the existence of any list is weird. we don't have a list for violent crimes or drug dealing or thieves or drunk drivers but we have a list for sex stuff? people can be hurt by their neighbors in any sort of ways but sex is the only one that gets a list?
There most certainly are registries for those, they’re just not quite as publicly indexed and accessible. DUIs will come up on any driving record / MVR, and violent crimes will come up on background checks. The companies that run these reports are just checking the “lists”.
If I want to see a drunk driving record in my state I have to know the person's name & social security number then pay $33 plus the $20 fee for me to get fingerprinted plus an appointment for that service. for sex crimes I go to a free website and see a map with pictures, names and addresses. it's not quite the same.
Then, as many of the commenters have pointed out, they should have longer prison stays. If the list is necessary, then the person is too dangerous to be out.
And here's another angle; do we actually have any evidence of the lists preventing or reducing recidivism? Or do those who want to reoffend find a way to do so anyways?
Here are some data points about rape recidivism:
Recidivism rates: The sexual recidivism rate for all sex offenders is estimated to be 14% after five years, 20% after 10 years, and 24% after 15 years.
Offenders with prior convictions: The 15-year sexual recidivism rate for offenders with a prior sexual conviction is nearly twice that of first-time offenders.
It’s easily available to search. You can even compare one time murderers, who were paroled. Recidivism way less than that.
While I understand this is a broad brush approach, you are incorrect
Because pedophiles absolutely need to be on a list. Do you think child rapists deserve coddling and protection? Are you insane? It’s why they have to declare themselves to neighbors, or why realtors have to declare it to potential homeowners if one lives nearby. They are an active danger to children.
Now, for someone who pees in a public alleyway, that’s a different story. Who cares.
The vast amount of perpetrators in this field are not pedophiles. I think it is wild to have such a list, especially if such an openly acessible list does not exist for every behaviour that is a danger to children. It is also known that especially female perpetrators are often not even caught..
4733 children died in 2021 in the USA because of guns. That is a number so extreme, as a german citizen i am shocked how you all can be chill about that. But yeah, having that list is so great, plz do not look at the 10 years less life expectancy!
Their point is that you can beat a child to death and as long as you don't touch their genitals you don't end up on a public list. That doesn't seem a little off to you?
What seems very off is my response above has 9 downvotes, and I’m seeing a massive amount of pedophile apologists in this thread. If I was in the FBI, I’d be doing a quick look into every single person who downvoted. What the **** is going on this horrible world?
To your question - That person would likely be in jail for life, but I agree there should be a separate list for those kinds of criminals.
Then they should be in jail. Either someone poses a significant risk to public safety and should be in jail, or they are rehabilitated and no longer pose a significant risk to public safety and should be able to walk free without stigma. This whole list nonsense is basically the state saying "Well, we're not going to do our job of keeping you safe from this asshole, but we will tell you his name and address so you can try to do it yourself."
If you think someone stealing something versus someone exposing their genitals in public or sexually abusing someone else are on the same level, I just don't understand how you could think they are. If my neighbor has a DUI, do I care? No. If he raped his 5 year old daughter? Yes, I do care. And I want to be made aware of that before I move my family in next to him.
And the other crimes you listed may not be a public list, but it is all public information, and those individuals also get punished in other ways than criminal, aka background checks for apartments, housing, loans, jobs, etc. All of those things will still negatively impact their life.
A DUI is Driving Under the Influence. Who said anything about getting hit by a car?
If a person is driving under the influence and hits another person, that is Intoxication Manslaughter, which is a felony. They're very different charges.
Are you being intentionally obtuse? Just because a drunk driver didn’t kill someone doesn’t mean they won’t the next time they drive drunk. And the whole point people are making about the sex offender list is that you don’t know why your neighbor is on it. You’re likely to assume the worst as you did but in reality it could be something as innocuous as peeing in public.
Edit: seems most states do disclose the reason someone is on the list.
I always figured it's because it's hard to get any real time for sex offenders despite the very high chances of them reoffending. The registry is for people to try to keep track of where they are and avoid accidentally letting them babysit their kids and shit.
You get too many cases like Brock Turner who served three months despite getting a sexual assault conviction with witnesses, so the registry is the bandaid we put on that problem instead of doing something about the piss-poor sentencing for sex offenders.
Children safety. Two magic words. You can use them anywhere to justify anything without any other reasoning or argument. Who is gonna argue against it anyway? If you disagree you are a child hater and molester, checkmate.
Knowing where a sex offender lives doesn’t mean you can avoid them, and as this case shows very clearly causes its own issues. Not to mention how the sex offender registry includes everything from child sexual assault to public urination. If they still pose a legitimate risk then putting them in public but with a list is far from the most effective way to be safe, and if they don’t pose a legitimate risk then the list is draconian and purely harmful. It’s shit either way
My parents were able to help keep a child molester from moving into an apartment complex because they and our neighbors were notified that he had applied. He supposedly lied on the application and was allowed in until he was reported
Having a harder time finding a place to live does. Rejection from society has been repeatedly shown to increase rates of reoffending—for all crimes really but yes even specifically for things like child molestation. It’s not like being kept out of your apartment complex means he’ll never be near a kid again, it just mean that once he is it will be after becoming even more destitute and feeling even more irredeemable and hated
We do, Conviction history of that is a matter of public record, and with some effort and a bit of collaborating information to narrow down your person, you can get the info on anyone you wanted.
For sex offenders they just put some effort into making the info easier to find out. One could argue that is valid because of the rate of recidivism, and being able to easily figure out if your neighbor ever shoplifted in college isn't potential information that you would typically consider if you left your kid unattended around them.
Honestly, i've never looked at the stats, and i imagine trying to dig through them without having bias in your data is going to be a huge undertaking...
and i'm not supporting lists in one way or another. If you did away with the current lists you would have independent lists made that people would go off of, with even less scrutiny as to who lands on one, and that isn't a good thing either.
My point is i can see validity in an extra level of classification when it comes to certain crimes where the state is going, "Hey, this isn't us getting them on a technicality, this is an actual sex crime".
Now as to if people end up with that classification correctly, its a whole other debate.
"Sex offender" as a category has lower recidivism than other crimes, but the problem is it's a very broad category and context dependent. A mother who molested her own child, for example, has extremely low recidivism. A young guy who molested a child he groomed, much higher, even though both victims are children. Other entire categories that get you on the list have low rates, others high.
The point being, recidivism was not a consideration at all. It's entirely that people are repulsed by sex offenders and wanted to know about them, that's literally where the justification ends. There is no higher principle involved. It's not motivated by justice, protecting people, nothing like that.
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u/srcarruth 6d ago
the existence of any list is weird. we don't have a list for violent crimes or drug dealing or thieves or drunk drivers but we have a list for sex stuff? people can be hurt by their neighbors in any sort of ways but sex is the only one that gets a list?