Term Paper: Concerns with Sex Offender Registration and Community Notification

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This term paper discusses Implementation and Unintended Concerns with Sex Offender Registration and Community Notification. From the public policy perspective, the most disturbing provision in Megan’s Law and its variants is the involuntary civil commitment of sex offenders to psychiatric hospitals after they have served their prison terms.

From the public policy perspective, the most disturbing provision in Megan’s Law and its variants is the involuntary civil commitment of sex offenders to psychiatric hospitals after they have served their prison terms. Although Constitutional guarantees against involuntary post conviction confinement continue to be argued, there is no Constitutional right to a plea-bargain-that is to say, an accused offender need not be offered a discount on a legislatively authorization sanction, whether to save the state the expense of a trial or for any other reason. there are considerable possible human and financial costs associated with trying to make individualized calculation, including the potential for victims of sex offenses to testify about those crimes.

Not all offenders convicted of crimes that touch sexual behavior are compulsory to register, and community notification is not required for all such offenses. As an alternative, most states have devised a system that weighs the seriousness of the offense of conviction and the offender’s prior record.

The scientific community has known for at least as many decades that it is only a minority of victims who offend, sexually or otherwise, in adulthood. Fedoroff and Pinkus (1996) and particularly Cathy Widom and her colleagues (Widom, 1995) have established, through the same sort of prospective research as that which informs the Sample and Bray investigation, that adults who had been victimized in childhood, either sexually or physically, or who had been the victims of disregard, in fact offend at a slightly lower rate than do otherwise similar adults with no documented history of victimization. In other words, the majority of victims, whether through formal professional treatment or through other “healing experiences,” whether those be the support of parents, clergy, or life partners, overcome the traumatically negative effects of childhood victimization, at least as those effects can be gauged by succeeding criminal offending.

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