Does isolating sex offenders really work? Some experts say no
The arguments from experts who contend that residency restrictions such as those sought by Dawn Knull don’t work focus on concerns that the restrictions isolate sex offenders and make it more difficult for them to be rehabilitated.
“It is a bad idea from the perspective of public safety,” said Mary Catherine Roper, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, which brought the case on behalf of sex offenders that led to the court striking down the Allegheny County ordinance.
Many experts have come out in recent years to say the restrictions don’t work, Roper said.
“You are driving (sex offenders) underground and making their rehabilitation impossible. Child safety and child protection experts oppose these laws,” she said.
“The key is to make sure (sex offenders) can have a stable life with connections to the community. You make that connection impossible, you make normal life impossible, and that is what drives people to reoffend.”
Yet the number of states with laws allowing for residency restrictions of convicted sex offenders is growing. There were 21 states in 2006, according to research cited by Knull. But there were at least 26 as of a 2013 database provided to the Press & Journal by the National Council of State Legislatures.
So why is interest in these residency restrictions continuing to grow, despite the counter-arguments of reformers and successful court challenges to laws such as the one in Pennsylvania in 2011?
According to one expert, the reason these laws continue to expand “is no mystery — politics.”J.J. Prescott, a University of Michigan law professor who has studied the impact of laws pertaining to convicted sex offenders after being released from prison, writes in a 2016 analysis in the Connecticut Law Review.
“The number of sex offenders who are subject to these laws continues to grow, so does the number of friends and family members of sex offenders who are also negatively affected by these laws,” Prescott writes. “But sex offenders ‘typically arouse contemptuous anger and disgust.’ By and large the public has little sympathy for convicted sex offenders.”
“Put simply, (sex offender post-release) laws sound like good ideas, and good ideas can be so persuasive on their own terms that actual evidence supporting them is unnecessary.”
Residency restrictions such as those struck down in the Allegheny County ordinance potentially “cut off” offenders from the support systems and treatment resources within the community “that they (offenders) need to keep from reoffending,” said Meghan Dade, executive director of the Pennsylvania Sexual Offenders Assessment Board.
“It’s very difficult for the (state board of probation and parole) to restrict people based upon proximity to a school or a playground, etc., because the majority of residences may be around a playground or park especially in a city,” said Maria Finn, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole. “The parolee wouldn’t be able to live at all in any city — any open lot could be considered a playground if children are using it as a playground.”
There are some…a few…who would like us to think that once a sex offender, always a sex offender. That is nothing more than a ‘bold faced lie’. Where do they get this ‘garbage’ in their thought process…certainly not from facts or the results of studies on the subject? It’s time for these lies to be put to rest. Recidivism is the lowest among these offenders. These are some of the tactics that Hitler used to ‘remove’ his rivals. Has our society gone totally madd?