A New Perspective on Sex (Offenders)

One of my more ongoing projects over the course of this year is one that I stumbled upon in November, and have been sort of working on here and there for the last 6 months. Over the last month or two it's gotten more attention in my office, and we've got a few people that are actually interested in the issue. Enough that I feel comfortable having a lot of interns working on this project...and I mean a LOT. We've probably already expended 200 hours of volunteer labor on this grand scheme that is evolving as it goes, but maintains the same basic goal: find housing for registered sex offenders.

I realize that many people have a hard time feeling sympathy for registered sex offenders. That's part of the reason why they need so much help. It's so easy, politically, to earn points by throwing the book at them. Not only is it a minority that everyone loves to hate, but they're pretty much exclusively convicted felons, meaning you don't even have to worry about losing their votes! Add to that the fact that the vast majority of convicted sex offenders (at least in New Orleans) are indigent African-Americans, and you're got guaranteed results from increasing punitive regulation on them. Here's the thing about sex offender registration: it's existence alone proves that the system is broken. Let's break that down for a minute.

You're arrested for a crime, convicted, and sentenced. What does that mean? It means the police think you did something wrong, and they along with the DA's convince a judge or jury that you did it, and therefore you must be punished (unless they farm a plea out of you, but that's a different story). Sentencing is intended to serve a few purposes: punish the offender, deter future offenses by the offender and others, and keep the good, law-abiding citizens safe from the criminal while (s)he is being rehabilitated. Go to jail, do your time, pay your fees, do your community service, finish the restitution, and then go about your way. That's how it's supposed to work, right? But with "sex offenders," you serve your time and then get out only to be monitored for the next 15 years, 25 years, or the rest of your life. That means you register your name, picture, and charge in public domain; circulate it to every neighborhood you ever move to (and pay $600-$700 each time for the privilege of doing so); report to probation/parole; and conform to a whole host of crazy regulations, including random drug tests and searches for contraband (which includes any materials with sexual encounters, human or animal). Technically, I imagine many rated-R movies and more than half National Geographic publications meet this broad classification.

What is the purpose? To punish them even more? For all other charges, a probationary period is used in lieu of serving the full sentence; for "sex offenders," it's in addition to the full sentence. Shouldn't sex offender registration be sort of like a specialized probation, where you serve part of your time in the community, but with added restrictions? Also, the public record of all the information would be a special kind of public shaming that even the US wouldn't condone for sheer punitive purposes. People here still sort of believe in 8th amendment rights.

It turns out that the most logical explanation for the requirement, and the one that most people will give you (as a valid justification for the rule), is that people need to know where these dangerous people are so that they can be safe. There are maps, public databases, neighborhood watch groups. There are fliers, newspaper ads, and bulletins every time a new one moves into a neighborhood. Many of them have a special condition saying that they can't live within 1000 feet of a school, church, playground, daycare, or "place where children generally congregate." Basically, it’s clear that the people who made the law think that children are unsafe when within three football fields of such a person. If these people are so dangerous that we need to know where they live and keep them physically separate from our children, why are they being released? I'm not trying to argue that everyone convicted of a sex offense should die in Angola (the largest state penitentiary in Louisiana, and one that houses only life-sentence or death-sentence inmates). I think that this is a clear reflection of the fact that everyone admits jail doesn't work. It doesn’t rehabilitate or deter future offense, because if it did, we wouldn’t have to worry about these people when they got out.

I don’t have all the answers. I might not have any of the answers. But I know where to start, and where you start is to stop ostracizing people and then wondering why they haven’t been properly socialized. And no, socialization isn’t always effective, nor is it always good. But when it comes to deviant behavior, it seems pretty clear that taking a bunch of people with closer ties to the underground economy than the formal one, and forcing them out to the fringes of society, is not going to encourage civic engagement and participation. And that doesn’t just apply to sex offenders—that’s just what’s on my mind right now.