Under duress, Georgia scales back sex offender law

Long-time blog subscribers may recall the case of Janet Allison, who became a homeless, jobless leper because she allowed her pregnant daughter's boyfriend to move into the family home. The state of Georgia has now scaled back that residency restriction law in an effort to prevent the courts from overturning it altogether.

Georgia had lost a series of legal challenges brought by human rights activists over the nation’s most draconian sex offender law. Attorney Sarah Geraghty of the Southern Center for Human Rights, which has been on the forefront of efforts to stem the tide of "fear-based" laws, gave a keynote speech about the law's inhumanity at the annual meeting of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers back in 2008.

About 13,000 -- or 70 percent -- of the men and women on Georgia’s sex offender registry will now be able to "live and work wherever they want," according to a report by Greg Bluestein of the Associated Press in yesterday's Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Residency restrictions will still apply to about 5,000 sex offenders who committed their offenses after 2003, but they will vary in scope. Among the changes, elderly and disabled offenders may also be exempted from residency requirements.

Iowa has also scaled back some of its restrictions under pressure from courageous prosecutors in that Midwestern state. As I blogged about back in 2007, Iowa prosecutors lobbied for repeal of residency restrictions because of their negative unintended consequences of encouraging sex offenders to disappear, making them more dangerous. "Most legislators know in their hearts that the law is no good and a waste of time, but they’re afraid of the politics of it," a spokesman for the Iowa prosecutors' association said at the time.

Related blog posts:

• Georgia sex offender law unconstitutional (Oct 28, 2008)
• Georgia court overturns sex offender law (Nov 22, 2007)
• Georgia high court backtracks on ruling overturning residency restrictions (Dec 17, 2007)
• Sex Offender Laws Gone Amok (April 10, 2007)

You might also like:

• Sentencing Law and Policy: California struggling with new challenges posed by GPS technocorrections

Punishment for Homelessness: Life in Prison

I’ve posted several times now about the legal conundrums faced by convicted sex offenders. In this guest column, an attorney highlights the case of Larry Moore Jr. of Georgia, facing life in prison because he could not provide the state with an address.

Guest commentary by Ezekiel Edwards

Should anyone be sentenced to the rest of their lives in prison because they are homeless?

Some people think so.

At least when it comes to the most vilified people in our society -- sex offenders. Sex offenders nationwide are carefully monitored, the public is privy to where they live, and, like many people with criminal records, they are barred from a bevy of employment and housing options.

To be sure, sex offenses should be dealt with seriously, and certain sex offenders require close surveillance. However, some states' concerns over sex offenders has transformed into outright and unacceptable animus, this time in the form of strict new sex offender registry laws.

Take Georgia, for instance, and the case of Larry Moore, Jr., in Augusta. Under state law, Mr. Moore, a sex offender, is prohibited from living within 1,000 feet of a church, school, school bus stop, day care center, church, and swimming pool. That does not leave a lot of places for Mr. Moore to reside. The options are even more limited when considering that almost every shelter in the entire state refuses to accept sex offenders.

Georgia also requires sex offenders to register an address. But given how few places the law allows sex offenders to live, and given that Georgia, like most states, invests far too little resources in helping people released from prison find housing and work, some sex offenders, like some prisoners generally, cannot find housing after prison, or lose their housing, and thus cannot report a legal address.

If it happens once, the result might be some jail time, or additional probation. But if it happens a second time, even if the underlying cause is homelessness, the punishment is life in prison. In other words, the penalty is harsher than if the offender had committed another sex offense.

Just ask Mr. Moore. In 2005, he failed to register as required, spent time in jail awaiting the disposition of his case, and eventually pled guilty. He was released in March 2006, and was left with two places to live that met the law's requirements, both hotels. He registered twice upon his release, registered again in April and June, twice again in July, when the new law took effect. But his job at a fast food restaurant did not pay enough to cover the cost of the hotel, and he was forced to move out.

Homeless, he could not provide the state with an address. Having been convicted of his second violation, Mr. Moore now faces mandatory life in prison under Georgia's law. A lawsuit has been brought by the Southern Center for Human Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union on his behalf.

Some think putting Mr. Moore in jail for the rest of his life is warranted, simply because he is a sex offender. Others argue that it is misleading to say that his life sentence stems from being homeless, as it ignores his original conviction for a sex offense. But no one is ignoring that Mr. Moore is a sex offender -- that is why he is subject to Georgia's cruel and unusual punishment in the first place. But his latest sentence is not for the sex offense, it is for failing to register an address as a sex offender.

Some suggest that sex offenders like Mr. Moore try to use homelessness disingenuously as a defense at trial. First, there are tens of thousands of homeless people in the United States, and included are some sex offenders. Second, under Georgia law, raising the defense of homelessness, even for those who are actually homeless, will always prove futile, as it was for Mr. Moore.

Some have suggested that Mr. Moore should have just found some rural place in Georgia to live. But this ignores the financial and social difficulties involved in moving, particularly for someone who is destitute, and also essentially condones urban cleansing of sex offenders.

Such drastic measures only further undermine sex offenders’ limited residential and employment stability, thereby only increasing the risk of recidivism. Yet unrealistic ostracism is exactly what Georgia and some like-minded folk desire: forcing anyone convicted of a sexual offense to (1) leave the state; (2) languish in prison; or, like in other states, (3) be relegated to the outskirts or underbellies of society. Florida, for instance, authorized five offenders to live under a bridge in Miami after they were unable to find suitable housing that they could afford. In Iowa, offenders have tried complying with the registry law by offering addresses such as "rest area mile marker 149" or "RV in old Kmart parking lot."

It is unconscionable to throw people in jail for the rest of their lives for being homeless and unable to secure an address for sex offender registry purposes. Herding sex offenders under bridges, or into rest areas and parking lots, thereby keeping them outside of the community and yet easily monitored (similar to, say, livestock), is degrading and inhumane.

Making simple residency insurmountable or impractical is not the answer to reducing sexual offenses. Instead, states should implement longer-term, more intelligent, and more humane strategies by paving clear paths to employment, self-sufficiency, and stability and making treatment programs widely available while continuing careful monitoring. If monitoring is difficult because someone is homeless, then the burden should be on the state to provide housing, or to relax the residency restrictions.

This column was originally posted August 14, 2007 at the blog of Drum Major Institute for Public Policy. Reposted with written permission of the author.

Ezekiel R. Edwards is a Criminal Justice Fellow at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy and a Staff Attorney and Mayer Brown Eyewitness Fellow at The Innocence Project in New York.

Georgia court overturns sex offender law

I haven't found time yet to read or analyze yesterday's ruling on sex offender laws, but this overturning of residency restrictions looked important enough to immediately pass along to my readers. The full opinion in Mann vs. the Georgia Department of Corrections is here; Greg Bluestein of the Associated Press reports on it as follows:

ATLANTA (AP) - Georgia's top court overturned a state law Wednesday that banned registered sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of schools, churches and other areas where children congregate.

"It is apparent that there is no place in Georgia where a registered sex offender can live without being continually at risk of being rejected,'' read the opinion, written by presiding Justice Carol Hunstein.

The law had been targeted by civil rights groups who argued it would render vast residential areas off-limits to Georgia's roughly 11,000 registered sex offenders and could backfire by encouraging offenders to stop reporting their whereabouts to authorities.

State lawmakers adopted the law in 2006, calling it crucial to protecting the state's most vulnerable population: children.

While many states and municipalities bar sex offenders from living near schools, Georgia's law, which took effect last year, prohibited them from living, working or loitering within 1,000 feet of just about anywhere children gather - schools, churches, parks, gyms, swimming pools or one of the state's 150,000 school bus stops.

It also led to challenges from groups like the Southern Center for Human Rights, which argued that it would force some offenders to live in their cars or set up tents or trailers in the woods, and undermine other efforts to keep track of offenders.

The Georgia Supreme Court ruling said even sex offenders who comply with the law "face the possibility of being repeatedly uprooted and forced to abandon homes."

It also said the statute looms over every location that a sex offender chooses to call home and notes while the case in question particularly involves a day care center, "next time it could be a playground, a school bus stop, a skating rink or a church.'"

Georgia high court backtracks on ruling overturning sex offender residency restrictions

As you may recall from my previous blog posts, last month the Georgia Supreme Court overturned that state's residency restrictions against sex offenders. The law bans registered sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of schools, churches and other areas where children congregate.

But in a press release issued last week, the high court announced a "substitute opinion" drastically limiting the scope of the ruling. The new language limits the ruling to homeowners only, and only to the extent that residency restrictions might cause a "taking of [their] property without just and adequate compensation."

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has the story here. The original decision in Mann v. the Georgia Department of Corrections is here.

Hat tip to How Appealing.

Sex Offender Laws Gone Amok

Wendy Whitaker, 26, had consensual oral sex with another high school sophomore when she was 17 years old. Unfortunately, the boy was two years younger. Ms. Whitaker was arrested and pleaded guilty to a “sodomy” charge. She was sentenced to probation but was required to register as a sex offender. When housing residency restrictions were enacted in Georgia in 2003, she was forced out of the home she owned because it was within 1,000 feet of a church.

If you think that punishment is extreme, consider the case of another Georgia woman, Janet Allison. The 45-year-old mother of five was forced to move from her four-bedroom house into a two-bedroom mobile home in the middle of nowhere because her former home was within a quarter-mile of a church. Yet the registered sex offender had committed no hands-on crime.

Ms. Allison was convicted of being a party to child molestation because she allowed the 17-year-old boyfriend of her 15-year-old daughter to move into the family home. Her daughter was pregnant by the boyfriend at the time.

After Ms. Allison was arrested, three of her children were removed from her custody and put into foster care, and she is forbidden from having any contact with one daughter and grandson. "I didn't touch anyone," she was quoted in a newspaper as saying. "I just thought I was protecting my daughter."

These women are plaintiffs in a legal challenge to Georgia’s registry being mounted by the ACLU and the Southern Center for Human Rights. The lawsuit argues that there is no individualized justice when all sex offenders are treated the same, regardless of whether they are violent predators or teenagers involved in consensual acts. It also asserts that forcing sex offenders out of their homes and off their jobs destroys families and creates social instability that in the long run will harm the public.

Click on the headline, above, to read more and to view a PBS video report on the Georgia law.

California Supreme Court to hear Jessica's Law challenge

In the wake of recent court rulings overturning residency restrictions for sex offenders in Georgia and in one Florida city, the California Supreme Court on Wednesday agreed to review the contentious topic as well.

I've blogged previously about this case, in which four registered sex offenders argue that it is irrational and illegal to apply residency restrictions to ex-convicts like themselves, whose sex crimes did not involve children. Three were convicted of rape and the fourth was convicted of indecent exposure.

Jessica's Law makes most urban areas off limits to sex offenders paroled from prison since the law's enactment on Nov. 7, 2006. Opponents say this is forcing ex-offenders to abandon their homes and families, and to choose between prison and homelessness.

In response to the law, about half of those covered by it have declared themselves transients, claiming either that they are homeless or that they change residences frequently. Although self-identified transients must report to their parole officers each day, it becomes harder to monitor them and to provide them with necessary treatment.

"We could potentially be making the world more dangerous rather than less dangerous," said Gerry Blasingame, a therapist and former chair of the California Coalition on Sexual Offending.

Because of the potential danger in encouraging sex offenders to disappear, prosecutors in Iowa have been lobbying for the repeal of that state's similar residency restrictions law. "Most legislators know in their hearts that the law is no good and a waste of time, but they’re afraid of the politics of it," said a spokesman for the Iowa prosecutors' association.

"It defies common sense to argue that public safety is somehow served by forcing sex offender registrants into homelessness - to sleep in cars, in parks, near schools and on the streets - disconnected from their support networks," said Ernest Galvan, a lawyer for the four men contesting the California law, in recently filed court papers.

The San Francisco Chronicle has more coverage of the case (titled E.J. on Habeas Corpus, S156933) here. More on the problem of sex offenders declaring transiency is here. The Sentencing Law & Policy blog has additional coverage and links here.

News headlines from around the U.S.

The major news outlets are running all kinds of stories relevant to forensic psychology. Here is a sampling.

CSI counterpoint

The fallability of forensic sciences is gaining attention lately. Roger Koppl, director of the Institute for Forensic Science Administration, and Dan Krane, a biological sciences prof at Wright State, co-authored this informative op-ed piece in the Newark (NJ) Star-Ledger:

Defendants should have right to forensic expertise

When patients kill

It is always bad news when someone is certified ready for release from a psychiatric hospital and then commits a violent offense. Take William Bruce: Two months after the 24-year-old schizophrenic was released from a hospital in Maine, he hatcheted his mother to death. Here, the Wall Street Journal finds fault with patients rights' advocates who lobbied for Bruce's release:

A Death in the Family: Aided by advocates for the mentally ill, William Bruce left the hospital -- only to kill his mother

Christian Science Monitor slams sex offender laws

As public awareness mounts regarding restrictive residency laws targeting sex offenders, the Christian Science Monitor joins the fray with this hard-hitting editorial by C. Alexander Evans:

Protecting our kids – or jeopardizing everyone's freedom? Residency laws for child sex offenders flout the Constitution

MoJo's "Slammed: The coming prison meltdown"

And if you've got time for still more reading, a highly recommend the Mother Jones special on incarceration, "SLAMMED." It features at least nine interesting articles, among them:

Hard Time Out: The prison boom comes to the schools

Probation Profiteers: In Georgia's outsourced justice system, a traffic ticket can land you deep in the hole

Why Texas Still Holds 'Em: Forget oil and gold. In the Lone Star state, the boomtown business is locking up immigrants

When Prison Guards Go Soft: Even California's powerful prison guards' union thinks more prisons are a bad idea

Not to mention, a "MoJo Prison Guide" with a glossary of prison slang and answers to such obscure prison trivia as:

• What Do Prisoners Make for Victoria's Secret?
• Which Works Better Behind Bars, Scuba or Buddha?
  

Hat tip: Jane

Epidemic of nomadic sex offenders worsens

New laws not exactly a blueprint for public safety

It's happening all around the country, from Georgia to Florida to Washington. But nowhere is the problem more acute than in California, which has seen an 800 percent increase in the past two years. As Karl Vick of the Washington Post reports:

LOS ANGELES -- Upon release from state custody, Ross Wollschlager began an intensive search for a home, one that abided by the restrictions imposed on convicted sex offenders in California -- and, in various versions, by about 30 other states. Obliged by law to return to Ventura County, the convicted rapist was forbidden to sleep within 2,000 feet of a school or a park.

He ended up in a tent on the dry bed of the Ventura River.

Strict new laws aimed at keeping track of sex offenders after they leave prison appear to be having the opposite effect, encouraging homelessness in a population believed more likely to re-offend if cast into the streets without structure or family support, say prosecutors, police, parole officials and experts on managing sex offenders.

The issue is starkest in California, where the number of sex crime parolees registering as transient has jumped more than 800 percent since Proposition 83 was passed in November 2006. The "Jessica's Law" initiative imposed strict residency rules and called for all offenders to wear Global Positioning System bracelets for the rest of their lives.

Named for a 9-year-old Florida girl raped and murdered by a convicted sex offender, the provision passed by a wide margin that reflected the powerful public emotion that experts and law enforcement officials say in this instance trumped sound policy.

"The public definitely was sold a bill of goods on this one," said Detective Diane Webb, supervisor of the Los Angeles Police Department unit that tracks 5,000 sex offenders in Los Angeles County. "Unfortunately, it bodes well for politicians to support it because the public does have this false sense of security that this is somehow protecting them when it's not."

Locating legal housing for offenders has become so difficult in urban California that when parole officers find an apartment building beyond the exclusion zones, they often pile in as many offenders as the landlord will accept. When neighbors notice, the cluster spurs protests that prompt lawmakers to pass even tighter exclusion zones as Proposition 83 allows.

The informative Post story continues here.

Previous related posts:

• Punishment for homelessness: Life in prison
• Sex offenders must live as trolls
• A bridge as a last resort

Sex offender news roundup

Because my subscriber base is diverse, in my daily scans for blog topics I try to balance multiple areas of forensic practice. But these days, news pertaining to sex offender policy is so pervasive that I must consciously work to keep it from overwhelming the blog.

After all, even those of you who work with sex offenders probably want a diversion sometimes. When you initially trained for your profession, I'll bet you weren't thinking, "This will be so fantastic! I'll get to spend lots of quality time with sex offenders, absorbing all of the intimate details of their warped atrocities against women and children!"

No? I didn't think so.

But, sigh, that's the reality these days. Rare monsters in the United States and elsewhere -- such as John Couey in New Jersey and Earl Shriner in Washington State -- drive social policy. Aggrieved family members fire up a local community, politicians jump on an easy bandwagon, and -- voila -- the rest is history. As New York Times reporter Michael Cieply perceptively noted, in reference to the Roman Polanski case, the landscape has changed dramatically in the last three decades:

Manners, mores and law enforcement have become far less forgiving of sex crimes involving minors in the 31 years since Mr. Polanski ... fled rather than face what was to have been a 48-day sentence after he pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with a minor. But if he is extradited from Switzerland, Mr. Polanski could face a more severe punishment than he did in the 1970s, as a vigorous victims' rights movement, a family-values revival and revelations of child abuse by clergy members have all helped change the moral and legal framework regarding sex with the young.

Of course, we must guard against myopia. It is not just in the sex offender arena that we see zero tolerance policies gone wild. Look what is happening in the schools, for example. A 3rd-grade girl got expelled for a year because her grandmother sent a birthday cake to school for her. The problem wasn't the birthday cake, but the knife dear grandma sent to cut it with.

Anyway, on to this quick (I hope) roundup of sex offender-related developments.

Child victim decries conditions for sex offenders

Consequences of extreme social policies are so at odds with the original intents that even many who lobbied for the laws are having second thoughts. The Palm Beach (Florida) Post ran a remarkable story about a child sexual abuse victim whose victimization led to a legislative crusade against sex offenders. Lauren Book, whose child abuse saga began at age 11 at the hands of a caregiver, runs a nonprofit agency aimed at educating the public about child sexual abuse. Now, she is campaigning against the unintended consequences of the very residency restrictions that she helped inspire. Touring the sex offender encampment under the Julia Tuttle freeway in Florida, which I have previously blogged about, she said she has come to realize "that forcing predators to live in inhumane conditions will not protect children; in fact, she fears it may do the opposite":

"You can't really understand what it's like unless you go there. You can't capture it in words or pictures. Being there, hearing it, seeing it, smelling it - it's all part of understanding the situation…. It's a terrible situation under there, it is awful. I don't think them living under a bridge or absconding keeps children safe. I don't want them so desperate that they go out and find a child.''

The perils of a naked pumpkin

Elsewhere, legislators and judges are taking small steps to limit the consequences to youth of overinclusive sex offender registration requirements.

I mean, how would you feel if your kid was branded for life as a registered sex offender just because he had participated in Boulder, Colorado's popular "Naked Pumpkin Run" or "World Naked Bike Ride"?

To circumvent this scenario, Boulder is drafting a public nudity ordinance that would exclude arrests for nudity-related pranks from the registration laws. Commenting over at Grits for Breakfast, Scott Henson hopes this signals a growing public awareness that sex offender registries are too broad. "But a better fix would be for the legislature to remove indecent exposure and other petty crimes from the registry list. IMO we don't need more laws on this issue so much as better ones."

And in Michigan, a judge just ruled that putting a juvenile on the state's sex offender registry would constitute cruel and unusual punishment, prohibited by the U.S. Constitution.

The case involved "T.D.," a 15-year-old boy who touched the breast of a 15-year-old classmate in school. His name would have appeared on the registry for 25 years, until he was 43 years old. That would be unfair, ruled Judge Darlene A. O'Brien, because T.D.'s offense was "more akin to a juvenile prank than predatory, perverted, criminally deviant sexual conduct likely to be repeated." In her well-reasoned ruling, she too addresses the unintended consequences of the laws:

Requiring this rehabilitated juvenile offender to register for a total of 25 years upon reaching adulthood is likely to become a self-fulfilling prophesy -- if TD cannot get through school or get jobs because of community notification and public shunning, he is likely to become marginalized and, in fact, more likely to commit crimes as a result.

Prosecutors are appealing the decision, so an appellate court will get a chance to clarify whether juveniles must submit to public registration even when their offenses are mild and they present little risk of recidivism.

Challenges mounting on religious front

In at least the second pending case, a convicted sex offender in North Carolina is challenging a law that restricts his ability to attend church services. Police arrested James Nichols after he attended a Sunday service at a church that offers day care. As reported in the New York Times, "many of the three dozen states that establish zones where sex offenders cannot live or visit do not provide exemptions for churches." A similar lawsuit is pending in federal court in Georgia. Also in the South, in the city of Louisville, Kentucky, a Pentecostal church has snubbed its nose at the punitive climate against sex offenders by unapologetically ordaining a convicted sex offender as a pastor.

Voice stress analysis upheld

At the same time that these types of fissures are developing in the larger systems, other agencies are imposing additional restrictions on sex offenders. For example, a federal judge has ruled that sex offenders can be required to submit to computerized voice stress analysis as part of their post-release supervision, just as many are already required to undergo testing with polygraphs and penile plethysmography under the "containment approach" to recidivism.

The federal judge in the Northern District of New York ruled that debates about the scientific reliability of the technique do not "bear much on the therapeutic value of the tool" as a lie-detection incentive.

The attorney for Ethan Gjurovich, who was convicted of child pornography charges, said this is the first case he knows of in which a federal court has endorsed voice stress analysis requirement on a parolee. He likened it to the psychological pressure of a "lie-detecting dog" -- "If you don't tell the truth, he's going to bite you."

Paraphilic coercive disorder proposal critiqued

On a parting note, I encourage you to check out an interesting critique of the Paraphilic Coercive Disorder diagnosis being proposed for the DSM-V, over at the Asexual Explorations blog. The blog -- as its title implies -- is devoted to the emerging issue of asexuality. But its author was so astounded upon learning about some of the wacky diagnoses being proposed for the upcoming Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that felt compelled to detour from his main topic.

. . . And, speaking of pumpkins, be sure to tune in for a repeat of the ever-popular Halloween post,
BEWARE THE HALLOWEEN BOGEYMAN.

Criminalizing our nightmares, destroying civilization

We all know what an unmitigated disaster the Drug Wars have been. Here at Ground Zero (California), prison guards live large while public schools crash and burn. (We used to have among the best schools in the United States; now we are at the bottom.) Membership in the guards' union has soared from 2,600 to 45,000, while correctional salaries rose from $15,000 to -- in some cases -- $100,000 a year or more. (Laura Sullivan at NPR has an informative piece on Folsom Prison as an exemplar of this process. Folsom used to rehabilitate its prisoners; now it's a "merry-go-round" with no escape.)

Have we learned from the failed Drug Wars? Nope. Instead, we are on the cusp of a new and massive criminalization effort, this time targeting the bogeyman sex offender.

So predicts Corey Rayburn Yung, prolific scholar at John Marshall Law School in Chicago, in a new article, "The Emerging Criminal War on Sex Offenders." Yung reviews the history of "criminal wars," mainly the War on Drugs, to identify three essential features:

• Marshaling of resources
• Myth creation
• Exception making

He predicts that the changes being wrought by the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act ("AWA") of 2006 may bring "repercussions as substantial as the drug war has had on American criminal justice and society."

The ratchet effect

By now, we really should know better than to allow this further destruction of our civil society. Even the Economist of London, hardly a bastion of liberal politics, is lambasting the laws. The August 6 issue includes both a leader and a more in-depth article explaining why America’s sex laws are "unjust and ineffective." As the subhead puts it:

"An ever harsher approach is doing more harm than good, but it is being copied around the world"

As with the Drug Wars, the laws are driven by the "ratchet effect":

"Individual American politicians have great latitude to propose new laws. Stricter curbs on paedophiles win votes. And to sound severe, such curbs must be stronger than the laws in place, which in turn were proposed by politicians who wished to appear tough themselves. Few politicians dare to vote against such laws, because if they do, the attack ads practically write themselves.

"In all, 674,000 Americans are on sex-offender registries -- more than the population of Vermont, North Dakota or Wyoming…. [A]t least five states require registration for people who visit prostitutes, 29 require it for consensual sex between young teenagers and 32 require it for indecent exposure. Some prosecutors are now stretching the definition of 'distributing child pornography' to include teens who text half-naked photos of themselves to their friends.

"How dangerous are the people on the registries? A state review of one sample in Georgia found that two-thirds of them posed little risk. For example, Janet Allison was found guilty of being 'party to the crime of child molestation' because she let her 15-year-old daughter have sex with a boyfriend. The young couple later married. But Ms Allison will spend the rest of her life publicly branded as a sex offender."

Yung too discusses some of these unintended consequences, including the harm to innocent parties. Other examples can be found daily in the popular press. For example, today's Raleigh (North Carolina) News and Observer reports on the travesty of convicted sex offenders being denied the right to worship, and one church choosing to move its children's programs off-site to protect a sex offending parishioner.

As I've reported before, the sexual predator hysteria is creating a widespread phobia of men in contact with children. Columnist Jeanne Phillips (Dear Abby), for example, is fueling panic about the dangers of public men's rooms. As San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll sardonically responded:

"When did the idea get out that men's rooms were a secret hotbed of molestation? I mean, there are some men's rooms -- including, apparently, one in the Minneapolis airport -- where consensual homosexual activity between adults has been known to happen. But that's not at all the same thing as child molesting; that's just a form of speed dating. Men's rooms, may I say, are boring. Ain't nothing going on in them. Molestation typically happens in other places, usually in a private home. And statistically it's no more common than it was 30 years ago. As I've said before, if you're looking for the people most likely to molest your child, look at the members of your own family, because that's how it usually happens. People don't want to admit that, so they invent phantom pedophiles in the nation's men's rooms."

But above and beyond all of these unintended consequences, I predict that years from now we will look back and realize not just what we already know -- that we destroyed many lives unnecessarily, bankrupted our schools and other public institutions, and curtailed civil liberties on a massive scale -- but, more fundamentally, we actually created the creature we feared.

Creating the bogeyman: "Mike"

Let's take "Mike." An average, red-blooded 19-year-old American, he dated a cute 16-year-old girl. Like thousands of other young men, he was arrested, and forced to register as a "sex offender" for life. No matter that his behavior was not deviant. Three years is a standard age gap between young men and women for dating in our culture, as it has been forever. I happened to see the obituary of an 89-year-old man who before his demise had celebrated his 70th wedding anniversary. His wife was 86. Do the math. If he had been born 70 years later, he'd be a sex offender for life. Unable to live freely, work, or even attend church, he probably wouldn't have led such a successful life. After all, as social psychologists can tell you, the environment is at least as important to behavior as any psychological characteristics. Probably far more so.

Back to Mike. As I said, there's nothing wrong with Mike. But no matter. Like everyone else, he must undergo mandatory "treatment" for "statutory perpetrators" (yes, that's what treatment providers are calling guys like Mike).

The treatment of choice is cognitive-behavioral therapy. Its mantra, as Dany Lacombe of Simon Fraser University in Canada found in an ethnographic study of one prison-based treatment program, is:

"Once a sex offender, always a sex offender."

"Sex offending is like diabetes," a program therapist tells the assembled sex offenders. "It will not go away. You cannot be cured. We don't use the C word here. But can you be managed? Yes. Treatment is all about managing your risks to re-offend."

Despite little empirical support for this approach, Mike will be trained to understand his "cycle" of offending and develop a relapse prevention plan that focuses on controlling "deviant sexual fantasies." He will have to generate a log of sexual fantasies. If he denies deviant fantasies, or doesn't see the connection between his fantasies and his offending, he will be accused of not cooperating. He will learn to create deviant fantasies "to keep the therapists at bay."

As Lacombe quoted one 18-year-old, in the article in the British Journal of Criminology:

"They want to hear that I always have fantasies and that I have more bad ones than good ones. But I don't have bad ones that often. I make up the bad ones. I make them really bad because they won’t leave me alone."

Through the treatment process, Mike and others will learn to think of themselves as "beings at risk of reoffending at any moment." Indeed, if treatment is successful, Mike will become a virtual "confessional machine," "expected all his life to narrate his darkest fantasies to criminal justice officers and significant others who are enlisted to help him control his risk."

The iatrogenic process

As you probably know, iatrogenesis refers to the situation in which treatment creates or exacerbates an illness or adverse condition. In the context of sex offender treatment and management, here's how the process works:

1. Saturate popular culture with hypersexual advertising and degrading, misogynistic pornography.
2. When men succumb to the allure and experimentally transgress, label them as lifelong "sex offenders."
3. Through mandatory "treatment," reprogram them into dark and dangerous deviants, "a species entirely consumed by sex."
4. Finally, restrict their freedoms so severely that few if any prosocial life courses remain open.

Through exercises of moral regulation, then, the government, law enforcement, media, and therapists collude to transform sex offenders into a strange and different "other," no longer recognizable in their ordinariness.

While this makes Mike more closely match the public's conception of the bogeyman sex offender, is this helpful in the long run, either to him or to society more broadly? By brainwashing thousands of men to think of themselves as nothing more than perpetual sexual deviants, might we not be producing the very risk we have imagined and then sought to ameliorate?

Related articles by Corey Rayburn Yung:

The Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act and the Commerce Clause, Federal Sentencing Reporter, Vol. 21, No. 2, 2008

Banishment By a Thousand Laws: Residency Restrictions on Sex Offenders, Washington University Law Review, Vol. 85, p. 101, 2007

Photo credit: "Bogeyman" by faedrake (Creative Commons license)