MODULE 1: SEX OFFENSES, OFFENDERS AND VICTIMS
Sex Offender Legislation
We will begin the presentation with a focus on the effectiveness of sex offender legislation using
information from Raguso-Salerno and Zgoba's article titled, "Taking stock of 20 years of sex offender
lots and research-- an examination of whether sex offender legislation has helped or hindered our
efforts."
The 20 years between 1992 2010 have been particularly important for sex offender legislation.
During this period, both state and federal-level legislation was implemented to specifically address
and attempt to reduce sex offender crimes. This legislation can generally be grouped into four
common themes, including sexual offender registration notification, civil commitment, residence
restrictions, and risk assessment.
Having a basic understanding of these four terms is essential when looking at sex offender
legislation. First, we'll focus on registration and notification. Registration refers to the statutory
requirement that the personal information of released sex offenders be provided to law
enforcement, whereas notification refers to the same information being provided to the public.
Civil commitment applies to sexual offenders deemed too dangerous and mentally divergent to be
released following incarceration. Civil commitment is currently used in 20 states, as well as
federally. And infinite detainment and treatment until full rehabilitation are seen as its main goals.
Laws centered around residence restrictions typically prohibit registered sex offender from within
1,000 to 2,500 feet of places where children gather, including, but not limited to, schools, parks, and
daycare facilities.
The final component of sex offender legislation is risk designation. This can be seen by the
standardization of the registration notification requirement through a tier-based system put into
effect by the sex offender registration and notification act. According to this policy, the length of
each offender's registration would be determined by assigned tier of tier 1, 2, or 3, or low to high,
based on the severity of the crime that they committed.
So in order to test the effectiveness of these four common themes of sex offender legislation, in this
article, a sample of 1,129 adult male sexual offenders released from the New Jersey Department of
Corrections between 1990 and 2010 was selected. A New Jersey State Police computerized criminal
history and the national crime information center's interstate unit provided the criminal history data
for each of the sex offenders in the study.
This research focus on four objectives, each one testing the effectiveness of the themes already
mentioned. Objective one use retrospective data analysis to determine the hypothetical potential
that registration and notification laws would likely have had in preventing the offenders most recent
sex offenses. For the entire sample of the 1,129 men, only 210, or 18.6%, had prior sexual offenses.
11.4% had a prior sexual conviction. And 6% had prior incarceration.
Or in other words, this means that under Megan's law, only 11.4% of the sample would have ever
been mandated to register. And 6% would've qualified for notification. Interestingly, the data also
show that for the 90 cases where information was available, the majority of the offenders knew
their victims.
The second objective observed the effectiveness of civil commitment statutes. More specifically, the
authors were interested in how many convictions could have been prevented if the offenders in the
sample were detained for offenses committed prior to the index offense and would they have
qualified for civil commitment.
Of the 550 cases providing demographic information, only 126 showed a mental illness at the time
of the offense, with only 42 of these vendors having a prior sexual offenses, 30 prior convictions,
and 17 prior incarceration. When looking at the risk designation of the sample, only 32 of the
offenders would have fell into a tier 3 category. If you refer back to the definition of civil
commitment, you can see that few offenders would have been subjected to civil commitment prior
to their current indexed sex offense.
Objective three reviews the success of residence restrictions in curbing sexual victimization for
children. To accomplish this, Newark, sample of 74, and Patterson, sample of 52, two areas of New
Jersey's highest concentration of sex offenders, and representing approximately 20% of the sample,
were selected.
In both of these locations, the majority of the sex offenders lived within 1,500 feet of areas where
children congregate. Specifically, 90.5% for Newark, and 80.46% in Patterson. It is important to
notice that the effectiveness of residence restriction laws could severely be compromised by 2/3 of
offenders who are related or acquaintances with their victims.
The final objective of this study sought to determine how the new sex offender registration and
notification mandated risk tiers would likely change the current risk destinations already in place by
states. New Jersey's current guidelines were compared to SORNA to determine the possible risk
designation changes possibly brought by this legislation.
As we can see, almost half of the offenders were categorized at tier 1-- 47.1%. Tier 2 encompassed
24% of the offenders. And tier 3, only 2.9%. We can then say that, of this sample, 74.2% of the
offenders are registered. And 27.1% are eligible for notification. But under SORNA legislation, all of
the offenders would be subjected to registration and notification.
Overall, the findings of this research show the limited effect of registration notification on sexual
victimization. Also, we can observe that few sexual offenses would have been prevented if civil
commitment procedures had been applied to this sample. With regard to residence restrictions, it is
suggested that a vast majority of sex offenders would be forced to live outside of the densely
populated city limits if these impractical laws were adopted.
With risk designation, we can expect a large influx onto the state registry would occur with the
implementation of SORNA, as well as an increase in public notification rates. Overall, combined with
previous studies, all of these factors reviewed in this study suggested that sexual offender laws are
often not applied in the proper situations and offer minimal deterrence for sexual victimization.