The Existing sex Offender Registration Laws - Research Paper Example

? Sex Offender Registration Laws: Need for Change of the English of the Concerned September 2, Sex Offender Registration Laws: Need for Change There is no denying the fact that the public opinion regarding sex related offenses and sex offenders tends to be so charged that people seldom try to consider the fact that the contemporary sex offenders registration laws tend to be obsolete and need to be changed (Etzioni, 2006, p. 43). For the purpose of law is to extend punishment to the culprits and to provide safety and security to the common citizens and not to unnecessarily be prejudiced and biased against people who got involved in a crime and have served their sentence. It goes without saying that the current sex offender registration laws are obsolete and anachronistic that lead to the unwarranted harassment of many sex offenders and they need to be changed to extend a measure of relief and space to the sex offenders whose offences are not that serious and grave. In the United States, as per the Federal legal provisions, every state is required to maintain a sex offender registry. The purpose of this law was to extend the identity, names and addresses of the proclaimed sex offenders to the public so as to empower the common people and enable them to protect themselves and their children from possible sex offenses. However, in a practical sense, the sex offender registry happens to be quiet exhaustive and bulky and it is not possible for the people to commit to memory the names and addresses of all the sex offenders. Thereby extending to the people an exhaustive list of sex offenders replete with the name of people who got involved in varying gravity of sex offenses is not likely to protect the masses against sex offenses (Paludi, 2008, p. 178). Yet, on the other side, having one’s name in the sex offender registry could much harm the life of an individual. The other thing is that while accruing the names of sex offenders, the sex offender registry ascribes to a broad range of crimes that are classified as sexual offenses. Certainly it is a fact that there are people who have a violent propensity to indulge in sex crimes. Yet, there are also people who accrued the sex offender designation by simply indulging in some innocuous form of indecency, which they emphatically regret and feel sorry for. Hence, it will be totally unreasonable and farfetched to enter the names of such people in the sex offenders list. On the one side such an approach will do no practical good to the people, and on the other side such an approach will only make it difficult for the redeemable sex offenders to enter the social mainstream (Yessine & Bonta, 2006). People are bound to be unsympathetic towards the individuals whose name is in the sex offender registry. Hence, the contemporary sex offender registration laws need to be changed so that only those sex offenders who are liable to indulge in sexual offenses in the future get listed in the registry and the individuals who got listed by indulging in some momentary public indecency could get a chance to lead a normal life (Sullum, 2003). The existing sex offender registration laws happen to be counterproductive in their scope and intention because they are punitive in their spirit (Hodgson & Kelley, 2002, p. 225). The very objective of saving the citizens from sexual offenses gets overlapped by the act of labeling people who indulged in varying degrees of sexual offenses in a generalized category of sex offenders. It will be reasonable to conclude that not all sex offenders are beyond rehabilitation. There is a category of sex offenders which is open to social rehabilitation. Thereby, making an individual open to stigmatization by placing one’s name in the sex offender registry and pushing one into isolation is certainly not the right way to rehabilitate a sex offender (Wilson & Petersilia, 2011). In fact it increases the likelihood of a registered sex offender further engaging in sexual offenses. Simply speaking, compiling a long list of sex offenders who engaged in varying degrees of sexual offenses is not a practical approach towards protecting the common people from sex offenses. There is no dearth of individuals who ended up getting their name in the sex offender registry by indulging in some momentary public indecency or a onetime recklessness. Thereby, including the names of such people in the sex offender registry is essentially punitive and utterly biased and prejudicial. The need of the hour is that the sex offender registration laws should be so changed that they focus on the chronic sex offenders, while giving the individuals who are repentant, a chance to enter the social mainstream (Yessine & Bonta, 2006). As already mentioned that the current scope of sex offender registration laws is very wide and the sex offender registry mostly comprises of the names of offenders that have committed grave and serious sex offenses, to the names of individuals who accrued the label of being a sex offender simply by engaging in a trivial public indecency or a petty offense (Sullum, 2003). Thereby, the need of the hour is to reconfigure the sex offender registration laws so that the sex offender registry only contains the names of such people that are attributed serious and grave sexual offenses (Sullum, 2003). In contrast the trivial offenses like acts of public indecency and other such crimes should be spared of the sex offender registry norms and should be covered in some other statute. Such steps are bound to accrue many advantages for the states and the citizens. One advantage of deleting petty crimes from the sex offender registry norms is that it would divest the information pertaining to sex offenders of much dross and bulkiness and will make the sex offender registry more reliable and precise. This will directly protect the masses from the more serious sex offenders as people will have access to the information pertaining to the offenders who are more liable to commit serious crimes (Yessine & Bonta, 2006). Thereby, the sex offender registry will get more accurate and dependable as it will contain the names of only those offenders who are dangerous and more likely to engage in repeat sexual offenses. The other big advantage in removing the petty crimes from sex offender registration requirements will be that it will prevent the people who knowingly or unknowingly got engaged in petty sexual crimes like engaging in acts of public indecency to be labeled for ever as being sex offenders (Logan, 2009, p. 135). There are many individuals who have their names got included in the sex offender registry just because they were caught while engaging in some petty sexual crime. To have the label of ‘sex offender’ affixed to one’s name could expose such individuals to much public criticism and prejudice and could turn their lives to a virtual hell (Logan, 2009, p. 135). It is totally unethical to make an individual bear with a suffering of such nature, just because one got caught committing a petty crime once in a lifetime and is not likely to repeat such an offense again. Besides, a stringent approach towards sex offender registration laws is more likely to negate the objective of giving the petty sex offenders a chance to rehabilitate and correct themselves. Hence, there is a dire need to make the sex offender registration laws more humane and pragmatic. Making the sex offender registration laws more humane, pragmatic and concise will also save the law and order machinery from the unnecessary wastage of resources and a needless duplication of effort. The law and order personnel ascribe to the sex offender registry while investigating sexual offenses and crimes. The very fact that the sex offender registry contains the names of chronic criminals along with the names of petty or one time offenders, leads to much wastage of effort in investigating those criminals who are least likely to engage in crime again. In contrast, if the sex offender registration laws are made more practical, so that the sex offender registry contains the names of only serious offenders, this will save the law and order personnel of much wastage of efforts and resources and will make the law and order machinery more effective and result oriented (Vila & Morris, 2004, p. 141). It is a fact that when a logical plea is made for the humanization of the sex offender registration laws, the people who tend to be of conservative inclinations or are quiet passionate about booking sex offenders may come out with multiple disadvantages associated with such a lenient approach, and certainly many of such disadvantages tend to be valid. For instance the rational to cut short and edit the list of sex offenders to delete the name of such offenders who are practically harmless and are not likely to engage in a serious sex offense in the future may make some people say that if a person has the propensity to engage in a crime, it is very likely that such a person my indulge in a serious crime in the future (Williams-Taylor, 2012, p. 51). It is a psychological fact that the criminals who graduate to serious offenses in the future are likely to evince a marked propensity for engaging in crime in the nascent stage. Hence, registering the details of such individuals in the initial stages may help the society check them from engaging in a serious crime in the future. However, this disadvantage gets minimized before the assertion that the society cannot shatter the life of a person just because one evinced a propensity to engage in a certain kind of behavior. Nobody could deny the fact that almost all individuals do evince some type of sexual deviance at some time or other in their life. Yet, a majority of them do not get caught and are hence saved from the atrocity of being labeled as a sex offender for the rest of their life. Thereby, it is quiet logical to plea that the individuals who get caught engaging in petty sexual behavior or mild sexual obscenity should be saved the ordeal of being included in the sex offender registry, thereby giving them a chance to lead a relatively normal and regular life. The request for making the sex offender registration laws more rational and pragmatic make also make some people say that such an approach will make most of the sex offenders escape the clutches of law as it is very difficult to adjudge as to which sexual offense is petty and which sexual offense tends to be serious and grave (Marshall, 2006, p. 364). The sexual offense that may seem petty to one person may seem grave and serious to some other person. However, such logic is not valid as almost everybody has the capacity to differentiate as to what stands to be petty and what stands to be abominable. This is a topic of debate and thereby the lawmakers must debate this issue so as to decide on some rational classification procedure for deciding upon the gravity of a specific sexual offense. This will not only make the sex offender registries more compact, effective and trustworthy, but will also save the law and order machinery from wasting immense time and effort in chasing people who are otherwise normal and got caught while engaging in some sort of petty sexual obscenity. Simply speaking, compiling a long list of sex offenders who engaged in varying degrees of sexual offenses is not a practical approach towards protecting the common people from sex offenses. There is no dearth of individuals who ended up getting their name in the sex offender registry by indulging in some momentary public indecency or a onetime recklessness. Thereby, including the names of such people in the sex offender registry is essentially punitive and utterly biased and prejudicial. The need of the hour is that the sex offender registration laws should be so changed that they focus on the chronic sex offenders, while giving the individuals who are repentant, a chance to enter the social mainstream. References Etzioni, A. (2006). The Limits of Privacy. New York: Basic Books. Hodgson, J.F., & Kelley, D.S. (2002). Sexual Violence: Policies, Practices and Challenges in the United States and Canada. Westport, CT: Praeger. Logan, W.A. (2009). Knowledge as Power: Criminal Registration and Community Notification Laws in America. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Marshall, W.L. (2006). The Juvenile Sex Offender. New York: Guilford Press. Paludi, M.A. (2008). The Psychology of Sexual Victimization. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Sullum, J. (2003, February). Dangerous Assumption: Sex Offender Registration. Reason, 16. Vila, B., & Morris, C. (2004). The Role of Police in American Society. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Williams-Taylor, L. (2012). Increased Surveillance of Sex Offenders. El Paso, TX: LFB Scholarly. Wilson, J.Q., & Petersilia, J. (2011). Crime and Public Policy. New York: Oxford University Press. Yessine, A.K, & Bonta, J. (2006). Tracking High Risk, Violent Offenders: An Examination of the National Flagging System. Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 48(4), 573-579. Read More