Is It Time To Get Rid of the Sex Offender Registry? Emily Horowitz Says Yes.

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.7 • 855 Ratings

🗓️ 13 June 2021

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

One sure way to lose a popularity contest is to fight for the rights of convicted sex offenders. But The National Sex Offender Registry, which was established during an era of panic over crime and child danger, has come with a host of unintended consequences. Sociologist Emily Horowitz is one of a handful of academics and researchers who speaking out against the registry, showing how it's yet another blunt instrument of "tough on crime" 1990s legislation and ultimately does more to ruins lives than to protect kids. Emily spoke with Meghan about what led her to this work and why our assumptions about sexual predators are often wrong. She also explained some of the reasons why sexual abuse against children, and sexual violence in general, has declined over the last 30 years-for reasons having nothing to do with the registry. Relevant links: New York Times: At 18, He Had Consensual Gay Sex. Montana Wants Him to Stay a Registered Sex Offender New York Times: Did The Supreme Court Base a Ruling on a Myth? The New Yorker: The List Guest bio: Emily Horowitz is a professor of Sociology & Criminal Justice at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of a number of articles about the harms of sex offense registries, including the book Protecting Our Kids? How Sex Offender Laws Are Failing Us. At St. Francis College she co-directs a program that helps those with criminal justice involvement earn college degrees and she is currently conducting research on the experiences of veterans with sex offense convictions.

Transcript

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0:00.0	We have a really harsh criminal justice apparatus. If you are convicted of harming a child,
0:09.7	you're going to go to prison for a long time. Then you're going to be on parole.
0:15.2	Then if you ever do reoffend, even without the registry, you will be punished far more harshly.
0:23.3	So there's all kinds of sanctions already in place.
0:26.0	The registry is just a form of vengeance and public shaming.
0:30.2	It's not effective.
0:31.5	It doesn't help anything.
0:33.3	There's virtually no evidence that seeing, you know, being able to Google somebody and seeing
0:38.5	they have a prior sex offense has any impact on reoffence.
0:49.1	Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Dowm. If you're someone who likes to take unpopular
0:56.1	positions on public issues, you'd be hard-pressed to do better than fighting for the rights of
1:01.1	convicted sex offenders. But the National Sex Offender Registry, which was established in the 1990s,
1:07.5	and is the only such registry in the world that publicly discloses the names and addresses
1:12.4	of offenders, regardless of the level of offense, is anything but unassailable. The more than 800,000
1:19.7	people currently on the registry include not only those who've committed serious sex crimes against
1:25.5	children, but also people who've downloaded child
1:28.3	pornography, despite never having touched a child, people who've had sex at, say, age 19, with their
1:34.9	16-year-old boyfriend or girlfriend, or even people who've been caught urinating in public.
1:40.7	Once on the registry, they're subject to often draconian restrictions on where they're allowed to live and travel,
1:47.8	often making it impossible to find jobs, leaving them homeless, and basically casting them out of society,
1:54.0	often for the rest of their lives. Sociologist and criminal justice scholar Emily Horowitz is one of a handful of academics and researchers who are speaking out against the registry, showing how it arose out of an era of moral panic about child safety and often does more to ruin lives than to protect kids.
2:14.6	Emily spoke with me about what led her to this work, why our assumptions about sexual
	...

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