Flaws in Sex Offender Registry

                All over the nation, sex offenders are required by law to register themselves so that government authorities can keep track of the residence and activities of sex offenders. By implementing sex offender’s registration, its intent is to keep the community safe by making information in the registry available to the general public. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, an estimated 100,000 sex offenders are not living where they are registered¹. There are many flaws to our sex offender’s registry.

There is no uniform approach to how sex offenders should register from state to state. Although federal government has initiation several general requirements for registering sex offenders, many states don’t follow the requirements. Most states complain that it disrupts and clashes with their own policies for managing sex offenders.

Sex offender registry doesn’t take into account the likelihood of sex offenders to commit the same crime.  Instead it combines all offenders together into one registry allowing worst offenders to blend in with less threatening ones. This creates an issue because these high risk offenders and being punished the same as the low level offenders.

The public can’t be protected if the registry is not up-to-date.  In Washington, offenders are required to register their information with a sheriff of the county in which they live. The sheriff then passes the information along to local or public police who must verify the address. Unfortunately, the list of sex offenders keeps expanding why the numbers of officials who monitor sex offenders have grown at a much slower rate. In California, authorities cannot account for 44 percent of the state registered sex offenders².

¹http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/us/09offender.html?pagewanted=2&ref=sexcrimes

²http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Sex-offender-registry-failing-1104802.php

Blog Post 1

Are punishments for sex offenders effective?

According to the National Alert Registry, there are 400,000 registered sex offenders in the United States and growing.  This number alone is only the number of people register in America.  Sex crimes not only affect victims, but also the people around them.  Victims are more likely to suffer from depression, have post traumatic stress disorder, abuse alcohol and drugs and even contemplate suicide. 

In the United States millions of dollars are bring spend on sex offenders. Sex offenders are treated unlike any other criminals, especially in the area of punishment and rehabilitation. For example, drug dealers are released back into the community after completion of their sentence. They can return back to their neighborhoods and continue to sell drugs. However for sex offenders, release from prison is not the end of their punishment.

Sex offenders create a fear in communities and these fears have lead to different policies being placed on these individuals. A convicted sex offender faces incarceration, required to register on a sex offender registry, prohibited in areas where children congregate, and in some parts of the world stoning.

There are many different forms of sex crimes; from aggravated assault to human trafficking.  The question is what are we doing to punish people that practice these sex crimes and if what we are doing is actually being affective?  There are different situations of these crimes that need to be treated uniquely in their own way.