Everything is best told in a story, so let's drop ourselves into a situation that could very well become real.

You're a parent surfing the Internet, and you run across something about sex offenders. You get to thinking, "I sure do wonder if any of these people live near me." You locate your state's Sex Offender Registry online and do a search in your area.and in twenty seconds, your neighbor, three doors down, is staring you in the face. In this picture, he's not smiling--in fact, you've never seen a lousier picture of anyone before. His face is almost emotionless, and perhaps even a shred downtrodden. Your neighbor has always been decent to you and never shows inappropriate affection to your children. In fact, he has a wife, and children of his own living with him! You're shocked that such a disgusting individual is someone that lives five hundred feet down the road, and is allowed to have children in his house to boot! Your children walk past his house on the way to school every day! You feel as if you're lucky that the kids haven't been raped and murdered yet! Who allowed such a person to live so close to you? What an outrage! It looks like it's time for you to start taking your children to school personally.

You plaster the subdivision with posters warning everyone of your new discovery. You start bussing your children to school personally. Your kids aren't allowed to go outside anymore. It's pretty difficult for everyone, but at least your children are safe. You're afraid that your neighbor may break in at night and do something to your family, so you beef up your home security system. Thank goodness the sex offender registry exists! Now you know who is a threat to your children, and your children won't be violated because the identities of all the dirty predators are out in the open.

Fast forward a couple of months. The family of the neighbor whose face you plastered around the neighborhood has been going through a living hell. Because of your broadcast, everyone in town knows about this person. His children have been getting bullied and beaten up at school and often come home with new bruises or cuts, which they try to hide. Six weeks ago, there was a drive-by shooting on his house in the middle of the night. Two weeks ago, his entire family packed up two moving trucks and pulled out of the neighborhood for good. The evil demented man left, and your children are safe again.

After swimming practice at the sports complex today, your beautiful fourteen-year-old daughter came home and suddenly began crying violently. It happens so suddenly that you can't quite comprehend what could possibly have caused such a powerful outburst of painful emotion.

Unfortunately, the next hour consists of you discovering that your daughter was sexually molested by a thirty-year-old man who works at the sports complex. Worse yet, she's been molested nearly every single day, for the past month. She tells in great detail how he earned her trust, became like one of her friends, and how one day he touched her pants. As the horribly unreal tale unfolds, you quake with intense fear. It was their special secret. Don't tell anyone. The only reason she came out was because she was so afraid. She felt so guilty and violated. You shed endless tears and don't know what to do anymore.

This story links together two separate situations that happen more often than you would be comfortable knowing about. Sex offender registration combined with public access to that registration are dangerous in more than one way:

• The term "sex offender" applies to many classes of crimes. One can become a sex offender for raping a five-year-old, and the same label will be applied to many who urinate in public, are 18 years old and have sex with a 16-year-old girlfriend. or even download child pornography from the Internet for the thrill of getting away with something. Is this the correct way to handle crime--by popping a modern-day scarlet letter on a wide class of convicts, then treating them all as if they are all equal to the worst in the group?
  
  
• Registries are often used to engage in vigilante justice against convicted sex offenders. A few high-profile cases exist where a "righteous citizen" used information on sex offender registries to locate and murder sex offenders.
  
  
• New sex offenses against children are usually committed by persons close to those children and not currently listed on any form of criminal registry. The truthful figures, direct from a US Department of Justice study, place the number of convicted sex offenders that commit new sex crimes between five and six percent--which means that if 100 people are on the registry for your county, only five or six will commit another sex crime, which means that 94 or 95 will not.
  
  
• Sex offender registries are what is known as a "de facto" punishment. After serving whatever sentence is expected, offenders are then branded, often for life, by having huge amounts of personal information posted in a publicly accessible registry. This violates the basic idea that once a person "does their time" they can return to society and rebuild their lives, and because of the inappropriate behavior induced in the public by exposure to this information, the entire idea of a "correctional system" that works to build healthy behaviors and prevent the unwanted behaviors from resurfacing is essentially thrown down the tubes in favor of lifetime punishment by the neighbors and the city council.
  
  
• Many people feel that sex offenders should be punished as much as possible, or even killed immediately upon conviction, and this is often how one finds registration and post-punishment punishment justified, but consider this: sex offenders that are released from prison or are placed on probation with a suspended sentence need to rebuild stable lives in order to minimize the risk of committing new crimes, including new sex crimes. Stability generally consists of meeting core needs such as decent housing, a job with a living wage, and healthy social relationships. Having a demonizing label like "sex offender" prevents these people from getting housing and a job, and in general any new friendships will dissolve immediately upon discovering the "sex offender" status. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the offender can't register without a home, and goes back to jail on a felony failure to register. The offender steals to eat, and goes back to jail for petty theft. The offender can't develop relationships, and may revert to deviant behavior to compensate, which may consist of resuming the behaviors that opened up opportunities to sexually offend in the first place. In other words, punishment of offenders beyond prison and/or probation actually increases the overall chances that your children will jump in harm's way.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Sex offender registration coupled with fully open public disclosure of the contents of the registry endangers everyone. The ex-offender and his or her innocent family members, your children, and even you yourself--all are at higher risk of becoming a crime victim because of sex offender registration. If the purpose of registration is to help you protect your family, it is failing in a worse way with every passing year. The next time you hear a politician talking about "being tough on crime," remember what you've read here, and ask yourself: is the "tough on crime" approach making my child safer, or just making me feel better at night for a few months before I find out my child gets molested at the pool on a daily basis?

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