With more than 105,000 registered sex offenders, the State of California recently took a bold step toward inserting some rationality into its sex offender registration program. Bloomberg News reported on October 10, 2017 that Governor Jerry Brown had signed legislation “that could eventually purge 90 percent of the names off California’s lifetime registry for sex offenders.” Reportedly, the law will allow “sex offenders to be removed from the registry 10 or 20 years after they serve their sentence, provided they haven’t committed another serious crime in the meantime.”
The State of Texas has 90,000-plus sex offenders registered. The Texas Department of Public Safety has repeatedly stated since 2011 that 90 percent of these offenders do not pose any measurable risk to public safety. That’s why the Republican-dominated legislature in 2011 enacted legislation signed into law by former Gov. Rick Perry that created a pathway toward de-registration for those sex offenders who do not pose a risk to public safety.
The reasoning of the legislature at the time was expressed as far back as 2005 when former North Texas conservative Republican Lawmaker Ray Allen first introduced a bill that would have authorized a process for low-risk sex offenders to get off the Texas’s registry.
“When we first started writing sex offender notification bills in 1995 and 1997, we cast the net too wide,” the Austin Statesman quoted Allen as saying. “There was a lot of concern there were a lot of sex offenders out there preying on children. We now have more than 85,000 people on the registry. And the reality is we have probably only four-to-five thousand dangerous sex offenders and a whole lot of other folks who were drunk or stupid or misguided who are very unlikely to commit future sex crimes … you’re creating a very large legal forest for the 5,000 (high-risk offenders) to hide in. A list where 90 percent won’t commit another crime is not very useful to the public.”
California may have learned from Texas failed de-registration experiment. The Statesman reported last year that as of June 2016, only 58 offenders out of the roughly 80,000 non-dangerous offenders on Texas’ registry had managed to deregister. The deregistration process is so cumbersome and fraught with so many obstacles that most non-dangerous offenders do not even apply for deregistration.
The website, Texas Sex Offender DeRegistration, outlines the three-step process that a registered sex offender must traverse to secure deregistration. The requirements of each step are listed below:
Most registered sex offenders do not have either the practical skills to navigate through this process or the resources to hire an attorney to assist them in doing so.
Whether California will erect a similar process that is as difficult to hurdle remains to be seen. But the state, like Texas, has reached the conclusion that the costs of sex offender registration is not only cost prohibitive but is totally unnecessary for most of its convicted sex offenders. Megan McArdle, who wrote the Bloomberg piece, put it this way:
“This is how we have ended up with the absurdities of the sex offender registries. In which teenaged boys who slept with their underage girlfriends can be required to spend years of their life (perhaps all the years of their life), fending off revolted stares from neighbors who think they’re child molesters. In which men have to sleep under bridges because there is no abode in the county that is far enough from a child for them to legally take residence. In which work, marriage, travel or even a roof over your head become near-impossible dreams for anyone ever convicted of any sexual offense – and you may even be liable for these penalties if you are accused of exploiting … yourself.”
Most people see sex offenders through the harsh, narrow lens of “child molester.” That is simply not the case with most registered sex offenders in Texas or California. These two states alone account for more than 200,000 of the nation’s 700,000-plus registered sex offenders. At least they both now have begun pathways to de-registration. Hopefully, California will teach Texas a lesson and cause the Lone Star State to reconsider its program of de-registration…
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