On the effect of sex offender registries for juveniles:
In dozens of interviews, therapists, lawyers, teenagers and their parents told me similar stories of juveniles who, after being discovered on a sex-offender registry, have been ostracized by their peers and neighbors, kicked out of extracurricular activities or physically threatened by classmates. Experts worry that these experiences stigmatize adolescents and undermine the goals of rehabilitation. “The whole world knows you did this bad thing,” notes Elizabeth Letourneau, an associate psychology professor at the Medical University of South Carolina and an expert on juveniles with sex offenses. “You could go to treatment for five years; you could be as straight as an arrow; but the message continues to be: You are a bad person. How does that affect your self-image? How does that affect your ability to improve your behaviors?”
On the requirements of the Adam Walsh Act, passed during Alberto Gonzales' tenure:
Under the Adam Walsh Act, a 35-year-old who has a history of repeatedly raping young girls will be eligible for the public registry, and so will a 14-year-old boy adjudicated as a sex offender for touching an 11-year-old girl’s vagina. According to the law, the teenager will remain on the national registry for life. He will have to register with authorities every three months. And if he fails to do so — not an unlikely prospect for some teenagers, especially those without involved parents — he may be imprisoned for more than one year.
On the danger of the Adam Walsh Act:
the Adam Walsh Act and similar legislation may risk ensnaring low-risk teenagers who were never headed toward becoming adult sex offenders. Numerous studies show that recidivism for juveniles who commit sex offenses is about 10 percent. That’s lower than most other juvenile offenses, including property and drug crimes. It’s also a significantly lower recidivism rate than that of adult sex offenders, which ranges from about 25 percent to, for the most serious offenders, 50 percent or higher. (Official recidivism rates are lower than actual rates; some sex offenders commit later offenses that go undetected.) And though the Adam Walsh Act requires many first-time teenage offenders to publicly register for life, if an adolescent hasn’t committed another sex crime within five years of his first offense, research suggests that he is unlikely to do so, notes Mark Chaffin of the University of Oklahoma.
On trying to distinguish a juvenile sex offender:
[B]y definition, adolescence is a time of development and flux; a boy who seems at high risk for repeat offenses at 14 may no longer be so at 16. And a low-risk 14-year-old boy could become higher risk by the time he is 16. Indeed, the manual of one juvenile-assessment test highlights the complications: “No aspect of their development, including their cognitive development, is fixed or stable. In addition, their life circumstances often are very unstable. In a very real sense, we are trying to assess the risk of ‘moving targets.’ ”
On consequences of lifetime registration for juveniles:
[O]ne consequence of community notification is that as these adolescents move into adulthood, they may struggle to stay in the mainstream because they have a hard time finding and holding jobs. Becoming a teacher or a doctor or joining the military may be virtually impossible for those labeled as sex offenders on public registries. Even job prospects at Target, McDonald’s or any business that performs background checks aren’t promising. In interviews, people in their 20s told me that they have been either fired or turned down for jobs at retail stores, fast-food restaurants and social-service organizations after employers discovered they were adjudicated as juveniles for sex offenses.
The article concludes:
[law professor Franklin E. Zimring says]keeping juveniles off public Internet registries isn’t just a civil rights issue. “It’s also about bringing some kind of rationality into law enforcement,” he says, given that including low-risk offenders in these laws adds to police workloads with no proof that it’s actually effective.
In the meantime, if thousands of juveniles do accumulate on state and federal Internet registries, Mark Chaffin argues that at the very least we should be studying the impact on these adolescents. “We’d need to follow these kids for 10 years to look at their different experiences and outcomes,” he said. “Frankly, we could easily find these policies do more harm than good.”
As Elizabeth Letourneau told me recently, “If kids can’t get through school because of community notification, or they can’t get jobs, they are going to be marginalized.” And marginalized people, she noted, commit more crimes.
Prior TalkLeft coverage: Why juvenile sex offender registries are a bad idea; on the Adam Walsh Act and on Megans' Laws.
