require the details of every abortion to be posted on a public website.
Mothers -- or would-be mothers, rather -- will be prompted to answer 37 questions that range from her marital status and race to how many times she's ever been pregnant. One question asks for the woman's reason to abort, offering "relationship problems" as a possible check-off box, and it's difficult to ignore the judgmental and disapproving tone.

The website, which will cost $200,000 per year to implement, is intended to prevent or decrease the number of abortions in Oklahoma, but the bill has already raised considerable debate, attracting opposition from the Center For Reproductive Rights and former Oklahoma Representative Wanda Jo Stapleton, among others. This questionnaire not only forces doctors into an uncomfortable predicament -- failure to disclose this information would result in "criminal sanctions and loss of medical license," as Salon's Lynn Harris reports -- but, put simply, it shames women. "They're really just trying to frighten women out of having abortions," Kery Parks, director of external affairs at Planned Parenthood of Central Oklahoma, told Harris. Indeed, in a small town, probing details would easily identify the woman with a proverbial scarlet A.

Sensitivity issues aside, this possible law poses a question about the extent to which transparency works in today's information-saturated society, where the line between reasonable alerts and public shaming has increasingly blurred. The latter is nothing new, with historical roots in the mark of Cain, Jesus's crucifixion, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and the Nazis' yellow stars during the Holocaust -- quite the range right there.

More contemporary examples include a theft defendant in Michigan who was ordered by
a judge to bear the words "Daddy, don't steal" on his arm, and convicted shoplifters who were sentenced to wear neon green t-shirt with the phrase "I'm a thief" while performing community service in Ohio.

Sometimes, transparency makes complete sense, like when a medical professor promotes a specific drug and simultaneously sits on the board of its distributor. Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig discusses transparency's merits in The New Republic:

In particular, management transparency, which is designed to make the performance of government agencies more measurable, will radically improve how government works. And making government data available for others to build upon has historically produced enormous value -- from weather data, which produces more than $800 billion in economic value to the United States, to GPS data, liberated originally by Ronald Reagan, which now allows cell phones to instantly report (among other essential facts) whether Peets or Starbucks is closer.

But Lessig's piece focuses more on the questionable uses of transparency, arguing that the good intentions do not always yield good results. Consider an editorial recently published in the New York Times about sex offender registries:

Meanwhile, an attempt to create a national registry -- part of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act passed in 2006 -- has faltered badly. States fretting about the costs and legal complications all missed the deadline to comply, which was then extended to July 2010. They worry that the registry would create an overwhelming monitoring burden and that it uses crude means of assessing the likelihood that offenders might repeat their crimes. The list of offenders is so large as to be almost useless. It is supposed to include not only rapists and kidnappers but also flashers and teenagers who had consensual sex.

The Offender Locator iPhone application is among Apple's top-selling features, but is it creating more harm than protection? In many ways, as these sorts of disclosures, literally available at our fingertips, spiral out of control, and everyone can find out everyone else's business in the virtual community created by the Internet, we seem to be returning to the dangerous age that Hawthrone described. Oklahoma legislators, take note: "Sunlight may well be a great disinfectant," Lessig says, "But as anyone who has ever waded through a swamp knows, it has other effects as well."

When Adults Fail Children—For Life

Brody's Scribbles... A Guest Editorial from Dr. Marty Klein

article link

When Adults Fail Children—For Life

By Dr. Marty Klein

The Iowa Supreme Court has affirmed the conviction of 18-year-old Jorge Canal, who complied with a 14-year-old friend’s request for a photo of his penis. The young man is now forced to register as a sex offender, meaning his chances of getting a college degree, job, or livable apartment are pretty much ended.

According to the court, the girl “generally hung out with teenagers older than herself;” was “only friends” with Canal; thought the picture was sent “only as a joke;” and was not “a means to excite any feelings.” Nevertheless, Canal was convicted of “knowingly disseminating obscene material to a minor.”

Canal was a foolish kid. But there are many ugly, stupid, irresponsible adults in this story. The girl’s mother, who checked her daughter’s e-mail and internet use, found the photo and forwarded it to her husband. The father then showed the photo to his friend, a police officer. The cop arranged to have Canal arrested. A prosecutor pursued the case, a judge tried it, a jury convicted. These adults failed Canal and his friend miserably. His ruined life will be a testament to their fear, insecurity, and hatred.

All these adults were supposedly attempting to protect Iowa’s young people–by punishing this kid who was fooling around with a pal.

So let’s spend a moment in the real world (which none of these adults seem to inhabit). Which is likely to hurt this 14-year-old girl more—seeing a 2-square-inch photo of a friend’s erect penis, or being the reason that this friend will spend time in jail and decades as a registered sex offender? Her life is now ruined (in addition, of course, to his), because of her criminally negligent parents, criminally ambitious prosecutor, and 12 jury members who failed to protect people who needed justice but received only wrath.

Americans should understand the horrors of our obscenity laws: a picture or word or object is obscene only after a jury decides that it is. And a jury can decide that ANY picture, word, or object is obscene. So no one can know for sure what’s obscene until it’s too late. This is exactly like laws against “hooliganism” in places like Russia that we rightly deride.

The judge in Canal’s case had rightly told the jury that “a depiction of a person’s genitals was not in and of itself obscene. In order for the depiction of a person’s genitals to be obscene, an average person applying contemporary community standards with respect to what is suitable material for minors must find the material is patently offensive, appeals to the prurient interest, and lacks serious literary, scientific, political, or artistic value.” At that point, the picture becomes illegal, and sharing it with someone else becomes a crime.

A jury of twelve Americans destroyed Jorge Canal’s life because they believed that a picture of his erect penis is “patently offensive.” I hope each of them never gets a good night’s sleep for the rest of their lives.

Dr. Marty Klein has been a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Sex Therapist for 29 years. As a clinician, he works each week with couples and individuals who have a variety of sexual and non-sexual difficulties--over 30,000 sessions since 1980.

Dr. Klein fights for the sexual rights of all Americans through his legal and courtroom work. He has been an expert witness, consultant, or invited defendant in many state and federal censorship, internet, and obscenity cases.

He has authored over 100 articles in publications such as Parents, New Woman, and Playboy, as well as San Francisco Medicine, the California Therapist, and the Journal of Homosexuality. He is also a former contributing editor to The New Physician, American Baby, and Modern Bride.

How many victims?

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0909/18/lkl.01.html

The other day Larry King was interviewing Dr. Phil and several other people about the Garrido case. And Dr Phil Said "The question on everybody's mind is Philip Garrido involved in some of the other disappearances that we've been talking about tonight. Dan Simon, you've been in Antioch. You've been all over this. Experts that follow these things with pedophiles and sexual offenders tell us that the average sexual offender can have anywhere 100 to 400 victims throughout their lifetime. So the fact that Philip Garrido has been tied to one that we know of and a violent rape before leaves an awful lot of concern that there are other victims out there. What does law enforcement think about this?" Dan Simon was a guest from law enforcement also on the show. Now I have heard others makes similar claims. That one reason we have to be so tough on Sex Offenders is they have so many victims. I haven't come across any studies that have supported this claim. Does anyone reading this know of a study that does support this claim of a high number of victims?
Let's take a minute and look at the numbers. There are over 650,000 registered former offenders. I've heard numbers putting the registry numbers at over 700,000. But for now lets just use the 650,000, figure, if each person on the registry each had 100 victims that would mean there are 65,000,000 victims of sexual abuse. And at 400 each that numbers come out to 260,000,000. Say the words two hundred and sixty MILLION potentional victims of sexual abuse! As of July 2006 the population of the United States is 304,059,724. If the numbers being quoted by the media and politicians are true then almost every person in the United States has been molested by someone already on the registry. And what about the new cases being reported? Over 86% of cases reported are new offenders, people not already on the sex offender registry. Lets look at another fact that is often touted out when you hear these 'experts' talking. Sexual abuse is very under reported. If so how do the numbers add up? On the ARC radio show, with Ron Book as the guest, one caller countered those very myths by saying "If at the rate the media is claiming, children are being victimized. We would be knee high deep in this country, in the bodies of dead & abused children."

Article mentions Shirley Turner whose son was slain by a vigilante

The mother of one of the people killed in the vigilante murders here in Maine in 2006 is profiled here. It's a sad and horrible story. Shirley Turner is one woman I would love to meet someday. I hope she knows that there are people who do care about what happened to her son and we are fighting to help make sure it never happens again.


From The Times

September 3, 2009

A sad lesson in ‘know thy neighbor’

Megan’s Law did not protect Jaycee Dugard. It helped create ghettos of abuse – and would do

Link here

Catherine Philp

Shirley Turner’s son was not a child rapist. He was a teenage boy madly in love with his girlfriend and three weeks before her 16th birthday they could wait no longer and made love in her bedroom while her parents were out at the movies. When her father returned and discovered them, he reported William to the police. He was charged with statutory rape, convicted, sent to jail and on his release his name was added to the sex offenders register under the version of Megan’s Law applied in his home state of Maine.

Shirley Turner’s stepfather, Brian, was a child rapist. He raped her at the age of 5. As Shirley approached her teens, her mother grew jealous of her husband’s apparent “preference” for her daughter. When she was 15, Brian took off, dragging Shirley with him and forcing her into marriage. William was her only child, fathered by her rapist.

When Stephen Marshall, a vigilante, started surfing Maine’s sex offenders register for child molesters to kill, it was William’s name he found, not Brian’s. Brian was never registered because Shirley never reported the crimes of the stepfather who became her husband. William is now dead, along with a more conventionally guilty paedophile in his town, both shot by Marshall. Brian is in jail, to Shirley’s relief, not for sex offences, but for attempting to murder her when she finally fled.

This was the tortured narrative I came across in Milo, northern Maine, in 2006, while looking for evidence of whether or not Megan’s Law worked. Shirley, a haunted shadow of a woman, wept warm tears on me as she told of the loss of her beloved son. She was one of the few people I connected with in this unsettling backwater where jaunty Stars and Stripes flying from clapboard houses disguised an underside of pure American Gothic.

BACKGROUND

I thought of Milo this week reading the latest soul-polluting details of the Jaycee Dugard case in Antioch, California, a place where the local Megan’s Law register recorded more than 100 registered sex offenders living in Phillip Garrido’s Zip code. In the small town of Milo, there were 42.

Jennifer Kale, the young mother who lived next door to Marshall’s second victim, had no idea she had a sex offender for a neighbour, despite having checked the register. She didn’t recognise the mug shot because she had never met him. “When I was little there was always some weird guy that your parents said to stay away from,” she said.

“You sort of knew. But it’s different now. Then you knew everyone but that’s all changed. You don’t know anyone anymore.”

Milo owes a number of its sex offenders to the introduction of Megan’s Law in neighbouring Massachusetts in 1999, three years before it was adopted in Maine. To escape registration there, many decamped north to Maine. Now Megan’s Law has been enacted across the United States, the migration has not stopped. Campaigners against the law argue it has driven many offenders underground or into hiding in plain sight; permanently transient to avoid registration or transplanting to neighbourhoods of the criminal underclasses where everyone minds their own business.

Garrido’s is such a neighbourhood, it is now emerging, where his neighbours built crack dens in their backyards and ignored the voices of children from the home of a man registered as a sex offender. Even there he was known as “Creepy Phil”. Megan’s Law did not exist when Jaycee was snatched but it would not have saved her. The Garridos travelled 150 miles to snatch her from her local bus stop. No internet search could have predicted that. Only one person ever reported the presence of children to the police, despite most neighbours admitting they knew that children lived there and that Garrido was on the register.

Every time a horrific child sex crime takes place in Britain, voices are raised in support of our own Megan’s Law. And yet there is no evidence that such a law has done anything to lower the level of child abuse. A 2008 federal-funded survey conducted in New Jersey, where Megan’s Law originated, concluded it had done nothing to deter the repeat offenders it is designed to target. It only made them easier to track down when they had reoffended.

Megan’s mother still defends the law named for her murdered daughter, saying she never intended it to deter offenders, only to “raise awareness”. But a register is a knee- jerk response to the cry of “something must be done,” and that done, we are all too happy to do nothing more. If a sex offender lives on our street, Megan’s Law gives us the means to hound them out to somewhere else — where they can prey on someone else’s kids.

If it corrals them into ghettos to escape us, so much the better. At least it keeps them off our street. Job done, there is no need for us to look out for the other children in our “community” or bother to check why someone else’s young girls are playing in the creepy man’s yard.

Meanwhile, most of the abuse goes on where it always has: in homes like Shirley Turner’s, where neighbours fear to tread. Megan’s Law satisfies our desire to do something, and fast. And it saves us from facing the awful truth that we don’t know who our neighbours are, and as long as they don’t bother us, most of us don’t care.

Catherine Philp is diplomatic correspondent of The Times

We have a mailing address now!

Today I set up CFC Maine's very own post office box. I can be reached by writing me at Citizen's For Change Maine or CFC ME, PO Box 611, Bridgton, Maine 04009. This means we can start our letter writing campaign and have a valid address to be reached at for those that do not have access to the internet. Thanks to those who gave so generously at our first meeting. Their donations allowed us to pay for the mailbox and we have purchased some stamps to get started. To anyone else who would like to assist us with the letter campaign donations of stamps would be greatly appreciated. Also I am looking for suggestions on how to write a letter, to be sent out to those on the registry and their families, that would gain their trust and that would motivate them to get involved. Has anyone else sent out letters in the past? What worked and what didn't? Looking forward to hearing from you all.

CFC Maine mentioned in article

State law set to change city's sex offender ordinance

http://www.keepmecurrent.com/american_journal/news/article_e2946838-9e46-11de-8b21-001cc4c002e0.html
Please feel free to leave comments

Posted: Thursday, September 10, 2009 3:20 pm | Updated: 5:16 pm, Thu Sep 10, 2009.

Leslie Bridgers

Westbrook police Detective Dan Violette says there's a reason the number of sex offenders living and working in the city hasn't changed much in the past two years.

Since the City Council adopted one of the strictest ordinances in the state prohibiting registered sex offenders from living or working in most of the city, Violette has had to force people out of their new apartments and make them quit their jobs.

According to the detective, who said he spends about 25 percent of his work week keeping track of sex offenders in the city, about 37 registered sex offenders live in Westbrook and an additional 16 work there.

"The number hasn't fluctuated very much," Violette said.

But that could change when a new state law goes into effect Saturday, nullifying Westbrook's ordinance.

The City Council will vote Monday on whether to adopt the state's new maximum allowable restrictions on where sex offenders can live. If passed, the 2,500-foot buffer zones around all places children frequent will be replaced with 750-foot restricted areas just around schools. And that only covers residency. The state law says that towns and cities cannot restrict where sex offenders can work.

In a gesture showing their disapproval of the state law, Gorham town councilors last week refused to change the town's restrictive ordinance in order to comply. However, it's still in question what the town's police department will be able to enforce once the law goes into effect.

Though Violette said he'll still spend the same amount of time monitoring sex offenders in the city and notifying neighbors and employers of their whereabouts, the state law takes away some of his authority over sex offenders and a safeguard for Westbrook children.

"It's given me more tools to help make sure sex offenders were in compliance," he said about the old law.

DRAWN TO WESTBROOK

There are no demographics that encompass all sex offenders, Violette said, but because a lot of employers don't want to hire registered sex offenders, many, regardless of their backgrounds and skills, don't have steady sources of income.

"You're a convicted felon. That makes you ineligible to work in a lot of places," Violette said.

Because of that, he believes the amount of low-income housing in Westbrook draws more sex offenders. Though Portland is probably the most attractive city in the area for jobless sex offenders because of its shelters and support services, he said, "we're ripe for the picking as far as increasing our numbers."

However, some say that keeping people out of jobs and homes because of their sex offender status is unconstitutional.

Jane Cantral, who runs Maine Citizens for Change - a local affiliate of the national group Reform Sex Offender Laws - said she and her boyfriend Calvin Shelton, a registered sex offender, didn't have an easy time finding a home in this area of the state.

"We're trying to buy a house and we're looking at maps," said Cantral, a Bridgton resident who was herself the victim of a sex offender.

"It sounds good as a knee-jerk reaction, but if you really thought about it, how much sense does it make?" Cantral said.

She pointed to the fact that students are not in school at night, when most sex offenders are in their homes. She also noted that kids are better looked after in schools and day cares than they are the rest of the day.

"I don't think residency restrictions are needed at all," she said.

Cantral hopes that more efforts will be made on educating parents and children and treating sex offenders rather than on making local or state laws that she believes are ineffective.

IS LESS MORE?

But success is measured in different ways when it comes to sex offender laws.

Violette said he scans the state's sex offender registry about once a week to see if there are any new registered sex offenders living or working in Westbrook. During the past two years, he said, he's had to ask about a dozen people to leave their jobs, usually because of their proximity to day cares. Though he's gotten mixed reactions from employers - some thank Violette for making them aware of the charges, others would rather to keep the workers regardless of them - the sex offenders themselves tend to comply quickly.

"Almost every time, they quit right way," he said.

Other than the case of one registered sex offender Violette had to repeatedly chase out of a Spring Street apartment, he said the same willingness to obey the ordinance was true of sex offenders trying to move to the city. He said he's had to turn down about five or six sex offenders who tried to move into restricted areas of the city from out of town and another half-dozen who wanted to move within Westbrook.

Overall, Violette estimated that about 20 additional sex offenders would be living or working in the city today if it weren't for the ordinance.

"It was working," he said.

PEACE OF MIND

One woman who was an outspoken advocate of the Westbrook ordinance when it was adopted said she plans to speak up again at the council meeting Monday.

Jen Wescott, who has two family members that were sex crime victims, said even with the ordinance in place, as a mother and a day care owner, she's on constant alert, keeping an eye on who's around. The city's law offered extra protection.

"It gives you a little more sense of security," Wescott said.

But creating a false sense of security is one of the arguments opponents have against residency restrictions.

"They have a tendency to drive offenders underground," Sen. Anne Haskell, D-Portland, who sponsored the bill, said in June, when the law was passed. "Then you don't know where they are, which is a more dangerous situation."

Those who support less-stringent residency resrictions say the vast majority of sex crimes are committed by people known to the victims - which was the case with Wescott's family members and with Cantral, as well.

While Cantral argues that over-reaching restrictions violate the rights of former criminals who have paid their debts to society, Wescott and Violette both believe that additional protection against sex offenders can only help to keep kids safer.

"Any buffer you put between a sex offender and our vulnerable children, I think that's a good thing," Violette said.

A Video About the Perceived Dangers of the Internet

StandUp!: A Blog about Prison, Criminal Justice and Recidivism

StandUp!: A Blog about Prison, Criminal Justice and Recidivism

CFC Maine Meets

We are having our first planning session for CFC Maine next Saturday September 12th at 10:30am in Gorham. We will be discussing and setting forth our goals for the upcoming year. If I haven't contacted you about this meeting yet please consider attending. We want everyone interested in promoting change to RFSO laws to join us. RFSOs, family members and the general public are all invited. There are many jobs that can be done without being in the public eye. We need to plan the best way we can exploit the current climate asking how things should change to prevent more crimes like the recent one with Kaycee. Email me at ladyfurebear@yahoo.com if you want more information. Hope to see you there.

One of many articles pointing out RFSO laws don't work....

America's flawed sex offender laws

The Jaycee Dugard case illustrates how America's sex offender registries hurt efforts to stop repeat sex crimes

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/sep/05/jaycee-lee-dugard-sex-offender-laws

Americans have been doing some soul-searching about our approach to monitoring convicted sex offenders since the recent discovery of Jaycee Lee Dugard. Dugard was kidnapped in California at age 11 and held captive for 18 years in Phillip Garrido's garden. He managed to hide his secret prisoner from the police even though he was a convicted rapist and his name appeared on the public sex offender registry.

In the past, news of a horrific crime committed by a convicted sex offender inevitably led to widespread calls for increasing the scope of sex offender registration and community notification laws. Over the past 15 years, the US has expanded its registration and notification schemes to include an estimated 674,000 convicted sex offenders. Some remain on the public list for the rest of their lives, regardless of the seriousness of their offence, the current threat they might pose or their progress toward rehabilitation . The effectiveness of such laws has rarely been questioned, and they enjoy widespread public support.

But this time around, there has been a different type of discussion. Rather than just calling for tougher sex offender monitoring laws, Americans are openly wondering if a new approach is needed to deal with convicted sex offenders who have re-entered the community.

Although Garrido's case is extraordinary, it illustrates the flaws in America's sex offender registration and community notification schemes. Experts in sexual violence say that placing all convicted sex offenders on a registry for life may do more harm than good. The public nature of the registry makes it nearly impossible for convicted sex offenders to re-enter the community with the kind of support system they need to reduce their likelihood of committing another offence. Low-level offenders who pose little risk to the community are monitored in the same way as high-risk offenders, diluting police resources to concentrate on those, such as Garrido, who pose a high risk of committing another offence.

Furthermore, focusing so much public attention and resources on convicted sex offenders ignores the reality of sexual violence in the United States. It is estimated that 87% of new sex crimes every year are committed by individuals without a prior sex crime conviction. And very few sex crimes move through the system – less than one-third of all reported rapes result in an arrest.

So pouring scarce resources into monitoring all convicted offenders means there is less money for programmes to prevent sexual violence and counsel victims and for the rape investigation units, rape evidence testing and other tools that could bring justice in these cases.

Because of such concerns, Human Rights Watch called in a 2007 report for a major revamping of America's sex offender laws. Registration should be limited to former offenders who have been individually assessed as dangerous, and only for as long as they pose a significant risk. Community notification should be restricted to those who genuinely can benefit from knowledge about dangerous former offenders in their midst.

Sex offender registration and community notification laws didn't cause Garrido's crimes, but they didn't help the police stop them, either. While Americans are starting to question the value of our extensive sex offender monitoring system, it remains to be seen whether these doubts will lead to real reform.

Once sex offender laws are in place, it is hard for politicians to repeal them, because they don't want to appear weak on the issue of sex offenders. If Britain wants to do more to prevent sexual violence, it should keep its sex offender registry narrowly focused, and use the savings in time, energy and resources to implement sexual violence prevention policies that will actually keep the public safe.

Burn Your “Sex Offender” Map

Great blog post on the Free Range Kids blog, in response to the articles I posted below from the Economist. The writer of this blog is one of the few voices of reason in these days of over protective parents. She has gotten tons of flack over letting her son take the subway in New York. She's well worth reading.

Burn Your “Sex Offender” Map

Read here on the Free range Kids Blog

Posted on August 8, 2009 by lskenazy

Okay, here is some weekend reading to sink your teeth into. It’s an article from the Economist:

“Unjust and Ineffective: America has pioneered the harsh punishment of sex offdenders. Does It Work?”

The short answer is “No.” We are putting people on sex offender registries who do not belong there at all. People who peed in public. Streakers. Johns. Teenagers who had consensual sex. The registry does not discriminate between violet pedophiles and once-horny young folk who are now 30-year-old housewives, like one of the people profiled in the piece. Wendy Whitaker was 17 when she had sex (at school — dumb!) with her underage-by-three weeks boyfriend. She was arrested for it and her lawyer told her to plead guilty to get it over with. She did. But it was never over.

One of the plea bargain conditions was that she check in regularly with her probation officer. When she didn’t, she was thrown in jail for more than a year. She finished probation in 2002 but she’s still on a public registry that does not exmpain what she did. So, as notes the article, “it looks like she did something terrible to a helpless child.”

In all, according to the Economist, about 5% of the people on the sex offender registries pose a serious risk to children. Usually, when not in jail, these people end up wearing ankle bracelets. But when you pull up one of those Sex Offender Maps — really easy to do on the Web (and now on the iPhone!)– it looks like wherever you turn, there’s another child rapist. Which, of course, leads to more fear on the part of parents. That is understable. Our pig-headed insistence on lumping everyone together on these lists and never taking them off is not. Especially because — get this: “Registering sex offenders and warning their neighbors cost millions & had no effect on the number of sex crimes.”

No effect. One more quote from The Economist, which says that the sex offender laws, “get harsher and harsher. But that does not necessarily mean they get better. If there are thousands of offenders on a registry, it is harder to keep track of the most dangerous ones. Budgets are tight. Georgia’s sheriffs complain that they have been given no extra money or manpower to help them keep the huge and swelling sex-offenders’ registry up to date or to police its confusing mass of rules. Terry Norris of the Georgia Sheriffs’ Association cites a man who was convicted of statutory rape two decades ago for having consensual sex with his high-school sweetheart, to whom he is now married…. “We spend the same amount of time on that guy as on someone who’s done something heinous.’”

From a Free-Range standpoint, it is appalling that these sex offender registries make it seem as if children are unsafe on any street. From a humanitarian viewpoint, it is appalling to think of our government is not ready to revamp the whole thing. Kids — and grown ups caught peeing in public — would all be safer. — Lenore

America's unjust sex laws

Second article
America's unjust sex laws

Aug 6th 2009
From The Economist print edition

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14165460

An ever harsher approach is doing more harm than good, but it is being copied around the world

iStockphoto

IT IS an oft-told story, but it does not get any less horrific on repetition. Fifteen years ago, a paedophile enticed seven-year-old Megan Kanka into his home in New Jersey by offering to show her a puppy. He then raped her, killed her and dumped her body in a nearby park. The murderer, who had recently moved into the house across the street from his victim, had twice before been convicted of sexually assaulting a child. Yet Megan’s parents had no idea of this. Had they known he was a sex offender, they would have told their daughter to stay away from him.

In their grief, the parents started a petition, demanding that families should be told if a sexual predator moves nearby. Hundreds of thousands signed it. In no time at all, lawmakers in New Jersey granted their wish. And before long, “Megan’s laws” had spread to every American state.

America’s sex-offender laws are the strictest of any rich democracy. Convicted rapists and child-molesters are given long prison sentences. When released, they are put on sex-offender registries. In most states this means that their names, photographs and addresses are published online, so that fearful parents can check whether a child-molester lives nearby. Under the Adam Walsh Act of 2006, another law named after a murdered child, all states will soon be obliged to make their sex-offender registries public. Such rules are extremely popular. Most parents will support any law that promises to keep their children safe. Other countries are following America’s example, either importing Megan’s laws or increasing penalties: after two little girls were murdered by a school caretaker, Britain has imposed multiple conditions on who can visit schools.

Which makes it all the more important to ask whether America’s approach is the right one. In fact its sex-offender laws have grown self-defeatingly harsh (see article). They have been driven by a ratchet effect. Individual American politicians have great latitude to propose new laws. Stricter curbs on paedophiles win votes. And to sound severe, such curbs must be stronger than the laws in place, which in turn were proposed by politicians who wished to appear tough themselves. Few politicians dare to vote against such laws, because if they do, the attack ads practically write themselves.

A whole Wyoming of offenders

In all, 674,000 Americans are on sex-offender registries—more than the population of Vermont, North Dakota or Wyoming. The number keeps growing partly because in several states registration is for life and partly because registries are not confined to the sort of murderer who ensnared Megan Kanka. According to Human Rights Watch, at least five states require registration for people who visit prostitutes, 29 require it for consensual sex between young teenagers and 32 require it for indecent exposure. Some prosecutors are now stretching the definition of “distributing child pornography” to include teens who text half-naked photos of themselves to their friends.

How dangerous are the people on the registries? A state review of one sample in Georgia found that two-thirds of them posed little risk. For example, Janet Allison was found guilty of being “party to the crime of child molestation” because she let her 15-year-old daughter have sex with a boyfriend. The young couple later married. But Ms Allison will spend the rest of her life publicly branded as a sex offender.

Several other countries have sex-offender registries, but these are typically held by the police and are hard to view. In America it takes only seconds to find out about a sex offender: some states have a “click to print” icon on their websites so that concerned citizens can put up posters with the offender’s mugshot on trees near his home. Small wonder most sex offenders report being harassed. A few have been murdered. Many are fired because someone at work has Googled them.

Registration is often just the start. Sometimes sex offenders are barred from living near places where children congregate. In Georgia no sex offender may live or work within 1,000 feet (300 metres) of a school, church, park, skating rink or swimming pool. In Miami an exclusion zone of 2,500 feet has helped create a camp of homeless offenders under a bridge.

Make the punishment fit the crime

There are three main arguments for reform. First, it is unfair to impose harsh penalties for small offences. Perhaps a third of American teenagers have sex before they are legally allowed to, and a staggering number have shared revealing photographs with each other. This is unwise, but hardly a reason for the law to ruin their lives. Second, America’s sex laws often punish not only the offender, but also his family. If a man who once slept with his 15-year-old girlfriend is barred for ever from taking his own children to a playground, those children suffer.

Third, harsh laws often do little to protect the innocent. The police complain that having so many petty sex offenders on registries makes it hard to keep track of the truly dangerous ones. Cash that might be spent on treating sex offenders—which sometimes works—is spent on huge indiscriminate registries. Public registers drive serious offenders underground, which makes them harder to track and more likely to reoffend. And registers give parents a false sense of security: most sex offenders are never even reported, let alone convicted.

It would not be hard to redesign America’s sex laws. Instead of lumping all sex offenders together on the same list for life, states should assess each person individually and include only real threats. Instead of posting everything on the internet, names could be held by the police, who would share them only with those, such as a school, who need to know. Laws that bar sex offenders from living in so many places should be repealed, because there is no evidence that they protect anyone: a predator can always travel. The money that a repeal saves could help pay for monitoring compulsive molesters more intrusively—through ankle bracelets and the like.

In America it may take years to unpick this. However practical and just the case for reform, it must overcome political cowardice, the tabloid media and parents’ understandable fears. Other countries, though, have no excuse for committing the same error. Sensible sex laws are better than vengeful ones.

Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

Unjust and ineffective

Unjust and ineffective

Aug 6th 2009 | HARLEM, GEORGIA
From The Economist print edition

http://www.economist.com/opinion/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=14164614

America has pioneered the harsh punishment of sex offenders. Does it work?

Illustration by Noma Barr

ONE day in 1996 the lights went off in a classroom in Georgia so that the students could watch a video. Wendy Whitaker, a 17-year-old pupil at the time, was sitting near the back. The boy next to her suggested that, since it was dark, she could perform oral sex on him without anyone noticing. She obliged. And that single teenage fumble wrecked her life.

Her classmate was three weeks shy of his 16th birthday. That made Ms Whitaker a criminal. She was arrested and charged with sodomy, which in Georgia can refer to oral sex. She met her court-appointed lawyer five minutes before the hearing. He told her to plead guilty. She did not really understand what was going on, so she did as she was told.

She was sentenced to five years on probation. Not being the most organised of people, she failed to meet all the conditions, such as checking in regularly with her probation officer. For a series of technical violations, she was incarcerated for more than a year, in the county jail, the state women’s prison and a boot camp. “I was in there with people who killed people. It’s crazy,” she says.

She finished her probation in 2002. But her ordeal continues. Georgia puts sex offenders on a public registry. Ms Whitaker’s name, photograph and address are easily accessible online, along with the information that she was convicted of “sodomy”. The website does not explain what she actually did. But since it describes itself as a list of people who have “been convicted of a criminal offence against a victim who is a minor or any dangerous sexual offense”, it makes it sound as if she did something terrible to a helpless child. She sees people whispering, and parents pulling their children indoors when she walks by.

Punish first, think later

The registry is a gold mine for lazy journalists. A local television station featured Ms Whitaker in a spot on local sex offenders, broadcasting a helpful map showing where she lives but leaving the specifics of the crime to each viewer’s fearful imagination. “My husband’s family saw me on TV,” she says. “That’s embarrassing.”

What Ms Whitaker did is no longer a crime in Georgia. The state’s sodomy laws, which in 1996 barred oral sex even between willing spouses, were struck down by court rulings in 1998 and 2003. And since 2006, thanks to a “Romeo and Juliet” clause in a sex-crimes law, consensual sex between two teenagers has been a misdemeanour, not a crime, if one partner is underage but no more than four years younger than the other.

The Romeo and Juliet clause was not retroactive, however, so Ms Whitaker is stuck on the register, and subject to extraordinary restrictions. Registered sex offenders in Georgia are barred from living within 1,000 feet of anywhere children may congregate, such as a school, a park, a library, or a swimming pool. They are also banned from working within 1,000 feet of a school or a child-care centre. Since the church at the end of Ms Whitaker’s street houses a child-care centre, she was evicted from her home. Her husband, who worked for the county dog-catching department, moved with her, lost his job and with it their health insurance.

Thanks to a lawsuit filed by the Southern Centre for Human Rights, a group that campaigns against rough justice, Ms Whitaker won an injunction allowing her to return home. But her husband did not get his job back, and now works as a labourer. The two of them are struggling financially. And Ms Whitaker is still fighting to get her name removed from the registry. “When you’re a teenager, you do stuff,” she says. “You don’t think you’ll be paying for it when you’re nearly 30.”

Every American state keeps a register of sex offenders. California has had one since 1947, but most states started theirs in the 1990s. Many people assume that anyone listed on a sex-offender registry must be a rapist or a child molester. But most states spread the net much more widely. A report by Sarah Tofte of Human Rights Watch, a pressure group, found that at least five states required men to register if they were caught visiting prostitutes. At least 13 required it for urinating in public (in two of which, only if a child was present). No fewer than 29 states required registration for teenagers who had consensual sex with another teenager. And 32 states registered flashers and streakers.

Because so many offenses require registration, the number of registered sex offenders in America has exploded. As of December last year, there were 674,000 of them, according to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. If they were all crammed into a single state, it would be more populous than Wyoming, Vermont or North Dakota. As a share of its population, America registers more than four times as many people as Britain, which is unusually harsh on sex offenders. America’s registers keep swelling, not least because in 17 states, registration is for life.

Illustration by Noma Barr

Georgia has more than 17,000 registered sex offenders. Some are highly dangerous. But many are not. And it is fiendishly hard for anyone browsing the registry to tell the one from the other. The Georgia Sex Offender Registration Review Board, an official body, assessed a sample of offenders on the registry last year and concluded that 65% of them posed little threat. Another 30% were potentially threatening, and 5% were clearly dangerous. The board recommended that the first group be allowed to live and work wherever they liked. The second group could reasonably be barred from living or working in certain places, said the board, and the third group should be subject to tight restrictions and a lifetime of monitoring. A very small number “just over 100” are classified as “predators”, which means they have a compulsion to commit sex offenses. When not in jail, predators must wear ankle bracelets that track where they are.

Despite the board’s findings, non-violent offenders remain listed and subject to a giant cobweb of controls. One rule, championed by Georgia’s House majority leader, banned them from living within 1,000 feet of a school bus stop. This proved unworkable. Thomas Brown, the sheriff of DeKalb county near Atlanta, mapped the bus stops in his patch and realized that he would have to evict all 490 of the sex offenders living there. Other than the bottom of a lake or the middle of a forest, there was hardly anywhere in Georgia for them to live legally. In the end Georgia’s courts stepped in and suspended the bus-stop rule, along with another barring sex offenders from volunteering in churches. But most other restrictions remain.

Sex-offender registries are popular. Rape and child molestation are terrible crimes that can traumatize their victims for life. All parents want to protect their children from sexual predators, so politicians can nearly always win votes by promising curbs on them. Those who object can be called soft on child-molesters, a label most politicians would rather avoid. This creates a ratchet effect. Every lawmaker who wants to sound tough on sex offenders has to propose a law tougher than the one enacted by the last politician who wanted to sound tough on sex offenders.

A self-defeating pillory

So laws get harsher and harsher. But that does not necessarily mean they get better. If there are thousands of offenders on a registry, it is harder to keep track of the most dangerous ones. Budgets are tight. Georgia’s sheriffs complain that they have been given no extra money or manpower to help them keep the huge and swelling sex-offenders’ registry up to date or to police its confusing mass of rules. Terry Norris of the Georgia Sheriffs’ Association cites a man who was convicted of statutory rape two decades ago for having consensual sex with his high-school sweetheart, to whom he is now married. “It doesn’t make it right, but it doesn’t make him a threat to anybody,” says Mr Norris. “We spend the same amount of time on that guy as on someone who’s done something heinous.”

Money spent on evicting sex offenders cannot be spent on treating them. Does this matter? Politicians pushing the get-tough approach sometimes claim that sex offenders are mostly incorrigible: that three-quarters or even nine out of ten of them reoffend. It is not clear where they find such numbers. A study of nearly 10,000 male sex offenders in 15 American states found that 5% were rearrested for a sex crime within three years. A meta-analysis of 29,000 sex offenders in Canada, Britain and America found that 24% had reoffended after 15 years.

That is obviously still too high. Whether or not treatment can help is disputed. A Californian study of sex offenders who underwent “relapse prevention”, counselling of the sort that alcoholics get from Alcoholics Anonymous, found that it was useless. But a meta-analysis of 23 studies by Karl Hanson of Canada’s department of public safety found that psychological therapy was associated with a 43% drop in recidivism. Some offenders—particularly men who rape boys—are extremely hard to treat. Some will never change until they are too old to feel sexual urges. But some types of treatment appear to work for some people and further research could yield more breakthroughs.

Publicising sex offenders’ addresses makes them vulnerable to vigilantism. In April 2006, for example, a vigilante shot and killed two sex offenders in Maine after finding their addresses on the registry. One of the victims had been convicted of having consensual sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend when he was 19. In Washington state in 2005 a man posed as an FBI agent to enter the home of two sex offenders, warning them that they were on a “hit list” on the internet. Then he killed them.

Murders of sex offenders are rare, but harassment is common. Most of the offenders interviewed for this article said they had experienced it. “Bill”, who spent nine months in jail for having consensual sex with a 15-year-old when he was 27 and is now registered in North Carolina, says someone put up posters with his photograph on them around his district. (In at least four states, each offender’s profile on the online registry comes with a handy “click to print” function.) The local kids promptly stopped playing with Bill’s three children. And someone started leaving chopped-up sausages on his car, a possible reference to castration. Bill and his family moved house.

Jill Levenson, of Lynn University in Florida, says half of registered sex offenders have trouble finding jobs. From 20% to 40% say they have had to move house because a landlord or neighbour realised they were sex offenders. And most report feeling depressed, hopeless or afraid.

“Mike” spent a year and a half behind bars for statutory rape after having sex with a girl who said she was 17, but was two years younger. He was 22 at the time. Since his release, he has struggled to hold down a job. Once, he found work as a security guard, but his probation officer told him to quit, since the uniform lent him an air of authority, which would not do.

He is now unemployed, and lives in a flophouse in Atlanta between a jail and a strip club. The area is too desolate to have any schools or parks, so he is allowed to live there. His neighbours are mostly other sex offenders and mentally ill folk who talk to themselves. “It’s Bumville,” sighs Mike. His ambition is to get a job, keep it and move out. Any job will do, he says.

Several studies suggest that making it harder for sex offenders to find a home or a job makes them more likely to reoffend. Gwenda Willis and Randolph Grace of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, for example, found that the lack of a place to live was “significantly related to sexual recidivism”. Candace Kruttschnitt and Christopher Uggen of the University of Minnesota and Kelly Shelton of the Minnesota Department of Corrections tracked 556 sex offenders on probation and found less recidivism among those with a history of stable employment.

Some bosses do not mind hiring sex offenders, if they know the full story and the offender does not seem dangerous. But an accessible online registry makes it all but certain that a colleague or a customer will find out about a sexual conviction. Sex offenders often report being sacked for no apparent reason. Mike had a job at a cake shop. His boss knew about his record. But one day, without warning, he was fired.

Publicly accessible sex-offender registries are intended to keep people safe. But there is little evidence that they do. A study by Kristen Zgoba of the New Jersey Department of Corrections found that the state’s system for registering sex offenders and warning their neighbours cost millions of dollars and had no discernible effect on the number of sex crimes. Restricting where sex offenders can live is supposed to keep them away from potential victims, but it is doubtful that this works. A determined predator can always catch a bus.

Laws that make life hard for sex offenders also affect their families. A survey by Ms Levenson found that 86% of family members felt stressed because of registration and residence rules, and 49% feared for their own safety. “It’s very difficult,” says Bill. “Pretty much all the things that make you a good father are now illegal for me to do.” He cannot take his children to a park, a pool, or a museum. He cannot be at any of their school events. And his children are ostracised. “The parents find out I’m registered and that’s it,” he sighs.

The penalties for sex offenders who break the rules can be severe. In Georgia the first time you fail to provide an accurate address or register annually with the county sheriff to be photographed and fingerprinted, you face ten to 30 years in prison. The second time: life. Yet because living on a public sex-offender registry is so wretched, many abscond.

Some states have decided that harsher sex laws are not always better. Iowa has sharply reduced the number of sex offences for which residency restrictions apply. Previously, all Iowan sex offenders who had abused children were barred from living within 2,000 feet of a school or child-care centre. Since where offenders lived was defined as where they slept, many would spend the day at home with their families and sleep at night in their cars at a highway rest stop. “That made no sense,” says Corwin Ritchie of the Iowa County Attorneys Association. “We don’t try to monitor where possible bank robbers sleep.”

The Iowan politicians who relaxed the law gave themselves cover by adding a new rule against “loitering” near schools. Mr Ritchie thinks the new rules are better, but he would rather get rid of the residency restrictions entirely and let probation officers make recommendations for each individual offender.

No quarter

Nationwide, the trend is to keep getting stricter. In 1994 Congress ordered all states that had not yet done so to set up sex-offender registries or lose some funding. Two years later it ordered them to register the most serious offenders for life. In 2006 it passed the Adam Walsh Act, named for a six-year-old boy who was kidnapped and beheaded, broadening the categories of offence for which registration is required and obliging all states to upload their registries to a national database. States had until this summer to comply with that provision. Some objected. In May they were given another year’s breathing space.

Illustration by Noma Barr

Other countries now seem to be following America’s lead. Hottest on its heels is Britain, where the sex-offenders’ registry includes children as young as 11. The British list is not open to the public, but in some areas parents may ask for a check on anyone who has unsupervised access to their child. France, too, now has a closed national directory of sex-offenders, as does Austria, which brought in some American-style movement restrictions on sex offenders earlier this year. After the disappearance in Portugal in 2007 of Madeleine McCann, a British toddler, some European politicians have called for a pan-European registry.

Human Rights Watch urges America to scale back its sex-offender registries. Those convicted of minor, non-violent offences should not be required to register, says Ms Tofte. Nor should juveniles. Sex offenders should be individually assessed, and only those judged likely to rape someone or abuse a child should be registered. Such decisions should be regularly reviewed and offenders who are rehabilitated (or who grow too old to reoffend) should be removed from the registry. The information on sex-offender registries should be held by the police, not published online, says Ms Tofte, and released “on a need-to-know basis”. Blanket bans on all sex offenders living and working in certain areas should be abolished. Instead, it makes sense for the most dangerous offenders sometimes to face tailored restrictions as a condition of parole.

That package of reforms would bring America in line with the strictest laws in other rich countries. But few politicians would have the courage to back it. “Jane”, the mother of a sex offender in Georgia, says she sent a letter to her senator, Saxby Chambliss, urging such reforms. “They didn’t even read it,” she says. “They just sent me a form letter assuring me that they were in favour of every sex offender law, and that [Senator Chambliss] has grandchildren he wants to protect.”

Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

15 Shocking Tales of How Sex Laws Are Screwing the American People

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