Sex registries as modern-day witch pyres
Perhaps the most irrefutable statement that can be made about modern day America is this: we have a penchant for putting people in cages. More than any other nation on the planet, we rely on incarceration as the fix for our social ills. America's unprecedented prison boom spawned advocates who work tirelessly to put the police state toothpaste back into the tube. As a result, despite a steady media diet of cops and robbers police procedurals, the rhetoric on crime policy has begun to shift. The country appears to be approaching something akin to apostasy. We have begun to lose our faith in imprisonment as an effective response to problems like drug addiction. For the first time since the data was tracked, state and federal prison populations declined in 2014, albeit slightly, from historic highs. Yet amidst this wave of reform, one group of people continue to languish in the collective "harsher is better" mindset: sex offenders. The American journalist H.L. Mencken once said that The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all. Mencken was right: if you're interested in defending human freedom, get ready to spend a great deal of time defending people you might not like. The guns of oppression are aimed at the friendless before they swing to the connected and moneyed. [...]
Unsurprisingly, it is exceedingly easy to run afoul of the requirements, keeping those that do trapped in a cycle of legislatively-crafted "crime" that can be tantamount to a de facto life sentence. "Failure to register" is fast becoming the crime of choice for returning those on the registry to prison. In 2008 in Minnesota, failure to register charges became the most common reason sex offenders were returned to prison. Between 2000 to 2016, Texas saw a more than 700% increase in FTR arrests, from 252 in 2005 to 1,497 in 2017. To borrow a phrase from computer programming, this is not some kind of criminal justice bug. [...]
As with witches, the modern-day sex offender is largely a creature of our own creation, acting as a sort of repository for many of our collective moral anxieties around sex. While a baked-in ick factor often turns many erstwhile warriors into silent observers, awareness and informed response is badly needed from those within the criminal justice community. And it is needed soon. [...]
source: Article 'Sex Registries as Modern-Day Witch Pyres: Why Criminal Justice Reform Advocates Need to Address the Treatment of People on the Sex Offender Registry' by Guy Hamilton-Smith (Law grad, civil rights activist, and author writing about criminal justice, sex offense policy, media, and culture); injusticetoday.com/sex-registries-as-modern-day-witch-pyres-why-criminal-justice-reform-advocates-need-to-address-the-aca3aaa47f03; injusticetoday.com; 12 December 2017