By Joel Pentlarge, Executive Director, CJPC                                                    6/29/09

Sex offender legislation is typically written in visceral response to horrific headlines. Monday’s (6/29/09) Boston Globe article DA details alleged kidnapping in Hanover, contains a prime example of headlines which terrify every parent. It is alleged that Justin Shine, 26 years old and high on cocaine, kidnapped a blond haired blue eyed 6 year old girl, covered her mouth with black tape, shackled her, and then injected her with drugs as part of a plan to rape her before he sliced his own wrists in an unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide. The gut reaction to this heinous crime is to demand tougher laws on all sex offenders.

The problem is that none of the laws currently on the books or proposed would have done anything to prevent this crime. Nothing in the news reports indicates that Mr. Shine had any prior record for sex offenses. So he would not be registered as a sex offender, and nothing about the sex offender registry would do anything to prevent this crime even if he had been registered. (If anything the sex offender registry may create for the public a false sense of security, since 90% of all sex offenses are committed by persons who have no prior record for sex offenses. ) Nor is Mr. Shine likely to ever be subject to sex offender registration if he is found guilty of the horrific crimes charged, because he is likely to receive the already existing maximum sentence of life in prison.

What could the Legislature do that might have prevent alleged crimes such as these? Frankly, it could admit that the “War on Drugs” has been a complete failure, as the Massachusetts Bar Association concluded after studying the issue in depth for over a year. A drug policy that treats cocaine addiction as disease and provides readily available substance abuse and mental health treatment would be much more likely to prevent the kind of crimes that Mr. Shine is alleged to have committed.

The Criminal Justice Policy Coalition urges the Legislature to adopt policies which will work to reduce sexual abuse and violence based on best evidence of what actually works. The best current research done by impartial researchers and law enforcement agencies indicates that sex offender registration has done nothing to reduce sexual assaults or recidivism. There is mounting evidence that sex offender registration, if anything, is likely to prevent the successful re-entry of former sex offenders by preventing them from obtaining stable housing, employment, and services such as sex offender treatment.

The best research to date also indicates that the classification systems used in sex offender registration are useless for predicting which small percentage (around 5% in five years) of former offenders will actually reoffend. As the New Jersey Department of Corrections concluded, the money spent on maintaining a system of sex offender registration could be much better spent on evidence-based programs actually shown to prevent sexual abuse.

CJPC therefore favors the policies embodied in the two bills which would repeal sex offender registration in Massachusetts, freeing up almost $5,000,000 currently budgeted directly by the state, plus an unknown amount of money being spent by each of the 351 Massachusetts cities and towns to register former sex offenders locally, for which the state provides no reimbursement. The two bills for abolition of the SORB are House 3775 and Senate 1715. Any bills which attempt to “fine tune” the sex offender registration process, are simply perpetuating a system which is fundamentally useless. Similarly, bills which would place additional restrictions on former sex offenders based on their classification levels, start from the faulty premise that these classification levels actually mean anything.

One other bill that is a step in the right direction is Senator Jehlen’s, Senate Bill 1711. This bill would substitute intensive parole supervision for civil commitment of persons who have completed their criminal sentences, but who are determined by a court to still be “sexually dangerous.”

The following two examples are the kind of research which the Criminal Justice Policy Coalition relies on in advocating these policies:

Sex Offender Sentencing in Washington State: Sex Offender Risk level Classification Tool and Recidivism; Washington State Institute for Public Policy, January 2006;

Megan’s Law: Assessing the Practical and Monetary Efficacy by Kristen Zgoba, Ph.D.; Philip Witt, Ph.D.; Melissa Dalessandro, M.S.W.; Bonita Veysey, Ph.D.; New Jersey Department of Corrections Research and Evaluations Unit under a grant from the United States Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice, January 2008.