Teenager’s Jailing Brings a Call to Fix Sex Offender Registries

NY Times   Until one day in December, Zachery Anderson was a typical 19-year-old in a small Midwestern city.

He studied computer science at the local community college. He lived with his parents and two younger brothers in a sun-filled home on the St. Joseph River, where framed family photos hang from the walls and a pontoon boat is docked outside.

And he dated in the way that so many American teenagers do today: digitally and semi-anonymously, through apps where prospects emerge with the swipe of a finger and meetings are arranged after the exchanges of photos and texts.

In December, Mr. Anderson met a girl through Hot or Not, a dating app, and after some online flirting, he drove to pick her up at her house in Michigan, just miles over the state line. They had sex in a playground in Niles City, the police report said.

That sexual encounter has landed Mr. Anderson in a Michigan jail, and he now faces a lifetime entanglement in the legal system. The girl, who by her own account told Mr. Anderson that she was 17 — a year over the age of consent in Michigan — was actually 14. [...]

As an Indiana resident, Mr. Anderson will most likely be listed on a sex offender registry for life, a sanction that requires him to be in regular contact with the authorities, to allow searches of his home every 90 days and to live far from schools, parks and other public places. His probation will also require him to stay off the Internet, though he needs it to study computer science.

Some advocates and legal authorities are holding up Mr. Anderson’s case as the latest example of the overreach of sex offender registries, which gained favor in the 1990s as a tool for monitoring pedophiles and other people who committed sexual crimes. In the decades since, the registries have grown in number and scope; the nearly 800,000 people on registries in the United States go beyond adults who have sexually assaulted other adults or minors. Also listed are people found guilty of lesser offenses that run the gamut from urinating publicly to swapping lewd texts. [...]

“The whole registry is a horrible mistake,” said William Buhl, a former judge in Michigan who has publicly argued that laws governing registries ought to be relaxed. “I think it’s utterly ridiculous to take teenage sex and make it a felony. This guy is obviously not a pedophile.”[...]

“No computer for five years, no smartphone? He can’t have an email address,” his father said. “To me, that’s wrong. That’s like taking away electricity or heat or gas to somebody, in today’s world.”

With their son’s release from jail set for Thursday, they were scrambling to find him a new place to live and satisfy the sex offender restrictions on housing. Their own house is less than 1,000 feet from a public boat launch, which is considered a public park under state law.[...]

For additional information see the linked articles from Prof Franklin Zimring

http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1590&context=facpubs

Jaacap
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MacArthur Foundation Research
An American Travesty:  Legal Responses to Adolescent Sexual Offending by Prof Franklin Zimring

During the 1990s, all 50 states enacted new laws aimed largely at protecting children against sexual predators. Under many of these laws, adult sexual offenders are regarded as more dangerous—and controlled more severely—if their victims are very young. This seems rational when dealing with adults who prey on young children. But in enacting laws aimed at adult sexual predators, legislators, whether deliberately or thoughtlessly, often used language broad enough to encompass offenders in early adolescence. Should a child or young adolescent who commits a single act of sexual aggression against another child be treated the same way as a 30-year-old man who assaults an 8-year-old girl? Legal scholar Franklin Zimring calls it a travesty of justice—a policy that ignores the developmental stage of young sex offenders in determining their legal fate.

In An American Travesty: Legal Responses to Adolescent Sexual Offending Zimring argues that Meganʼs Laws and other responses to these youths are based on certain assumptions about adult sex offenders—assumptions that donʼt apply to adolescents. He finds there has been virtually no scholarly literature or research on the topic of adolescent sex offending: few scientific studies of sexual misconduct among children and adolescents, no rigorous assessments of strategies that address it, no dialogue among legal scholars or judges. Zimringʼs book organizes the knowledge that does exist and considers the implications for policy and for further research—“a down payment on the debt scholarship owes the topic.”

An image breeds an industry Adult sex offenders—especially those who use force and those who prey on children—are viewed by the public with special outrage and fear. Even professionals consider many of them a breed apart from other criminals, with very particular characteristics:fixed, abnormal sexual proclivities; a focus on sex offenses to the exclusion of other crimes; at high risk of repeating their offenses. It is this image, controversial but widely held, that underlies Meganʼs Laws and related policy. This pathological image has now been extended to adolescent offenders as well, giving rise not only to new laws but to an industry of specialized treatment programs for sexually abusive youth. While juvenile sex-offense arrests have remained remarkably stable over the past two decades or more, the number of treatment programs has mushroomed: from 20 in 1982 to several hundred today.

Many of these programs take a unique approach to therapy. In place of the core mission of the juvenile justice system—to serve the childʼs best interests—their primary goal is prevention of sex crimes. Therapists in these programs consider their client to be not the youth but the community, and they form an adversarial relationship with the adolescent offender. The therapist serves as investigator, prosecutor, and probation officer; her tools include polygraphy and confrontation, and she has no obligation to protect the youthʼs confidentiality.

The adversarial approach grows out of a report issued in 1993 by the National Adolescent Perpetrator Network, a vocal and well-organized network that is part mental health treatment group, part victimsʼ rights lobby. The report, published in Juvenile Judge’s Journal, was the longest publication devoted
to juvenile sex offenders in at least half a century. At its center are 387 unproven assumptions about adolescent behavior, dangerousness, appropriate justice system responses, and the impact of various interventions on long-term development and life opportunities. The Task Force behind the report included no physicians, no specialists in program evaluation and policy analysis, no experts in juvenile justice, and only one attorney, a former prosecutor. Yet the report has stood for more than a decade, virtually uncriticized and tremendously influential. [...]