A child is more likely to end up on the sex offender registry than to be molested by someone on it.

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Today, your child is more likely to end up on the sex offender registry than to be molested by someone on it.

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There Are Too Many Kids on the Sex Offender Registry

Lenore Skenazy from the May 2018 issue

Both the boys admit they did it. Horsing around, two New Jersey 14-year-olds pulled down their pants and sat on the faces of two 12-year-old boys. As one of them later explained, "I thought it was funny and I was trying to get my friends to laugh."

For that act, he and his buddy are on the sex offender registry for life. This was, after all, "sexual contact done for sexual gratification or to degrade or humiliate the victim." The boys lost an appeal in 2011, with a three-judge panel writing that "although we are not unsympathetic to the arguments criticizing the application of the lifelong registration requirements…we are bound to uphold such application because that outcome is mandated by the Legislature."

This is what our sex offender laws have done: Today, your child is more likely to end up on the registry than to be molested by someone on it. ... The rationale for the list is one we can all appreciate: preventing sexual assault. The reality, however, is that this supposed crime-fighting tool is not doing the job.

"Only a tiny fraction of sex crimes against children are committed by people who are on the registry," says George Mason University sociologist Roger Lancaster, author of 2011's Sex Panic and the Punitive State. At this point, 40–50 studies have come to the same conclusion, he says: About 5 percent of people on the list go on to commit another crime, a far lower recidivism rate than almost any other class of criminals, including drug dealers, arsonists, and muggers.

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

1. This is what sometimes happens with laws that include...

...mandatory sentences and reactions. I have no idea why a juvenile prank went ended this way. I've seen judges and juries get things wrong but I still prefer trusting their judgement.