Proof Offender laws are not protecting children

[_EAllusion]

With respect to number one, what is your evidence that we can predict which offenders will repeat the crime after serving their sentences with an acceptable rate of accuracy?

The study you cited specifically looked at high-risk sex offenders. If you do not accept that we can sub-categorize high-risk sex offenders, why did you cite that study?

With respect to number 3, do you have any data supporting the notion that people on sex offender registries reoffend at higher rates than those that are not?

This is interesting, because I haven't read that study. I have read studies that show that former convicts who cannot transition into stable housing and employment have much higher recidivism rates than people who do. I've also read studies that show sex offender registries make it harder for former convicts to have stable housing and employment. To me, this looks like a straightforward inference, but I haven't read anything that connected those dots directly.

[_Res Ipsa]

Yeah, that’s the cost side of the equation. As I said, I think it’s reasonable to argue that whatever benefits the registries may have, they don’t justify the costs. Maybe that’s because I agree with that. But that’s not what was argued in the OP.

There is a body of evidence referred to in the very paper you link that sex offender registries don't help reduce the incidence of sex crimes. The paper argues that causing people to feel a sufficient amount of fear can produce modest changes in behavior, while remaining agnostic on the quality and relevance of that change. This goes back to my earlier point of using controls that make people feel fear of sex offenders without specifically naming sex offenders who have moved to their neighborhood. I would caution that making the public more fearful so they are a little more likely to make their children carry mace around with them might not actually be a good thing, but I'd be curious to know just how crucial it is for the notification to be about a specific sex offender in the area.

Yes. That's what the paper DT quoted concluded, and I don't dispute that. But the literature also says that most people ignore the registries. And if they do look at them, it's mostly once or twice out of curiosity. So it may be that it's easier for repeat offenders to find victims than it would be if more folks paid attention.

Please note what I haven't done here: I haven't touted this study as "proof," as was done in the OP. I'm not suggesting that it's definitive. I'm simply suggesting that there is some evidence contrary to what was stated in the OP.

by the way, I thought you gave short shrift to the protective behaviors. They weren't just things like locking doors. They included things like not talking to strangers, etc. The kinds of things that I think you're supposed to discuss with your kids.

ETA: To the extent that being informed about sex offenders in the neighborhood elicits beneficial protective behavior, there certainly may be ways to elicit that behavior more effectively and in ways that don't negatively impact perpetrators who have served their sentences. That's another thing that should be studied.

[_Res Ipsa]

With respect to number one, what is your evidence that we can predict which offenders will repeat the crime after serving their sentences with an acceptable rate of accuracy?

The study you cited specifically looked at high-risk sex offenders. If you do not accept that we can sub-categorize high-risk sex offenders, why did you cite that study?

Whether the classification was accurate or not isn't relevant to the study. The study was on the effect of certain information given to residents -- not whether that information was accurate.

With respect to number 3, do you have any data supporting the notion that people on sex offender registries reoffend at higher rates than those that are not?

This is interesting, because I haven't read that study. I have read studies that show that former convicts who cannot transition into stable housing and employment have much higher recidivism rates than people who do. I've also read studies that show sex offender registries make it harder for former convicts to have stable housing and employment. To me, this looks like a straightforward inference, but I haven't read anything that connected those dots directly.

I don't think it's a straightforward inference in the special case of sex crimes. It certainly may be in the case of property crimes.

[Guest]

With respect to number one, what is your evidence that we can predict which offenders will repeat the crime after serving their sentences with an acceptable rate of accuracy?

New York Times article in the OP says, "the registries have grown rapidly — to nearly three-quarters of a million registrants at latest count. Culpability and harm vary greatly in the offenses for which people are registered. Some states require exhibitionists and “peeping Toms” to register. By best estimates, a large majority is registered for conviction on first offenses involving neither violence nor coercionor even, in some cases, physical contact). Many registrants would not be classified as criminal under European laws, which set lower ages of consent than do American laws. Registrants even include minors who had consensual sex with their high school sweethearts, or who traded self-taken sexually explicit photos with their peers (“sexting”)'

I don't think teenagers should be added on the sex offender list for sexting. I believe law enforcement offers should only focus on child abusers and serial rapists, not on the people who are added for stupid illegal crap.

To better answer your questions please give me more time, I need to review the research literature. I am mostly doing a quick reply because I am busy doing something else. But here is a paper published in the respected American Journal of Public Health that concludes:

In fact, evidence on the effectiveness of these laws suggests that they may not prevent recidivism or sexual violence and result in more harm than good...For example, Barnowski, in his study examining the relationship between risk levels and recidivism among registered sex offenders in Washington, concluded that “[t]he notification levels determined by the [End of Sentence Review Committee] do not classify sex offenders into groups that accurately reflect their risk for reoffending.

Bonnar-Kidd, Kelly K. "Sexual offender laws and prevention of sexual violence or recidivism." American Journal of Public Health 100.3 (2010): 412-419.

[_EAllusion]

Whether the classification was accurate or not isn't relevant to the study. The study was on the effect of certain information given to residents -- not whether that information was accurate.

Huh? The classification was important because people were responding to the idea that the sex offenders were particularly dangerous people. If you don't think it's possible to distinguish between levels of danger between sex offenders - that the person who is on the registry because he urinated in public while walking home from the bar equally as dangerous as a serial rapist - then the study doesn't make a lot of sense. That the information was believed to be true was crucial to their findings because it's supposed to be measuring how people respond to true information.

There quite plainly are different levels of danger associated with different sex offenses. You reduced this into knowing rates of recidivism, but why should police be devoting resources to tracking people who might urinate in public again? Or teenagers who sexted their boy- or girlfriend? The danger just isn't in the likelihood of committing another crime, but in the nature of the crimes committed.

I don't think it's a straightforward inference in the special case of sex crimes. It certainly may be in the case of property crimes.

I would understand how the motive to reoffend is more clear in the case of property crimes, but I also understand how having something to live for reduces risking returning to prison.

[_DoubtingThomas]

With respect to number 2, where is your evidence that says that sex offender registries cause parents to be less careful about child abuse caused by folks not on the registry? Is there a study that says that there is a higher rate of child abuse by family members, etc. in families whose parents consulted a sex offender registry?

Here is a study

"A popular misconception among the general public is that sex offenders most often victimize strangers. To better understand these misconceptions about sex offenders, this study determines the frequency of misperception in the general public and establishes if the misconceptions are related to the policy of sex offender registration. Using a self-administered mail survey, it is found that on average, 3 out of 10 respondents indicate more worry about a child being sexually abused by a stranger than a child being sexually abused by someone known to them."

Craun, Sarah W., and Matthew T. Theriot. "Misperceptions of sex offender perpetration: Considering the impact of sex offender registration." Journal of interpersonal violence 24.12 (2009): 2057-2072.

With respect to number 3, do you have any data supporting the notion that people on sex offender registries reoffend at higher rates than those that are not?

"Several studies suggest that making it harder for sex offenders to find a home or a job makes them more likely to reoffend. Gwenda Willis and Randolph Grace of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, for example, found that the lack of a place to live was “significantly related to sexual recidivism”. Candace Kruttschnitt and Christopher Uggen of the University of Minnesota and Kelly Shelton of the Minnesota Department of Corrections tracked 556 sex offenders on probation and found less recidivism among those with a history of stable employment."

Georgia Harlem, “Unjust and Ineffective,” Economist, August 8, 2009

With respect to number one, what is your evidence that we can predict which offenders will repeat the crime after serving their sentences with an acceptable rate of accuracy?

It is my opinion the sex offender registry should only be for rapists and child abusers. Why? "waste valuable resources on sex offenders who are unlikely to reoffend, while leaving a deficit of treatment, supervision, and focus on offenders who we know should be receiving more intense scrutiny"

CALCASA, “Proposition 83 CALCASA Position Paper.”

New York times reports, "a large majority is registered for conviction on first offenses involving neither violence nor coercion" can't possibly be a good thing to fight rape and child abuse. Can you explain how can a large list of non-violent offenders helps?

[_Res Ipsa]

Whether the classification was accurate or not isn't relevant to the study. The study was on the effect of certain information given to residents -- not whether that information was accurate.

Huh? The classification was important because people were responding to the idea that the sex offenders were particularly dangerous people. If you don't think it's possible to distinguish between levels of danger between sex offenders - that the person who is on the registry because he urinated in public while walking home from the bar equally as dangerous as a serial rapist - then the study doesn't make a lot of sense. That the information was believed to be true was crucial to their findings because it's supposed to be measuring how people respond to true information.

Huh? I think you're conflating the issue of whether the information was accurate with whether the people who received the information believed it was accurate. The study was designed to see if people who were notified about sex offenders living in their neighborhood would take steps to (1) protect themselves or (2) protect others. The data they used were what they found available -- notification that was actually done by the local police department. In Minneapolis, where the study was conducted, notification occurred only for level 3 sex offenders. Whether, in fact, the process by which a level 3 classification is made accurately predicts future recidivism is irrelevant to the study: what counts is that the information was provided and the level of protective behavior reported by persons who were within the zone of notification was higher than that reported by folks outside of the zone of reporting. I don't have to have an opinion at all on the issue of the reliability of classification to use the study to argue just what I did: that there is some evidence in the literature that people who are given information about sex offenders living in their neighborhood leads people to engage in more behavior that is protective of their children. Your suggestion that it was somehow improper or inconsistent of me to offer that study for that conclusion is nonsensical.

There quite plainly are different levels of danger associated with different sex offenses. You reduced this into knowing rates of recidivism, but why should police be devoting resources to tracking people who might urinate in public again? Or teenagers who sexted their boy- or girlfriend? The danger just isn't in the likelihood of committing another crime, but in the nature of the crimes committed.

I don't understand your point here. I think the only time I mentioned recidivism is when DT made a claim about it. I don't think I "reduced" anything. I haven't advocated and don't advocate spending police resources on people who piss in public. DT made a claim about recidivism and I asked him for evidence. That's it.

[_EAllusion]

Huh? I think you're conflating the issue of whether the information was accurate with whether the people who received the information believed it was accurate. The study was designed to see if people who were notified about sex offenders living in their neighborhood would take steps to (1) protect themselves or (2) protect others. The data they used were what they found available -- notification that was actually done by the local police department. In Minneapolis, where the study was conducted, notification occurred only for level 3 sex offenders. Whether, in fact, the process by which a level 3 classification is made accurately predicts future recidivism is irrelevant to the study: what counts is that the information was provided and the level of protective behavior reported by persons who were within the zone of notification was higher than that reported by folks outside of the zone of reporting. I don't have to have an opinion at all on the issue of the reliability of classification to use the study to argue just what I did: that there is some evidence in the literature that people who are given information about sex offenders living in their neighborhood leads people to engage in more behavior that is protective of their children. Your suggestion that it was somehow improper or inconsistent of me to offer that study for that conclusion is nonsensical.

...

I don't understand your point here. I think the only time I mentioned recidivism is when DT made a claim about it. I don't think I "reduced" anything. I haven't advocated and don't advocate spending police resources on people who piss in public. DT made a claim about recidivism and I asked him for evidence. That's it.

DT claimed, "With 3 million offenders on the list (the vast majority are non-violent) it means law enforcement officers aren't focusing on the dangerous predators."

This argument seems straightforward enough. Sex offender lists include a large volume of people who aren't all that dangerous yet law enforcement resources are devoted to registry related tasks instead of concentrating resources on serious dangers to society. Seems bad.

You replied to it, "what is your evidence that we can predict which offenders will repeat the crime after serving their sentences with an acceptable rate of accuracy?"

This is a comment about recidivism and danger. I noted that the study you cited made distinctions between types of sex offenders to distinguish relative risk, which goes directly to the argument DT made. You retorted that the study didn't test whether that information was accurate. This is not at all relevant to the chain of argument. Either you think we can describe people on the registry as less dangerous than others or we can't. Sex offender registries do include people who urinated in public or had appropriate, consensual sexual relationships as teenagers. Maybe spending time keeping them 1000 feet away from schools to protect children isn't the best use of resources irrespective of whether that's fair.

[_Res Ipsa]

With respect to number 2, where is your evidence that says that sex offender registries cause parents to be less careful about child abuse caused by folks not on the registry? Is there a study that says that there is a higher rate of child abuse by family members, etc. in families whose parents consulted a sex offender registry?

Here is a study

"A popular misconception among the general public is that sex offenders most often victimize strangers. To better understand these misconceptions about sex offenders, this study determines the frequency of misperception in the general public and establishes if the misconceptions are related to the policy of sex offender registration. Using a self-administered mail survey, it is found that on average, 3 out of 10 respondents indicate more worry about a child being sexually abused by a stranger than a child being sexually abused by someone known to them."

Craun, Sarah W., and Matthew T. Theriot. "Misperceptions of sex offender perpetration: Considering the impact of sex offender registration." Journal of interpersonal violence 24.12 (2009): 2057-2072.

Okay, here's the paper: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ma ... ration.pdf

The study doesn't show what I asked for. In fact, it specifically notes that it didn't attempt to examine whether sex offender notification resulted in lower levels of protection against abuse of children by non-strangers.

Finally, the present study does not complete the chain by being able to determine if misperceptions in the belief of who sexually abused the child led to differences in protective behavior of children.

Upcoming work should also investigate if misperception of who sexally offends leads to less protective behaviors by parents or guardians. Likewise, it is important to know if this then contributes to more sexual abuse of children by people known to them because parents were concentrating on protecting children from strangers.

Although it collected data on how strongly people were worried about both stranger and non-stranger abuse on a 0 to 10 scale, it didn't report those data in the paper. Instead, it compared the two and labeled any case in which the score for stranger as higher than non-stranger as a "misperception." Thus, even though the study found increased rates of misperception among those who answered yes to the question "if anyone had been arrested for a sexual crime in their neighborhood," it didn't explain whether the cause was an increase in worry about strangers or a decrease in worry about non-strangers or both. In other words, it didn't report any finding on whether knowledge that someone had been arrested for a sex offense in the neighborhood decreased worry about sexual abuse by non-strangers.

[_Res Ipsa]

Huh? I think you're conflating the issue of whether the information was accurate with whether the people who received the information believed it was accurate. The study was designed to see if people who were notified about sex offenders living in their neighborhood would take steps to (1) protect themselves or (2) protect others. The data they used were what they found available -- notification that was actually done by the local police department. In Minneapolis, where the study was conducted, notification occurred only for level 3 sex offenders. Whether, in fact, the process by which a level 3 classification is made accurately predicts future recidivism is irrelevant to the study: what counts is that the information was provided and the level of protective behavior reported by persons who were within the zone of notification was higher than that reported by folks outside of the zone of reporting. I don't have to have an opinion at all on the issue of the reliability of classification to use the study to argue just what I did: that there is some evidence in the literature that people who are given information about sex offenders living in their neighborhood leads people to engage in more behavior that is protective of their children. Your suggestion that it was somehow improper or inconsistent of me to offer that study for that conclusion is nonsensical.

...

I don't understand your point here. I think the only time I mentioned recidivism is when DoubtingThomas made a claim about it. I don't think I "reduced" anything. I haven't advocated and don't advocate spending police resources on people who piss in public. DoubtingThomas made a claim about recidivism and I asked him for evidence. That's it.

DoubtingThomas claimed, "With 3 million offenders on the list (the vast majority are non-violent) it means law enforcement officers aren't focusing on the dangerous predators."

This argument seems straightforward enough. Sex offender lists include a large volume of people who aren't all that dangerous yet law enforcement resources are devoted to registry related tasks instead of concentrating resources on serious dangers to society. Seems bad.

You replied to it, "what is your evidence that we can predict which offenders will repeat the crime after serving their sentences with an acceptable rate of accuracy?"

This is a comment about recidivism and danger. I noted that the study you cited made distinctions between types of sex offenders to distinguish relative risk, which goes directly to the argument DoubtingThomas made. You retorted that the study didn't test whether that information was accurate. This is not at all relevant to the chain of argument. Either you think we can describe people on the registry as less dangerous than others or we can't. Sex offender registries do include people who urinated in public or had appropriate, consensual sexual relationships as teenagers. Maybe spending time keeping them 1000 feet away from schools to protect children isn't the best use of resources irrespective of whether that's fair.

You aren't accurately reporting the chain of argument. You're conflating different responses to different statements and questions.

I asked DT for evidence on his first statement because of his comment about concentrating on dangerous predators. "Dangerous predator" means likely to reoffend -- otherwise they're not a predator. It seems to me that you and I discussed this on another thread and you pointed out that we don't have reliable risk assessments for predicting whether an offender will reoffend. Am I remembering that wrong? I wasn't disputing the notion that devoting lots of police resources to public pissers was a bad idea. I mean, do the police really say "Well, this guy who peed in public and this other guy raped five children, but they're both on the list so we have to pay equal attention to them?"

You then implied that asking for that evidence somehow implied that it was improper or inconsistent for me to cite the study I referenced for the proposition that there is some evidence that giving people information about a sex offender living in their neighborhood caused them to take protective measures with respect to their children. That's just a non sequitur on your part. Nothing in the study depends on the notion that the level 3 classification is accurate. In fact, ethical considerations aside, they could have done the same study based on the police giving completely fictitious information about a fictitious sex offender and then asking them the same questions. But none of that is relevant to my main argument, which was a response to DT's original claim that if people don't agree that registries should be reduced or eliminated, they don't care about children's safety. It's relevant only to your claim that it was improper for me to cite the study that I linked.

You're actually making a similar point to mine when you ask what the effect would be of going door to door and telling people there might be a sex offender living in their neighborhood. It doesn't matter whether there actually is a sex offender. What matters is the effect the information has on people's behavior. Obviously, it wouldn't be ethical to lie to people in order to motivate them to protect their children.

I keep feeling as if you are responding to me as if I'm arguing in favor of the current registration system. I'm not. My entire argument is a response to DT's claims that people who don't take his position don't care about the safety of their children.