- Jan 12, 2006
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09...s.html?pagewanted=1&hp
While this case doesn't prove the ineffectiveness of sex offender registration laws, it does appear to demonstrate the limits of its effectiveness.
One thing that should, but probably won't be done is to reduce the number of crimes which get you put on the sex offender registry (ie "romeo and juliet" offenders convicted prior to the law), as the economist mentions here.
Case Shows Limits of Sex Offender Alert Programs
By MONICA DAVEY
Published: September 1, 2009
In all 50 states, registries of sex offenders have grown sophisticated and accessible in recent years, a response to high-profile attacks on children. People can search their neighborhoods for former convicts on state-run Web sites, sign up for private services that alert them if an offender moves nearby, even download an iPhone application, ?Offender Locator.?
But the case of Phillip Garrido, the California man accused of kidnapping a young girl and holding her captive for 18 years, is reigniting a debate about the usefulness of the government-managed lists and whether they might create a false sense of public safety.
Mr. Garrido, who had been convicted of kidnapping and rape in the 1970s, was listed, as required, on California?s sex-offender registry (complete with a description of the surgical scar on his abdomen and his 196-pound weight) and had dutifully checked in with the local authorities each year for the past decade ? all while, officials say, his victim and the two children he is accused of fathering with her were living in his backyard.
Sex offender lists have made far more information readily available to the public and the police than before, but experts say little research is available to suggest that the registries have actually discouraged offenders from committing new crimes.
And some experts say that the lists may lead people to presume that anyone registered must also be elaborately monitored, when, in truth, monitoring ranges enormously from place to place and state to state. In some cases, it amounts to little more than an offender mailing a postcard with his address to a police department once a year.
?We?ve come to see these registries as a panacea that is going to resolve all sex offender problems,? said Richard Tewksbury, a professor of justice administration at the University of Louisville who has written extensively about the effects of registries. ?That?s just not realistic.?
In some jurisdictions, officials tend to focus much of their attention on the estimated 100,000 former offenders nationally who fail to register, give false addresses or disappear, and less on the hundreds of thousands, like Mr. Garrido, who comply. And while some authorities have extensive contact with their registered offenders (Illinois has special monitors who follow those deemed most dangerous for life, looking for even subtle signs of crimes), those in some other states spend little time with offenders once they have filed an address.
Federal efforts to create a single, consistent registration system have been slowed by states? concerns about mounting costs, legal challenges and other issues. Deadlines for states complying with a federal plan approved by Congress in 2006 have been delayed a year, until July 2010.
The sheer numbers of sex offenders on the registries in all 50 states ? an estimated 674,000 across the country ? are overwhelming to local police departments and, at times, to the public, who may not easily distinguish between those who must register because they have repeatedly raped children and those convicted of nonviolent or less serious crimes, like exposing themselves in public.
Keeping track, for instance, of the home addresses of the 80 offenders who live in Dubuque County, Iowa, keeps law enforcement officers there ?plenty busy most every day,? a sheriff?s official there says. In more populous places like the San Francisco Bay Area ? and other places that draw large numbers of offenders ? the challenges are far more significant: 1,700 registered sex offenders live in Contra Costa County, where Mr. Garrido lived, including 100 in his ZIP code alone; more than 65,000 are registered statewide.
?The thing that is hard to remember is that all people on a registry are not the same, and we need to distinguish between them,? said Patty Wetterling, whose son was kidnapped in Minnesota 20 years ago and who now works for a state sexual violence prevention program. ?At the end of the day, the registry is just one tool out of a bunch of tools, and it?s only as good as its users. I worry that people want simple solutions to a very complex problem.?
Certainly, no one is blaming registries for Mr. Garrido?s alleged crimes? escaping notice for so long, and many defended their broader usefulness. ?Look, nobody ever suggested that registering sex offenders is going to remove sex offenders from the planet,? said Ernie Allen, the president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. ?But let?s at least make sure they?re not working in your elementary school or coaching the soccer team.?
If anything, Mr. Garrido was getting far more attention than the average offender listed on a state registry.
For years and until his arrest last week, he was on parole from the earlier kidnapping and rape in Nevada, and, California authorities said, met several times a month with a parole officer and wore a GPS device that tracked his whereabouts. Three years ago, he was visited by a sheriff?s deputy after a neighbor complained that he had a ?sexual addiction? and that children were living in his yard.
Although Mr. Garrido was listed on the state?s public registry, the deputy, the sheriff said, had not known he was a sex offender and did not search the house or yard, where primitive tents were housing his captives.
Mr. Garrido?s case has also renewed concern that policies regulating offenders may inadvertently be driving them to live in more remote, out-of-the-way places, where crimes can go unnoticed. Nine other registered sex offenders live within a mile of Mr. Garrido?s home on the outskirts of Antioch, in a dusty neighborhood on the outer reaches of the Bay Area.
New rules in many states have barred offenders from living near schools, parks and bus stops, and that has led some offenders, unable to find other alternatives that meet the rules, to live in rural areas, in their cars and, in at least one case in Florida, under a bridge.
But because he was released on parole for his earlier crimes decades ago, Mr. Garrido was exempt from a California law enacted in 2006 that bars offenders from living within 2,000 feet of places where children congregate. Still, at least one neighbor said the unincorporated area was ?loaded? with offenders, in part because no schools are around, meeting the current rules.
No Link Found to Killings
The authorities in Pittsburg, Calif., said Tuesday that they had found no concrete evidence linking Mr. Garrido and his wife, Nancy, the couple charged in the abduction of Jaycee Dugard, to a string of unsolved killings in the area.
A collection of law enforcement agencies had searched the Garridos? house and a neighbor?s backyard in Antioch, Calif., which neighbors Pittsburg, looking for clues in nine homicides, mostly of prostitutes, committed from 1998 to 2002. Several of the victims? bodies were dumped in industrial areas near places where Mr. Garrido, a printer, had sometimes worked.
But in a news release on Tuesday, the Pittsburg police seemed to be backing away from that theory, saying their search had come up empty, barring a ?few items that will require further forensic examination.?
On Monday, the Contra Costa County Sheriff?s Department said that a bone fragment had been found, but that it was not clear whether it was human.
While this case doesn't prove the ineffectiveness of sex offender registration laws, it does appear to demonstrate the limits of its effectiveness.
One thing that should, but probably won't be done is to reduce the number of crimes which get you put on the sex offender registry (ie "romeo and juliet" offenders convicted prior to the law), as the economist mentions here.
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