Sex Offender Residency Restrictions
Successful Integration or Exclusion?
Elizabeth Ehrhardt Mustaine – University of Central Florida
Few criminal offenders garner more fear and loathing than sex offenders. Images in the media of children killed at the hands of repeat and violent sexual predators fuels the efforts of lawmakers to create new restrictions and strengthen already existing constraints to keep our children safe and prevent these offenders from roaming freely (Leon, 2011). As a result, policy intended to manage this population is riddled with emotion and politics as lawmakers quickly develop law after law (usually named after tragic victims) often to the point of ignoring relevant empirical evidence or consideration of any collateral consequences.
Although sex offender policy is not new (Tewksbury, 2002), in the last 20 years, sex offenders have seen their lives become significantly more transparent and controlled. This recent explosion of federal legislation began in 1994 with the passage of the Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act, which required states to track sex offenders’ places of residence annually for 10 years after their release into the community (and quarterly for the rest of their lives if they were violent). It continued in 1996 with the passage of Megan’s Law, which provided for the public dissemination of information from states’ sex offender registries, and The Pam Lychner Sex Offender Tracking and Identification Act, which requires the Attorney General to establish a national database so that the FBI can track certain sex offenders, among other provisions. In 1997, the federal government improved the Jacob Wetterling Act by tightening the guidelines and circumstances for sex offender registration, directing states to participate in the national sex offender registry, and to ensure offenders who moved, worked, or were educated in different states register in all of them. In 2000, sex offenders who were attending colleges/universities were required to make their presence and residence known, and these institutions of higher learning were required to maintain this information on sexual offenders and make it available to those who were interested. In 2003, states were required to put their publically available sex offender registries online, and in 2006, Congress passed the Adam Walsh Child Protection
and Safety Act, which expanded the number of sex offenses that needed to be included in sex offender registration and notification, expanded the jurisdiction of locations required to participate in the sex offender registry to Indian tribes, and created the Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking to oversee the implementation and maintenance of federal sex offender policy. In the time in which these federal laws have been developed, individual states were passing their own versions of these laws, and currently all 50 states have sex offender registration and notification (Lees, 2005).
Read the entire article at http://criminology.fsu.edu/
