Failed policies: US sex offenders registration, public notification, and civil commitment
Elizabeth Letourneau
Sex offender registration and notification are failed policies. My research and that of virtually all others who publish in this space find that sex offender registration and notification laws fail to improve community safety in any way. Instead, these policies make it difficult for ex-offenders to find and maintain housing, employment, and pro-social positive relationships – the three keys to successful community re-entry following prison. These barriers may increase the likelihood that registrants will commit new crimes in service of meeting basic needs. Registration and notification policies fail in part because they are based on misunderstandings about sex crimes, including that people with sex crime convictions present a high and homogenous risk of sexual recidivism on an immutable trajectory towards more and more severe offending that is undeterred by time free of offending or by age of the individual. The published literature on adult-focused registration and notification most often documents no imipact of these policies on sexual recidivism. The published literature on youth-focused registration and notification without exception fails to find any public safety effect and instead finds severe harms to the children subjected to these policies. Ancillary studies indicate that these policies exert unintended consequences that put the public at greater risk, such as more sex offenses being pled down to non-sex offenses to avoid the onerous consequences of the registry, and lower conviction rates for those cases that were not pled down but went forward to trial as sex crime cases. Rather than wasting resources on costly, harmful policies governments could instead implement evidence-based interventions known to decrease the risk of violent recidivism and interventions known to prevent initial offenses from happening in the first place.
Elizabeth J. Letourneau, PhD is the endowed Moore Family Professor with Tenure in the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where she established MOORE, a center focused on child sexual abuse prevention. Her disciplinary training is in clinical psychology, and she has led a program of research, policy, and practice efforts focused on the prevention of child sexual abuse for 37 years. This work has informed more than 150 publications, appeared in dozens of media outlets including TEDMED and The New York Times Magazine, and attracted more than $30 million in federal, foundation, and philanthropic funding. She currently advises or has previously advised the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, European Commission, Google, Meta, National Academy of Sciences, World Bank and International Finance Corporation, among other governments, corporations, and civil society organizations. Her research has influenced state and federal laws and been cited in five U.S. state supreme court cases and the U.S. Revised Model Penal Code. Her policy and advocacy efforts were instrumental in achieving annual federal funding to the CDC in support of child sexual abuse prevention research; to date, US$13.5 million has been appropriated to the CDC in support of nine outcome evaluations of child sexual abuse prevention programs across the country. She is past president of ATSA and a recipient of the ATSA Significant Lifetime Achievement Award.