While it’s understandable that lawmakers and the public in general would have little sympathy for rapists or child molesters, in truth, people have landed on sex offender lists for exposing themselves in public (remember the “streaking” craze in the 1970s?), public urination, or having sex at age 17 with someone who is 15. In Texas, children as young as 10 can be put on the sex offender list.
In some states, you can land on the sex offender list for crimes that have nothing to do with sex. In seven states, “unlawful restraint of a minor” will land you on the list. See the Illinois case of Fitzroy Barnaby, who is now forced to register as a sex offender for grabbing a girl by the arm to lecture her after she road her bike out in front of his car, nearly causing him to hit her. The federal Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, passed in 2006, requires all states to put in place similar regulations in order to continue to receive federal funding.
Because they’re usually passed out of anger and passion rather than after careful contemplation, sex offender laws often make little sense. People caught with child pornography on their computers, for example, can be subject to harsher penalties than people who actually molest children, despite the fact that many people who merely consume child porn aren’t a threat to actual children. (Some were molested as children themselves, and consume pornography as a form of therapy.)
As Jacob Sullum points out in a recent article for Reason magazine (my former employer), under federal law, “a defendant with no prior criminal record and no history of abusing children would qualify for a sentence of 15 to 20 years based on a small collection of child pornography and one photo swap, while a 50-year-old man who encountered a 13-year-old girl online and lured her into a sexual relationship would get no more than four years.”
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AdvertisementT here’s also little support for the common belief that sex offenders are especially likely to repeat their crimes after they’re released from prison. Sullum points to a litany of research debunking that misconception, including a 2003 Department of Justice survey finding a 5 percent recidivism rate for sex offenders within three years of their release, versus a 22 percent rate for people convicted of nonsexual assault.
None of this is to say we should give a pass to people who actually do prey on children, or others. But our laws ought to address the actual harm, not perceived harm, and they should be passed based on real-world data, not the hysterical visions of pundits and politicians, or in response to a single incident.
Myth 9: Seeing is believing. Eyewitness testimony is a reliable way of solving crimes.
Scientists have known about the problems with eyewitness testimony going back to the 19th century, when psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus