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."

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.

The Adam Walsh Act A False Sense of Security or an Effective Public Policy Initiative?

An important new study has been released. Please read and forward to all members of your State legislature.

The Adam Walsh Act
A False Sense of Security or an Effective Public Policy Initiative?
Naomi J. Freeman
New York State Office of Mental Health, Albany
Jeffrey C. Sandler
University at Albany, New York

Available for purchase at http://cjp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/0887403409338565v1

Abstract:

With the enactment of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act (AWA), states are required to standardize their registration and community notification practices by categorizing sex offenders into three-tier levels in the interest of increasing public safety. No empirical research, however, has investigated whether implementation of the AWA is likely to increase public safety. Using a sample of registered sex offenders in New York State, the current study examined the effectiveness of the Adam Walsh-tier system to classify offenders by likelihood of recidivism. Results indicated that the AWA falls short of increasing public safety. In fact, registered sex offenders classified by AWA as Tier 1 (lowest risk) were rearrested for both nonsexual and sexual offenses more than sex offenders in Tier 2 (moderate risk) or Tier 3 (highest risk).

Excerpt:

Discussion
The current study tested the ability of the tier system, as stipulated in SORNA, to predict sexual recidivism among a group of registered sex offenders in New York State. The results cast doubts on the ability of the SORNA provisions of the AWA to increase public safety. More specifically, results showed that those offenders classified as Tier 1 (lowest risk) were rearrested for both sexual and nonsexual offenses more quickly than both Tier 2 (moderate risk) and Tier 3 (highest risk) offenders and were rearrested for sexual offenses at a higher rate than Tiers 2 and 3 offenders. Moreover, as shown in Table 3, the results indicated that many other risk factors supported by empirical research would be better predictors of future sexual offending than the SORNA tier level. Given the results of the current study, the enactment of SORNA may give community members a false sense of security. That is, community members may believe they are safe if no Tier 3 offenders are residing in their neighborhood when, in fact, Tier 3 offenders are not at increased risk to reoffend. As such, SORNA appears unable to accurately identify high-risk offenders and, therefore, increase public safety.

This lack of any observed association between crime of conviction and sexual recidivism may be due to the fact that crime of conviction may not be an accurate indication of the type of offense that was committed. Because convictions in sexual offenses are often elusive—whether as a result of lack of evidence, victim’s hesitation to testify, credibility of the victim, or characteristic s of the defendant—prosecutors may be more likely to offer a plea bargain in sexual offense cases to secure a conviction. As such, it is possible that crime of conviction does not accurately reflect the offense that was committed and, therefore, may be a poor predictor of future risk of reoffending. Thus, it is unsurprising that, as the current study found, other easily obtainable risk factors would be better predictors of recidivism and offer a more accurate risk criterion for the classification of sex offenders.

States had until July 2009 to fully implement the regulations outlined in the AWA.7 Yet, a recent analysis conducted by the Justice Policy Institute (2008) noted that, in all 50 states, the costs of implementing SORNA far outweigh the costs of losing 10% of Byrne funding. In fact, the Justice Policy Institute estimates that in 2009 alone, New York State would spend US$31,300,125 for the implementation of SORNA, whereas forfeiting 10% of its Byrne funding would only result in a loss of US$1,127,984.

Given the large fiscal implications of implementing SORNA, as well as results of the current study which indicate that the tier system does little to accurately predict which offenders will reoffend and which will not, perhaps states should reconsider
the implementation of SORNA. Rather, if states are wedded to registration and community notification practices despite the empirical research that indicates the ineffectivenes s of such laws to impact rates of sexual offending (e.g., Petrosino &
Petrosino, 1999; Sandler et al., 2008; Walker et al., 2005; Zevitz, 2006; Zgoba et al., 2008), then perhaps the public would be better served if the scarce resources surrounding sex offender management were limited to the offenders who pose the greatest risk to the public’s safety (Harris & Hanson, 2004). Given the results of the current study, which indicate the lack of ability for the tiered system under SORNA to accurately identify offenders at high risk of sexual recidivism, the AWA would, in fact, target the strongest sanctions against those least likely to recidivate, while giving lesser sanctions to those most likely to recidivate (i.e., Tier 1 offenders).

Currently, the provisions outlined in SORNA do not discriminate between those sex offenders who can be rehabilitated and those who may continue to sexually offend. Yet, in recent years much has been learned about risk factors related to sexual recidivism, and a growing number of actuarial risk assessment instruments have been developed to identify those high risk sex offenders who pose the greatest threat to public safety. The two most well-known risk assessment instruments used for the prediction of sexual recidivism among male sex offenders are the Static-99 (Hanson & Thornton, 1999) and the MnSOST-R (Epperson et al., 1998), both of which have been shown to have moderate predictive accuracy in numerous international samples of sex offenders (Knight & Thornton, 2007). Although these risk assessment instruments do not account for all factors that could be associated with recidivism, they provide a moderate prediction of recidivism and allow for a means to distinguish sex offenders based on risk (usually into categories of low, medium, and high risk). In fact, results of the current study suggest that individual items found on these instruments are significantly associated with recidivism for a group of sex offenders in New York State. Specifically, the presence of prior sexual offenses, the number of previous sentencing dates, having male victims, and being younger (all items on the Static-99) were all related to an increase in the likelihood of sexual recidivism. Although some sex offenders are extremely dangerous and pose a threat to public safety, others present a low risk and can be effectively managed in the community with appropriate levels of supervision and treatment. Thus, the registration and community notification provisions of the AWA may be more effective if actuarial risk assessment instruments that measure both static and dynamic factors are used as a way to identify those most at risk to reoffend (see Levenson & D’Amora, 2007) instead of the currently proposed three-tier system based solely on crime of conviction. Not only would this approach prevent low-risk offenders from receiving the same sanctions as high-risk offenders, it would also conserve resources and allow registration and community notification practices to be directed at those most at risk to reoffend. Targeting intervention programs and legislative initiatives to specific types of sex offenders will more effectively reduce the likelihood of recidivism, ultimately increasing public safety, and will conserve the limited resources aimed at sex offender management strategies.


Conclusion
The idea behind the enactment of the AWA, to standardize registration and notification procedures nationwide, appeared to address limitations of the current system. In reality, however, the three-tiered system, as outlined in SORNA, fails to increase the effectiveness of current registration and community notification practices. In fact, as indicated by the results of the current study, the system proposed in SORNA actually decreases the ability of states to predict which sex offenders will sexually reoffend and which ones will not. More specifically, the use of almost any empirically based risk factor would yield more accurate predictions than the SORNA tier level, which is based solely on crime of conviction. Although no risk prediction system can accurately predict sexual recidivism 100% of the time, the results of the current study indicate that SORNA is almost completely ineffective at categorizing sex offenders based on risk of sexual recidivism. As such, it appears enactment of the AWA (and, therefore, SORNA) would not only cost states more money than they would lose if they were not to enact it, but also that such enactment would unlikely increase public safety.

There is, however, a broader question surrounding the ability of any sex offender registration and notification law to increase public safety. Specifically, several recent studies (e.g., Petrosino & Petrosino, 1999; Sandler et al., 2008; Walker et al., 2005; Zevitz, 2006; Zgoba et al., 2008) have found registration and notification laws to be ineffective methods of reducing sexual victimizations . Furthermore, there is some evidence to suggest that these types of laws are increasing recidivism, as the unintended consequences of these laws may aggravate stressors known to be associated with sexual reoffending (Freeman, in press). Winick (1998) argued that

by denying them [sex offenders] a variety of employment, social, and educational opportunities, the sex offender label may prevent these individuals from starting a new life and making new acquaintances, with the result that it may be extremely difficult for them to discard their criminal patterns. (p. 556)

Given that the SORNA provisions increase the reporting requirements as well as the public distribution of housing and employment information, it is possible that the enactment of the tier system, as outlined in SORNA, may actually increase reoffending rates of convicted sex offenders. As such, perhaps it is time to replace these wellintended, yet ineffective, public policy initiatives (e.g., registration, community notification) with ones that are scientifically supported.

Why There Won't Be a "Sandra's Law"....And Why There Should Be

Article written by "Jonathon" Recently sent to me by Mary of RSOL Virginia. It's extremely well written and thought provoking. Posted with permission. THanks Jonathon and Mary.

Why There Won't Be a "Sandra's Law"....And Why There Should Be

The details of Sandra Cantu's murder are as horrible and heart-rending as anything we have seen. Sandra's fate was as terrible as that of Adam or Jessica, and yet you will not see the pundits or Sandra's family campaigning for the passage of Sandra's Law.

The problem is that the circumstances of Sandra's murder do not lend themselves to simple solutions, or to posturing on the part of self-proclaimed protectors of children. Sandra was not killed by a registered sex offender (the police are to be credited for not jumping to that conclusion). No registry would have prevented her death. The circumstances of Sandra's murder are far more the norm for such things than are the "stranger danger" scenarios used to justify the enactment of the AWA or Jessica's Law.

Sandra was killed by someone whom she and her family trusted. Statistics show that about half of all child abductions are by a parent, and about a quarter are perpetrated by a friend or close associate of the family. These are the abductions most likely to result in the death of the child.

I recently decided to try my hand at writing model legislation to replace the deeply flawed Adam Walsh Act. I haven't gotten very far. The first question I asked was what the best statistics on sex offender recidivism actually are. To that end, I visited the National Sex Offender Management web site where I found a number of studies attesting to the fact that sex offenses are under-reported, and that "many" sex offenders have committed additional offenses for which they were not caught.

Many of the studies concentrated on rape and child molestation as the offenses of choice. Rape, before the national sex hysteria, was almost universally recognized as a crime of violence. It's about the violence and the domination, not the sex. As such, I would expect it to have recidivism rates approaching those of violent crimes in general, namely 50-75%. Child molestation, may indicate true pedophilia on the part of the perpetrator. As this goes to the heart of how the person is wired sexually, one may assume it to be resistant to change. This doesn't mean that pedophilia cannot be treated or managed, or that all pedophiles reoffend. It simply means that one may expect this to be a tough nut to crack. In fact, Dr Fred Berlin, a nationally recognized expert on sex offenses and sexual trauma (a REAL one, not a John Walsh) has had remarkable success in treating high-risk sex offenders, including pedophiles. To the best of my knowledge (and I have an advanced degree in psychological counseling), shaming and ostracism are not valid therapeutic tools for ANY condition.

Many of the studies claimed that, when unreported crimes are taken into account, sex offender recidivism may rise to the level of 30-50%. The statement that "all sex offenses are under-reported" must be viewed in the context that ALL crimes are under reported. This includes drug dealing, drunk driving, burglary, you name it. When under-reporting is factored in, sex offenses rise to recidivism levels approaching the LOWER limits of the percentage range for crimes of all kinds. About two thirds of all drunk drivers, for example, re-offend. This means they are RE-ARRESTED or RE-CONVICTED. Shall we assume that they are caught every time they get behind the wheel with a snoot full? What would be the "actual" recidivism rate for drunk driving if under-reporting is factored in?

Recidivism and danger to the community cannot be looked at in a vacuum. They must be considered as they related to the entire spectrum of illegal activity. Do we assume, as the announcer intones on Law and Order SVU that "sexually related crimes are especially heinous?" Are they really more heinous than selling your kid crack? Than running over him with your car when you are intoxicated? Than assault? Than murder?

Because of a need to precisely define what is a sex offense for purposes of study, most legitimate studies appeared to stay away from such things as Internet offenses. The term "sex offense" actually encompasses a vast and highly heterogeneous universe which, like the real universe, continues to expand. This suggests that the actual management of sex offenses and sex offenders may be a rather complex undertaking, not the "one size fits all" approach used by the AWA and other legislation.

Society (that means politicians and the press) has decided that we need a huge and costly - and publicly accessible - sex offender management system. They have decided that everybody needs to be on the list. Even as studies in New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere have demonstrated that Megan's Law has done nothing for public safety, there are those who will continue to cry, "if it saves one child, it will be worth it." Well, it hasn't saved one child. It is, however, taking funds and personnel away from programs that DO save children, and DO make their lives better. Virginia, for example, is cutting back on education while it continues to expand the registry. As the registry grows, and as more people on it are declared "violent" by legislative whim, more state troopers are spending their time monitoring sex offenders, not on the highway where their presence actually saves lives. In an era when states are running out of funds and cutting back on essential services, the registry remains fully funded, even as many politicians now privately admit that it has become next to useless.

Sandra's Law should be the replacement for the Adam Walsh Act. Sandra's Law would be based on facts and science, not myth and politics. Sandra's law would follow the principle recommended by most real experts, namely watch some people smarter, not all people longer. Sandra's Law would actually enhance public safety while allowing those who truly want to rehabilitate and to rejoin society to do so. In all likelihood, the size of the registry under Sandra's Law would be greatly reduced, and public access limited. Under Sandra's Law, ALL funds saved through restructuring the sex offender management system would be channeled into programs directly benefiting children.

Sandra's death was a terrible tragedy, and absolutely nothing we can do will change that. She deserves a legacy, too. Can you think of a better one?