The Impact of Megan's Law

These studies provide insight into how to make statutory mandates better for monitoring sex offenders. Predictors of risk can always be updated and mad...

Sex offenders have been a serious problem for our legal system at all levels, not to mention those who have been their victims. There are 43,000 inmates in prison for sexual offenses while each year in this country over 510,000 children are sexually assaulted(Oakes 99). The latter statistic, in its context, does not convey the severity of the situation. Each year 510,000 children have their childhood's destroyed, possibly on more than one occasion, and are faced with dealing with the assault for the rest of their lives. Sadly, many of those assaults are perpetrated by people who have already been through the correctional system only to victimize again. Sex offenders, as a class of criminals, are nine times more likely to repeat their crimes(Oakes 99). This presents a

Sex crimes are one of the most serious problems in the United States today. The legal system is casual when it comes to punishing sex criminals with insufficiently short prison sentences that are further reduced by the option of parole. While sexual offenders comprise a sizable portion of U.S. prison inmates, they evoke an even greater portion of public concern, (Boccaccini, Murrie, Caperton, & Hawes, 2009). Most sex offenders are released back into society after serving as little as one- fourth of their prison sentence. Recidivism is extremely high among sexual predators; 75% are convicted more than once for sexually abusing young people, (Boccaccini, Murrie, Caperton, & Hawes, 2009).

In the last ten years, state and local governments have begun to legislate policy changes on the issue of sexual predators and most are still deciding how to make it work within their own locality. Once sexual predators have served their time in prison, there remains the daunting question of will they relapse back to their former state, or even a more fearful question of have they even been cured of this illness? According to John Leo of the US News and World Report, “The state has an obligation to defend the public from dangerous criminals. Is it really helpless to act if a violent inmate with a long record says he plans to mutilate and kill children when released? To say authorities can’t do anything but wait for a child to be murdered is a confession of moral bankruptcy....

When walking around your neighborhood, town, local mall, or other places you frequent, are you constantly thinking about if or when you may encounter a registered sex offender? For most people, that is not the first thing that is on their mind. In reality you probably encounter many in your life without even knowing it. The Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act was initially implemented to give people the ability to know who is living around them, what they were charged with, and potentially give the community a sense of security. While most people in the community think this act is doing them a great service, what they typically do not know is the many loopholes involved in this act, and how it negatively impacts many people, such

Perception is not reality. The common assumption that the court system often treats female sex offenders differently than male sex offenders, the punishments of female sex offenders are more lenient than men who commit the same types of crimes, and the differences between male and female victims are all perception and not reality. Objective considerations to additional factors make the perceptions baseless. These additional factors solidify the factual differences between male and female sex offenders.

Sexual offenders have been a problem that has faced the criminal justice system for a long time. Sexual offenders come in all different types. Most sexual offenders look like anyone else walking down the street. It is very hard to pick out a sexual offender from a crowd of people unless one knows that person or has seen their case broadcasted on the local news. Sexual offenders can have different variations of the sexual offense they have been convicted on. Some sexual offenders are sentenced for statutory rape, others for pedophilic offenses and others for violent sexual assaults. Each one of these offenses has a completely different thought process and level of violence associated with it. All of these offenses devastate the victim and has long lasting effects on the victim’s life. Also, sexual offenders are more likely to commit another offense. Usually with child molesters the child they were prosecuted for molesting is not typically their first victim. Most of the time the compulsion to reoffend is too hard for the offenders to resist. The correctional system, which is a part of the criminal justice system, needs to keep all of this in mind when paroling sexual offenders back into the community. The community deserves to be protected at all costs from these offenders.

In the event that a prisoner (particularly a sex offender) does complete rehabilitation, he carries with him a stigma upon reentering society. People often fear living near a prior drug addict or convicted murderer and the sensational media hype surrounding released felons can ruin a newly released convict’s life before it beings. What with resident notifications, media scare tactics and general concern for safety, a sex offender’s ability to readapt into society is severely hindered (554). This warrants life-skills rehabilitation applied to him useless, as he will be unable to even attempt to make the right decision regarding further crime opportunities.

Mills, Sonia Marie Perry. Psychosocial Antecedents of Sex Offender Criminality and Violence. Louisville: University of Louisville Libraries, 2004. Print.

Yates, P. M. (2005). Pathways to treatment of sexual offenders: Rethinking intervention. Forum on Corrections Research, 17, 1-9.