Do Sex Offender Registries Protect Children? The Impact of New York’s Sex Offender Registration Act

• In Event: 600 - Section on Crime, Law and Deviance Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 10. Origins and Effects of Policies

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s, public sex offender registries detail personal information on sex offenders, allowing all to view, in many cases forever, their photographs and other identifying data. As a result, sex offenders—including those who committed non-violent crimes, those whose victims were adults, and those who have been fully rehabilitated, never reoffending after completing prison terms and parole or probation—have no hope of avoiding public stigma, potentially for life. The reasoning, put forth by diverse and politically heterogeneous groups, is that sex offenders are qualitatively different from all other offenders. Sex offenders are different, they claim, no matter the circumstances of the offense or the behavior of the offenders; they must be monitored and publicly identified for as long as possible because they are, according to these groups, universally incurable and incurably predatory. Sex offender laws have emerged, without question, from sincere efforts to protect children from the legitimately widespread social problems of physical and sexual child abuse, neglect, and maltreatment. These measures address genuine fears regarding exceedingly rare, statistically anomalous, but extraordinarily horrific instances of child abduction by stranger sexual predators. This paper examines how patterns of sex offense convictions have changed in New York State as a result of their Sex Offender Registration Act (SORA). Using data from the New York Division of Criminal Justice Services, I compare changes in the nature and distribution of sex offender convictions post-SORA, in the context of mounting evidence that these expensive and much-heralded laws have had little or no impact.

Author

• Emily Horowitz, St. Francis College