www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14164614
Economist shop Advertisement Briefing Sex laws Unjust and ineffective Aug 6th 2009 | HARLEM, GEORGIA From The Economist print edition America has pioneered the harsh punishment of sex offenders. Illustration by Noma Barr ONE day in 1996 the lights went off in a classroom in Georgia so that the students could watch a video. Wendy Whitaker, a 17-year-old pupil at the time, was sitting near the back. The boy next to her suggested that, since it was dark, she could perform oral sex on him without anyone noticing. She was arrested and charged with sodomy, which in Georgia can refer to oral sex. She met her court-appointed lawyer five minutes before the hearing. She did not really understand what was going on, so she did as she was told. Not being the most organised of people, she failed to meet all the conditions, such as checking in regularly with her probation officer. For a series of technical violations, she was incarcerated for more than a year, in the county jail, the state women's prison and a boot camp. Ms Whitaker's name, photograph and address are easily accessible online, along with the information that she was convicted of "sodomy". But since it describes itself as a list of people who have "been convicted of a criminal offence against a victim who is a minor or any dangerous sexual offence", it makes it sound as if she did something terrible to a helpless child. She sees people whispering, and parents pulling their children indoors when she walks by. Punish first, think later The registry is a gold mine for lazy journalists. A local television station featured Ms Whitaker in a spot on local sex offenders, broadcasting a helpful map showing where she lives but leaving the specifics of the crime to each viewer's fearful imagination. The state's sodomy laws, which in 1996 barred oral sex even between willing spouses, were struck down by court rulings in 1998 and 2003. And since 2006, thanks to a "Romeo and Juliet" clause in a sex-crimes law, consensual sex between two teenagers has been a misdemeanour, not a crime, if one partner is underage but no more than four years younger than the other. The Romeo and Juliet clause was not retroactive, however, so Ms Whitaker is stuck on the register, and subject to extraordinary restrictions. Registered sex offenders in Georgia are barred from living within 1,000 feet of anywhere children may congregate, such as a school, a park, a library, or a swimming pool. They are also banned from working within 1,000 feet of a school or a child-care centre. Since the church at the end of Ms Whitaker's street houses a child-care centre, she was evicted from her home. Her husband, who worked for the county dog-catching department, moved with her, lost his job and with it their health insurance. Thanks to a lawsuit filed by the Southern Centre for Human Rights, a group that campaigns against rough justice, Ms Whitaker won an injunction allowing her to return home. But her husband did not get his job back, and now works as a labourer. And Ms Whitaker is still fighting to get her name removed from the registry. "You don't think you'll be paying for it when you're nearly 30." California has had one since 1947, but most states started theirs in the 1990s. Many people assume that anyone listed on a sex-offender registry must be a rapist or a child molester. A report by Sarah Tofte of Human Rights Watch, a pressure group, found that at least five states required men to register if they were caught visiting prostitutes. At least 13 required it for urinating in public (in two of which, only if a child was present). No fewer than 29 states required registration for teenagers who had consensual sex with another teenager. Because so many offences require registration, the number of registered sex offenders in America has exploded. As of December last year, there were 674,000 of them, according to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. If they were all crammed into a single state, it would be more populous than Wyoming, Vermont or North Dakota. As a share of its population, America registers more than four times as many people as Britain, which is unusually harsh on sex offenders. America's registers keep swelling, not least because in 17 states, registration is for life. Illustration by Noma Barr Georgia has more than 17,000 registered sex offenders. And it is fiendishly hard for anyone browsing the registry to tell the one from the other. The Georgia Sex Offender Registration Review Board, an official body, assessed a sample of offenders on the registry last year and concluded that 65% of them posed little threat. Another 30% were potentially threatening, and 5% were clearly dangerous. The board recommended that the first group be allowed to live and work wherever they liked. The second group could reasonably be barred from living or working in certain places, said the board, and the third group should be subject to tight restrictions and a lifetime of monitoring. A very small number "just over 100" are classified as "predators", which means they have a compulsion to commit sex offences. When not in jail, predators must wear ankle bracelets that track where they are. Despite the board's findings, non-violent offenders remain listed and subject to a giant cobweb of controls. One rule, championed by Georgia's House majority leader, banned them from living within 1,000 feet of a school bus stop. Thomas Brown, the sheriff of DeKalb county near Atlanta, mapped the bus stops in his patch and realised that he would have to evict all 490 of the sex offenders living there. Other than the bottom of a lake or the middle of a forest, there was hardly anywhere in Georgia for them to live legally. In the end Georgia's courts stepped in and suspended the bus-stop rule, along with another barring sex offenders from volunteering in churches. Rape and child molestation are terrible crimes that can traumatise their victims for life. All parents want to protect their children from sexual predators, so politicians can nearly always win votes by promising curbs on them. Those who object can be called soft on child-molesters, a label most politicians would rather avoid. Every lawmaker who wants to sound tough on sex offenders has to propose a law tougher than the one enacted by the last politician who wanted to sound tough on sex offenders. A self-defeating pillory So laws get harsher and harsher. If there are thousands of offenders on a registry, it is harder to keep track of the most dangerous ones. Georgia's sheriffs complain that they have been given no extra money or manpower to help them keep the huge and swelling sex-offenders' registry up to date or to police its confusing mass of rules. Terry Norris of the Georgia Sheriffs' Association cites a man who was convicted of statutory rape two decades ago for having consensual sex with his high-school sweetheart, to whom he is now married. "It doesn't make it right, but it doesn't make him a threat to anybody," says Mr Norris. "We spend the same amount of time on that guy as on someone who's done something heinous." Money spent on evicting sex offenders cannot be spent on treating them. Politicians pushing the get-tough approach sometimes claim that sex offenders are mostly incorrigible: that three-quarters or even nine out of ten of them reoffend. A study of nearly 10,000 male sex offenders in 15 American states found that 5% were rearrested for a sex crime within three years. A meta-analysis of 29,000 sex offenders in Canada, Britain and America found that 24% had reoffended after 15 years. A Californian study of sex offenders who underwent "relapse prevention", counselling of the sort that alcoholics get from Alcoholics Anonymous, found that it was useless. But a meta-analysis of 23 studies by Karl Hanson of Canada's department of public safety found that psychological therapy was associated with a 43% drop in recidivism. Some offenders--particularly men who rape boys--are extremely hard to treat. Some will never change until they are too old to feel sexual urges. But some types of treatment appear to work for some people and further research could yield more brea...
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