"Don’t Just Get Kids Off the Sex Offender Registry. Abolish It"

A helpful reader alerted me to this article which has the title I have used for the title of this post.  I think these excerpts captures some the themes of this lengthy article: 

A focus on the juvenile sex offender — or any juvenile offender — has potential upsides. It invites audiences to see a whole person and a complex situation and to empathize with the person who has done, or been accused of doing, harm. The invocation of childhood, and its suggestion of innocence by reason of immaturity, can spread sympathy more widely to whole communities harmed by the carceral state, particularly when kids are secondary victims of parental incarceration and systemic “civil death” or disenfranchisement.

Coverage of the JSO often unpacks the category of “sex offender” — pointing out that it includes convictions for sexting, public urination and consensual sex between minors, as well as violent rape and the abuse of children; it can expose the uniquely harsh treatment of all these people by the U.S. criminal justice system and the public. These stories point to the youthful offender as collateral damage in a regime of indiscriminate and ever-escalating penalties....

But there are also significant downsides to campaigns that construct children as exceptional and different from adults. The public may just as easily be left feeling that adults who break the law are bad and deserve all they get — or that guilty people do not deserve fairness or sympathy.  This gives legislators a rationale for trading off youth-friendly criminal justice policies for harder adult penalties, as recently happened when New Mexico legalized sexting between teens but increased penalties for people 18 and older sexting with people under 18.  Not just adults but some youth can be penalized by the focus on “children.” Call the person who breaks the law a “child,” and there’s a danger that any young person not demonstrably childlike will end up prosecuted as an adult.

Exclusive focus on the young offender — rather than a rejection of the entire sex offender regime — avoids the larger, less politically popular truth. “Sex offender registries are harmful to kids and to adults,” says Emily Horowitz, associate professor of sociology and criminal justice at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, and a board member of the National Center for Reason & Justice, which works for sensible child-protective policies and against unjust sex laws. “No evidence exists that they prevent sex crimes either by juvenile offenders or adult offenders.”

Such a strategy can invite a wider range of supporters, but it also can mean inadvertent acceptance or even endorsement of policies that are antagonist to justice for wider groups, if not for everyone. For instance, [Center on Youth Registration Reform] (CYRR) is collaborating with Eli Lehrer, of the free-market think tank R Street; he is also a signatory of the conservative Right on Crime initiative.  Flagged on the CYRR site is an article by Lehrer, published this winter in National Affairs, that argues for taking kids off the registry. But the piece also concludes that ending the registries would be “unwise” and suggests they’d be really good with a few “sensible” tweaks.  Lehrer also proposes hardening policies — such as “serious” penalties for child pornography possession and the expanded use of civil commitment — that data reveal to be arbitrary or ineffective and many regard as gross violations of constitutional and human rights.