A great post by Lenore Skensazy at Free Range Parenting about the kid I wrote about this morning:

Zach is not a fiend. And one fourth of the people on the registry got on as minors…because minors have sex with other minors. That doesn’t make them predators. It makes them like most of us, people who have sex with people in our age bracket. And yet, we’re talking 200,000 young lives decimated—200,000 dots on sex offender maps, scaring parents from ever sending their kids outside again. (That’s how I originally got interested in this issue. It’s hard to go Free-Range when we’re told our kids are in constant danger from the dots in the neighborhood.)

I would add that even the people who have committed heinous acts do not deserve to be on a public registry once they have served their time. Contrary to popular belief, sex offenders have the lowest recidivism rate of any criminals except for murderers. And yet we don’t have a public Drug Dealer Registry. A public Arsonist Registry. A public Assault Registry….

That’s because the public Sex Offender Registry is not about public safety. It’s about public shame. It’s about our obsession with predators and politicians pandering to it, with laws that studies show do not make kids any safer.

Go read the whole thing.