Oregon used to have a special designation for SOs that were likely to reoffend. You had a second trial and went in front of a judge. I believe the standard was pretty high (like they had to show psych test results) and then they could alert your neighbors, restrict where you live, etc.
I know when they developed the everybody SO registry they talked about scrapping it, I'm not sure if they did. It seems to me if they did, they scrapped something useful for making it easier to find out the PTA president was busted for prostitution when she was 19. It's insane.
That said, for the hardcore actually determined likely to reoffend, I would like to see them in some sort of separate housing, hopefully one that came with counseling, support groups, etc. It seems that would be likely to keep us safer. And with the cost of prison for recidivism and the cost of maintaining an asinine registry, I don't know that it'd be an unaffordable switch. But I don't expect even in Oregon politicians are lining up to be pro-SO.
I know this sounds like something from olden times, but is it possible to have some sort of remote colony-like state-owned community where people like this could voluntarily live and where nobody under 18 would be allowed to enter?
There was a private citizen who set up a type of compound like this in OK. He was forced by the city to kick out the residents because there is a a law, maybe city ordinance, about how many sex offenders can live together. The city basically forced these people into the streets and camp cities like the one pictures in te article.
How are sex registries a tool of the patriarchy when many offenders are on there for abusing boys?
Because mothers fear their kids being abused more than kids fear being abused. My understanding is that women typically support harsher sentencing than men, and vote for and consult the registries at higher rates than men.
FWIW, I don't know if I necessarily agree with the premise, though I do think it's definitely an interesting one that I want to think more about.
How are sex registries a tool of the patriarchy when many offenders are on there for abusing boys?
Because mothers fear their kids being abused more than kids fear being abused. My understanding is that women typically support harsher sentencing than men, and vote for and consult the registries at higher rates than men.
FWIW, I don't know if I necessarily agree with the premise, though I do think it's definitely an interesting one that I want to think more about.
If this something women want and use more than men then it seems even less likely a tool of the patriarchy.
Unless the implied assumption is that we women don't know what we want or what we will use unless men tell us.
There's a difference between an 18 year old dating a 16 year old and parents get offended for whatever reason, a drunk idiot who urinates in a park and a real-life heinous child molester. It is my understanding that you end up on the list for any of the above and there is no differentiation. Is that correct?
That's what the "level # offender" designation is supposed to imply. But it's confusing and subjective and not standard across states (or courts even)
Because mothers fear their kids being abused more than kids fear being abused. My understanding is that women typically support harsher sentencing than men, and vote for and consult the registries at higher rates than men.
FWIW, I don't know if I necessarily agree with the premise, though I do think it's definitely an interesting one that I want to think more about.
If this something women want and use more than men then it seems even less likely a tool of the patriarchy.
Unless the implied assumption is that we women don't know what we want or what we will use unless men tell us.
There are two levels to this discussion. First, you had sex offender registries. Which were presumably offered to provide people information they could use to change their own behavior. What happened in response wasn't people changing their own behavior, it's that people began to realize everything they had to be afraid of, and used that information to request the state further punish and/or change the behavior of others.
In other words, the registries didn't empower people with knowledge they could use to protect themselves, instead, they made them more scared and made them request more protections from the state. As there are legitimate questions over whether either kind of legislative development is effective at preventing sex crimes, it seems like legitimate fears are being both stroked by the sex registry, then placated by security theater, which seems to go farther and farther at providing a false sense of security. Does anyone really feel safer that the 19 year old who pissed in the bushes on his college campus now lives in a trailer park and washes dishes under the table?
I'm not opposed to a case-by-case analysis of whether sex offenders, as a condition of their sentencing or release, should register and/or be restricted in where they live and work either temporarily or permanently. Certainly I can see how it's useful or necessary in certain instances.
But the over-inclusion of offenders on the registries, the increased prohibition on their movement, and the due process violations that are occurring at a manic rate are not only not narrowly tailored to address legitimate fears, but they are not proven to be effective at preventing crimes.
So I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it a tool of the patriarchy, but I do think there's something wrong with the fact that politicians are tapping into legitimate fears of sexual assault by both stroking those fears and by selling do-nothing laws that cost almost nothing to adopt and enforce but sound fantastic on paper.
So I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it a tool of the patriarchy, but I do think there's something wrong with the fact that politicians are tapping into legitimate fears of sexual assault by both stroking those fears and by selling do-nothing laws that cost almost nothing to adopt and enforce but sound fantastic on paper.
If this something women want and use more than men then it seems even less likely a tool of the patriarchy.
Unless the implied assumption is that we women don't know what we want or what we will use unless men tell us.
There are two levels to this discussion. First, you had sex offender registries. Which were presumably offered to provide people information they could use to change their own behavior. What happened in response wasn't people changing their own behavior, it's that people began to realize everything they had to be afraid of, and used that information to request the state further punish and/or change the behavior of others.
In other words, the registries didn't empower people with knowledge they could use to protect themselves, instead, they made them more scared and made them request more protections from the state. As there are legitimate questions over whether either kind of legislative development is effective at preventing sex crimes, it seems like legitimate fears are being both stroked by the sex registry, then placated by security theater, which seems to go farther and farther at providing a false sense of security. Does anyone really feel safer that the 19 year old who pissed in the bushes on his college campus now lives in a trailer park and washes dishes under the table?
I'm not opposed to a case-by-case analysis of whether sex offenders, as a condition of their sentencing or release, should register and/or be restricted in where they live and work either temporarily or permanently. Certainly I can see how it's useful or necessary in certain instances.
But the over-inclusion of offenders on the registries, the increased prohibition on their movement, and the due process violations that are occurring at a manic rate are not only not narrowly tailored to address legitimate fears, but they are not proven to be effective at preventing crimes.
So I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it a tool of the patriarchy, but I do think there's something wrong with the fact that politicians are tapping into legitimate fears of sexual assault by both stroking those fears and by selling do-nothing laws that cost almost nothing to adopt and enforce but sound fantastic on paper.
I agree with everything you said but I'm not yet there that this is a tool of the patriarchy.
Politicians stoke fear on every topic, regardless of gender, not to hold women down, necessarily, but generally to keep themselves politically relevant.
That picture is EXACTLY what it looks like when you are entering the connector southbound from 20 West. EXACTLY.
It does.
Sex offender registries are so incredibly useless and cause far more harm than good (do they actually do any good at all?). If someone is dangerous enough that they can't be trusted to live within a certain distance of a school, they should still be in prison.
Sits next to TTT. I thought the whole idea was that once you serve your time, your debt to society is paid. I realize that there are usually conditions placed upon release (parole for example) but the sex offender registries place people in a perpetual state of limbo without hope of truly starting again. Maybe the sentences and penalties should be harsher, if we as a society don't feel they can ever be trusted again.
And don't get me started on the people who have to register because they were prosecuted for having sex with a 16 year old at 18.
There's a guy in my parents neighborhood who painted his house bright bright yellow and put toys and such in his front yard. He has no kids. But he is on the sex offender registry, turns out. I'm pretty sure in this situation, this is very useful information.
There's a difference between an 18 year old dating a 16 year old and parents get offended for whatever reason, a drunk idiot who urinates in a park and a real-life heinous child molester. It is my understanding that you end up on the list for any of the above and there is no differentiation. Is that correct?
yes and I think that is often overlooked. We're not talking solely about pedofiles. We're putting them in the same category as public urinators and it doesn't help.
If you support the laws, are you OK with imposing them on people who entered into plea bargains prior to the laws being on the books, or enforcing them in new ways after the plea bargain was entered (i.e. person knew about the registry but 3 years after he entered the deal, state passed a law prohibiting him from living 1 mile from schools, thereby forcing him to sell his home, etc.)
And to the person in the yellow house. TBH, I'm surprised at how brazen they are. That is insane and creepy.
If you support the laws, are you OK with imposing them on people who entered into plea bargains prior to the laws being on the books, or enforcing them in new ways after the plea bargain was entered (i.e. person knew about the registry but 3 years after he entered the deal, state passed a law prohibiting him from living 1 mile from schools, thereby forcing him to sell his home, etc.)
And to the person in the yellow house. TBH, I'm surprised at how brazen they are. That is insane and creepy.
I don't think the laws are perfect and I don't support what you describe above. The general idea of having knowledge of where sex offenders live I'm okay with. Especially for those who harm children and have a propensity for repeat offense.
I'm not okay with statutory rape on the list. I'm not okay with public urination either.
I can't believe it's legal for a sex offender to lay what amounts to a kid trap at his house! I was shocked when I found out about this.
I knew a convicted rapist who was on the sex offender registry. He was homeless, and really trying to get his life together. He could not find housing or a job due to his record. For a while, he lived in his car. He continued to look for permanent housing and work, but due to the registry, basically was not able to live or work anywhere. His car got impounded, and that's when things went downhill. Shelter space is at a premium, so many nights he was sleeping on the street, not eating, etc. In the year and a half I knew him, he went from hard working and determined to an incoherent mess who would get in fights on cold nights so he could sleep in a jail cell. He became increasingly incoherent, irrational, unpredictable, and angry. The change in him over an 18 month period was incredible.
I do not know what happened to him. Likely dead or in prison.
I do question to what extent in his case, the laws made us more unsafe, because the result was someone who probably could have lived out a crime-free life if given the chance. Even if he weren't capable of living a crime free life, how are we served by having these people wandering between homeless shelters and the streets? If he's a risk to other tenants in a building, then he's a risk to others in the homeless shelter.
For everyone kid we save from going into Uncle Touchy's Yellow House, are we just putting other kids at risk in other ways? If rates of recidivism are high, how are we protecting against recidivism by moving them to homeless shelters, highway underpasses, and trailer parks? Seems to me like we are just changing the victims to people with the fewest resources to protect themselves and advocate for a better system.
If you support the laws, are you OK with imposing them on people who entered into plea bargains prior to the laws being on the books, or enforcing them in new ways after the plea bargain was entered (i.e. person knew about the registry but 3 years after he entered the deal, state passed a law prohibiting him from living 1 mile from schools, thereby forcing him to sell his home, etc.)
And to the person in the yellow house. TBH, I'm surprised at how brazen they are. That is insane and creepy.
No. I would not be okay with that. I feel like that would violate some kind of due process test.
It's an interesting issue.
SCOTUS has said that registration is not "punishment" and therefore is not an ex post facto law.
Many courts have interpreted this to mean that prohibitions on where you live and move are not, though I think they are pretty split, and often this issue is decided in state courts under state constitutional principles.
The issue is making its way through California now because the state passed a ballot proposition creating a 2000 foot buffer zone and applied it retroactively.
There's a difference between an 18 year old dating a 16 year old and parents get offended for whatever reason, a drunk idiot who urinates in a park and a real-life heinous child molester. It is my understanding that you end up on the list for any of the above and there is no differentiation. Is that correct?
That's what the "level # offender" designation is supposed to imply. But it's confusing and subjective and not standard across states (or courts even)
Not always. Tier designation (at least in my state) is based on likelihood to reoffend. I knew a mentally disabled man who would expose himself and really couldn't understand to stop. He was designated a tier 3 (highest designation) because he was highly likely to reoffend. He was yucky, but not dangerous. He was kicked out of his subsidized assisted living because of their restrictions on sex offenders. Last I heard he was homeless.
I think the buffer zones and registries are the result of a kind of inability to do much else. We can't kill them, which I would be fine with for pedophiles. And despite the fact we're willing to put repeat drug offenders in jail for life, we seem to not be able to do that with pedos. Castration would also work as far as I'm concerned, but I think that's already been found to violate the 8th. So, what to do. This isn't like some gang banger where we could reform our justice and incarceration systems and promote education, enfranchisement and job opportunities. These are broken, deeply dysfunctional people who have no business existing in this society. And yet, there's no where to put them.
My understanding is that part of the problem is that we have harsher drug sentencing laws than we have sex offender sentencing laws, and judges, prosecutors, and AGs have less authority in negotiating drug penalties than anything else. As a result, when prisons get overcrowded or budgets get slashed, we continue to incarcerate pot smokers and let Chester the Molester out on good behavior.
So yeah, I agree, there's too many of them on the street that shouldn't be, and that's a problem.
I don't see why the solution is "well, they are going to commit more crimes, so just keep them of my block, and let them go commit those crimes on other poor people living in the trailer park" instead of pressuring legislatures to rethink all criminal sentencing guidelines and prosecution strategies and priorities.
I do think that we as a society have an obligation to ask ourselves if the laws we have are actually effective, or if they are security theater, reshuffling the victims of the crime, and in the process, perhaps even causing more crime than we would have had without them.
Even if we believe or could know that some crimes are prevented, why don't we also think that some crimes that would not have been committed are, due to the fact that rehabilitated people are driven to criminality as a result of living on the margins?
I knew a convicted rapist who was on the sex offender registry. He was homeless, and really trying to get his life together. He could not find housing or a job due to his record. For a while, he lived in his car. He continued to look for permanent housing and work, but due to the registry, basically was not able to live or work anywhere. His car got impounded, and that's when things went downhill. Shelter space is at a premium, so many nights he was sleeping on the street, not eating, etc. In the year and a half I knew him, he went from hard working and determined to an incoherent mess who would get in fights on cold nights so he could sleep in a jail cell. He became increasingly incoherent, irrational, unpredictable, and angry. The change in him over an 18 month period was incredible.
I do not know what happened to him. Likely dead or in prison.
I do question to what extent in his case, the laws made us more unsafe, because the result was someone who probably could have lived out a crime-free life if given the chance. Even if he weren't capable of living a crime free life, how are we served by having these people wandering between homeless shelters and the streets? If he's a risk to other tenants in a building, then he's a risk to others in the homeless shelter.
For everyone kid we save from going into Uncle Touchy's Yellow House, are we just putting other kids at risk in other ways? If rates of recidivism are high, how are we protecting against recidivism by moving them to homeless shelters, highway underpasses, and trailer parks? Seems to me like we are just changing the victims to people with the fewest resources to protect themselves and advocate for a better system.
QFT ESF for president. I work in a homeless program and when people come to me who are on the registry... There's just nothing for them.