“Sex Offender Laws Have Gone Too Far”
We recently came across this five-part series on sex offender registries, written by three Yale Law School students and published by Slate.com. It traces the recent history of registries since the passage of the Jacob Wetterling Act in 1994, examines some of the fallacies and flawed stereotypes underlying the expansion of registries in the past 20 years, and spotlights three areas in which the authors argue their growth has been especially unwise:
- more non-violent “outlier” crimes are covered;
- states are keeping people on registries for longer periods of time and making removal harder; and
- more harsh collateral consequences attach to those required to register.