Sex (offenders) in the city

I now have had a chance to read the Eighth Circuit’s decision in Doe v. Miller, No. 04-1568 (8th Cir. Apr. 29, 2005) (available here), which upholds against numerous constitutional challenges Iowa’s legislation which “prohibits a person convicted of certain sex offenses involving minors from residing within 2000 feet of a school or a registered child care facility.”  As noted in this post, Mike at Crime & Federalism has already blogged up a storm about the case, and his three posts here and here and here (along with the comments) get to the heart of the legal and policy issues in the case.  Concerning Doe itself, I will just add that the case is especially interesting for its substantive due process analysis and also for its reliance on “common sense” rather than hard evidence about sex offender reoffending.  Also, the Doe decision, which provides a thoughtful review of a range of sex offender law and policy issues, provides a helpful list in footnote 4 of the twelve other state statutes that place residency restrictions on sex offenders.

Though a lot more could be said about Doe, the broader story is the new social panic about sex offenders which is, like so many criminal justice developments, driven by headline-making anecdotes of horrible individual cases rather than by refined data-driven policy analysis.  (I have prior sex offender posts on the power of the headline-making crime and on the surprising and encouraging data about sex offenses and offenders.)  Tellingly, this New York Times article today details that Florida, prompted by two terrible crimes, “will soon begin the nation’s most aggressive monitoring of child molesters at a time when dozens of states and localities are re-examining their policies.”  The NY Times article provides an effective national overview of sex offender developments, though the article lacks a refined discussion of the reach and efficacy of what has now been a decade of new criminal laws focused on sex offenses and offenders.

I am concerned about refined discussions of these laws because I fear they can often be written in broad ways that may harmfully fail to distinguish the truly dangerous from others.  Though the term sex offender often brings to mind the worst child molester, many sex offender laws can encompass persons who had underage consensual sex or who merely downloaded the wrong dirty pictures of the internet.  (Consider the work of the group of Save Our TexSONS, which seeks to prevent “unfair use of [sex offender] laws to prosecute teenagers engaging in consensual sex.”)

Relatedly, I fear that broad residency restrictions, which may prevent offenders from living in cities or other areas in which treatment and support services are more readily available, may undermine efforts to keep sex offenders from reoffending.  What seems most important to me is that there are follow-up studies and analyses of the efficacy of the sex offender laws which are now being considered a passed during this period of panic.