Washington law requires that schools get notified when state and county juvenile detention centers release sex offenders. But if the sex offender is released from an adult facility, there’s no notification whatsoever.
That could soon change if a bill introduced yesterday gets signed into law by the governor. The legislation requires that, 30 days before the release of a youth, who is convicted of a violent offense, a sex offense, or stalking and who is currently incarcerated in an adult facility, public officials must notify the district in which the youth lives or plans on living.
This legislation is similar to the one currently in place for juvenile institutions, and helps to strengthen it. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn requested the bill after lobbyist Marcia Fromhold brought the issue before him on behalf of all the school districts in the state. “School officials have the right to know that a sex offender is in their district,” Dorn said. “They need it so they can make sure their students are safe, but also so they can determine the best placement of the offender.”
“Public school districts have to admit all students, but with this bill you can prepare in advance,” said Kris Sork, communications officer for the Vancouver School District, whose lawyer helped to write the bill.
I think you have a typo: “But if the sex offender is released from an adult facility,” should be “But if the sex offender is released from a juvenile facility,”
I’m all for this in theory.
But in practice, I’m skeptical. The sex offender registry is rendered almost completely meaningless when kids get registered as sex offenders for sexting on their cellphones, dating someone a year or two too old or young, and other relatively harmless offenses. These types of kids really aren’t sex offenders; they’re just silly kids.
Totally agree with #2. Too much is caught in the huge net of the sex crimes system.
For those dangerous repeat offenders that the sex offender registry was actually designed for—which probably make up the vast minority of people on the registry—they often just end up homeless because of the criteria laid out by registry laws, where they’ll pose a larger threat to the community.
I’m skeptical the sex offender registry has done a single bit of good. It’s a slam-dunk to go with these sorts of laws, politically, and career suicide to question them.
If I remember correctly, WSIPP found that community notification (slightly different than this) increased fear by half, reduced recidivism by zero. What’s our goal? Reduce recidivism.
Yeah, homeless, unemployed sex offenders are the opposite of what we want.
What @2 said. The inclusion of thoughtless teenagers (and really, is there any other kind?) and other innocuous people on the sex offendor registry commits a triple sin:
– It totally ruins the life of people who have done nothing to deserve it by equating them with the worst child predators.
– The sheer deluge of names makes it impossible for families and teachers to actually be alert for actual predators, something they possibly could do if the list only contained the tiny minority of true monsters.
– It misdirects the energy and attention towards “stranger danger” when the vast majority of child sexual abuse happens within the home or inmediate circle of a child.
Yet in the infantile political landscape you can’t make these points because all those things take time to say and “My opponent wants to protect pedophiles!” takes no time at all.
We really should only be doing notification of Level III sex offenders – the most violent, the most likely to reoffend. And there are definitely Level III offenders in the teenage population, too – the schools have a real need to know about that, so they can take that into account when that particular teenager enrolls in their school.