One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.
— Milton Friedman
On July 29, 1994, Jesse K. Timmendequas lured seven year old Megan Kanka to his home, raped her, strangled her to death, and dumped her body in a park. Timmendequas had previously been convicted twice before of sex crimes against children.
In response, Congress passed Megan's Law in 1995. Megan's Law amended the previous year's Wetterling Act, which required sex offenders to register with law enforcement, to include community notification. In 2006, the Adam Walsh Act was passed, which required states to standardize their registries to federal requirements. States which refuse to do so lose 10% of their federal law enforcement funding.
These laws were written to protect children from sexual predators. Why would anyone oppose these laws? Surely, if you oppose the law, you are also opposing the protection of children from sexual predators! What are you, some kind of monster?
The problem with these laws is that they don't do what's on the label. They don't make us safer. They do, in fact, make us less safe. And these laws, written to protect children, are abused to harm them by the very enforcers of these laws.
Human Rights Watch has written a one hundred forty six page report on sex offender laws in the United States. I'll endeavor to keep this essay a bit shorter, but I recommend the larger report for those looking for something more in-depth.
First, I will repeat the entire premise this series is based on: The law exists to protect the rights of the people. Any law which does not do this, or, worse, infringes on the rights of the people, is unjust. And community notification fails this test.
A 2008 Columbia University working paper titled Do Sex Offender Registration and Notification Laws Affect Criminal Behavior? found that, while registration itself does reduce criminal behavior, community notification does not reduce recidivism. In fact, it increases it! The harsh penalty associated with being on the registry "leads to 1.3 additional recidivist sex offenses per 10,000 people."
Not only does community registration increase, rather than decrease, recidivism, an analysis of New York State's sex offender registration and notification law finds that 95% of sex offenses are committed by people who weren't on the registry anyway.
So much for the law protecting the people! But how does it infringe on the rights of the people? After all, these are bad people! Who cares if their rights are infringed upon?
There are nearly a million names on US sex offender registries. A million dangerous predators! A million names - and 23% of all contact offenders are minors, with 16% under 12 years old. The youngest are eight years old. The most common age is fourteen. Reason Magazine noted one particular case in Utah, in 2006, where two children, 13 and 14, were charged with raping each other.
Simply being threatened with sex offense registration drove 16 year old Corey Walgren to suicide, after he recorded audio of a consensual sexual encounter. 15 year old Christian Adamek hanged himself after facing a lifetime on the registry for streaking at a football game. A study by Johns Hopkins School of Public Health reports that children on the registry are four times as likely to attempt suicide, twice as likely to be sexually assaulted, and - a massive indictment on community notification - five times as likely to be approached by adults for sex.
The laws intended to protect children from predators are being used by government prosecutors to prey on children, easy targets for coercive plea bargains to pad conviction rates of "dangerous predators."
And that alone ought to be enough for any libertarian to demand their abolition.
