Reviewing disconcerting realities when kids are put on sex offender registries

Eric Berkowitz has this notable New York Times commentary, headlined "Punishment That Doesn’t Fit the Crime," about juveniles and sex offender registries. Here are excerpts:

When Matthew Grottalio was 10 years old, he and his older brother initiated a touching “game” with their 8-year-old sister. “None of us knew what we were doing,” he said, and he soon forgot about the episode.  But later that year, 1998, his sister’s teacher found out and notified the authorities.  Just weeks after Matthew’s 11th birthday, police officers handcuffed him outside his fifth-grade classroom.

Matthew and his parents agreed to a guilty plea in exchange for two years of probation, which he spent in a foster home. (His brother also pleaded guilty.)  When he returned to his family, they were stunned to learn that he was listed on the Texas sex offender registry website, and would be for 10 years.  He was just 13 years old.  Neighbors threw a Molotov cocktail at his house and shot and killed his family’s dog.  Local newspapers listed him by name along with adult sex offender “monsters” in the area.

He soon “hated life, hated everybody.”  Their sons’ ordeals shattered their parents’ marriage of two decades. Matthew dropped out of high school, ran away, was homeless for two years, sank into drugs and served time for burglary and parole violations.  His decade on the registry had ended by 2011, but internet searches continued to show him on the list — and still do.  Even worse, his parole included restrictions suitable to a serial child rapist.  He was barred from any unsupervised and unapproved contacts with people under 17, and from any contact with his sister, who was by then an adult. (She says she never considered him a threat.)  He also was barred from contact with the children of the woman he married in 2013. Even contact with the baby the couple had together was in limbo until he passed a sex offender evaluation....

Mr. Grottalio’s story is not unusual. In about 40 states, juveniles are listed on sex offender registries, often for their entire lives.  In about 19 states, there is no minimum registration age.  Prepubescent children are listed along with violent adult sex criminals.  While precise data is unavailable, it appears that as many as 24,000 of the nation’s more than 800,000 registered sex offenders are juveniles, and about 16 percent of that population are younger than 12 years old.  More than one-third are 12 to 14....

In her career as a criminal defense lawyer for juveniles and a researcher on juvenile sex offenders, Nicole Pittman, now a vice president at Impact Justice, defended or reviewed about 2,000 juvenile sex cases.  Most involved what she called “normative” sexual behavior and “experimentation.”  Nevertheless, on many sex offender websites, there are juveniles’ photos, names and addresses, and even maps to their homes....

2006, about 32 states had sex offender laws registering juveniles.  That year, the federal Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act mandated, for the first time, that certain youths 14 and over be registered in the state where the violation occurred. (Once that happens, the person also goes on the national registry.) The law also said that offenses such as indecent exposure and public urination had to be included. At least six states now require juveniles to be on the register for life.  Given that state and federal laws have grown into an often conflicting tangle of requirements and penalties, there can be no end to some kids’ ordeals....

The expansion of sex offender laws to include juveniles was based on the assumption that kids who sexually transgress cannot be reformed.  However, research has shown this assumption to be false. Only 1 percent to 7 percent of children who commit sexual offenses will do it again — much lower than the 13 percent recidivism rates for adult sexual offenders.

The policy seems to succeed only in making life difficult for offenders, subjecting them to harassment and isolation. Of the more than 500 youth sex offenders whose cases Ms. Pittman examined, about 100 had attempted suicide.... Knowing this, prosecutors like Vicki Seidl, the senior lawyer in the juvenile division of the Kent County district attorney’s office in Michigan, now push for pleas that keep youths off registries.  Other prosecutors are following suit.

But that alone will not solve the problem.  Juveniles, particularly ones under 14, need to be off the registries entirely. In 2011, the Department of Justice relaxed the requirement for registering juveniles, but legislators still fear that they’ll be accused of being “soft” on sex crimes.