The sex-offender registry can be a life sentence

From everything I&#x27;ve ever read, there is no concept of rehabilitation in the USA. If you have ever been convicted, or even accused, of a felony or sexual crime in the USA then life as you knew it was over.<p>The concept of being able to pay a debt to society and for that to settle the books, and to then allow those people to return to society and contribute value again... is alien to America.<p>The problem <i>starts</i> with the lack of rehabilitation and not with the original incident. If a person is deprived of the hope of ever living a meaningful life again, then what incentive exists against their prior behaviour? There is no disincentive that works when a life has already been destroyed.<p>Regardless of what it was, drugs, sex, violence, theft, or simply going to a demonstration and being arrested when someone else kicks off and you are convicted by proximity... once you deprive people of a future, of hope, then you really start bringing out the worst in them when you could have brought out the best in them.

In the fight against the great boogeymen of Terrorism and Sex Predation, the US has lost common sense.<p>As a kid, when I was 8 years old, I played doctor with my neighbor, we we were both curious about each others differences and so we explored them. So, if I read this article, if this had been in the US, we could have been tried as sex offenders? How does this even make sense? Of course kids are curious about body differences between men and women.<p>And, when I read those stories, I really don&#x27;t understand how a teenager could be convicted for having sex with a girl 2 or 3 years younger than her. I can&#x27;t imagine how a girl sexting could be convicted for producing &quot;Child Porn&quot;, that absolutely makes no sense.<p>And then the treatments describe are a form of abuse. I wouldn&#x27;t want to be subject to a “penile plethysmograph”.<p>It&#x27;s really scary how easily it is to pass Orwellian by invoking &quot;Think of the Children&quot; or &quot;To prevent terrorists&quot;. As soon as those two things are uttered, people seem to lose all common sense.

&gt; <i>Her friend, who had just given birth to a baby girl, had logged on to the Michigan Public Sex Offender Registry Web site to search for local predators.</i><p>&quot;Sex-offender&quot; registry is of course a total and complete abomination. But if you&#x27;re going to write against it, maybe you owe it to yourself and your readers to not use the words of the enemy -- namely &quot;predators&quot;.<p>There are no &quot;predators&quot;. There may or may not be people who made a mistake earlier in life -- many of those mistakes would not even be frowned upon in many other parts of the world.<p>But to call people on a sex-offenders list &quot;predators&quot; is like calling everyone on a no-fly list &quot;terrorists&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s bigoted, it&#x27;s despicable. And it&#x27;s at least counter productive to use that word in an article that tries to fight the very principle of those lists.<p>Also, to continue on a related wording controversy that&#x27;s really irritating, victims shouldn&#x27;t be able to automatically call themselves &quot;survivors&quot;. You&#x27;re a survivor only if you narrowly escaped death. If your life was never at risk then you&#x27;re not a survivor.

That a society is fine with incarcerating 9 (NINE!) year old kids is disturbing... but, I am <i>haunted</i> by the thoughts that a society on earth incarcerated ten year old kids for non-violent acts in the name of zero tolerance.<p>Zero tolerance for kids!! They don&#x27;t understand the damn &#x2F;meaning&#x2F; of that word for god&#x27;s sake!

I have a friend who plead guilty to two statuary rape charges that were false accusations, serving more time with parole than the maximum sentencing of the one charge he was guilty of, solely because the prosecution would drop the request for sex-offender registration, which would have done him permanent harm.<p>There are some real predators out there, and I understand the threats that make something like a registry necessary. However it has become a tool of the plea-deal legal industry and a mechanism by which non-predatory individuals have had their lives ruined by the state.

The US are getting weirder and weirder and weirder. I just can&#x27;t wrap my head around Trump, gun laws, life-time sex-offender registries, the messed up health care system.<p>Yet, I have only met absolutely nice, intelligent, loving americans, and I&#x27;ve met many. I feel sorry for them. They deserve better.

There is a huge problem with “accusation equals conviction”, and a huge problem with “let’s just keep adding punishments to already-convicted people”. There also seems to be no automatic apology mechanism after wrongful accusations or convictions, requiring one to spend even more time and money to be given even the most basic repayments for a life-destroying situation.<p>If I had to pick one thing to fix first, it should be COMPLETELY ILLEGAL TO DISCLOSE MERE ACCUSATIONS (no media coverage, etc.). Disclosure, particularly for sexual crimes, has been shown to have just as much of a career-destroying and family-destroying effect as an actual conviction, and the “hehe, sorry, wrong guy, you are free to go” after the ordeal never undoes the damage. It is a shameful, garbage way for society to operate.

<i>sigh</i> ... I&#x27;m not sure what else to say. The problem with &quot;Zero Tollerance&quot;, minimum sentencing and lifetime registries, is there&#x27;s no accounting for edge cases or practical exceptions. I&#x27;m hoping that over the next decade or two, a lot of this can be rolled back into sensible laws, and justifiable actions.

As a society, we have no way to differentiate who we&#x27;re mad at, and who we&#x27;re truly afraid of. Rehabilitation options are nonexistent, as most prisons and jails removed them in the 90&#x27;s. Offenders go to Prison and come out Convicts -- with better training, some more street smarts, complete with access to more drugs, guns, and tools of the trade.<p>America is not a country of second chances. Look at sites like beenverified and mugshots -- their sole purpose in life is to shame those who have been arrested&#x2F;convicted and allow employers&#x2F;landlords to discriminate in ways that really skirts the FDCPA (beenverified isn&#x27;t a CRA, so, there are no repercussions of reporting inaccurate information, nor are there ways of getting that information changed).<p>Hell, even AirBnB performs silent background checks on people who are renting homes -- even after presenting them the official copy of my clean (aside from a few speeding tickets and an accident from 1999) FBI background report, they still say that there are &#x27;public records&#x27; that they are using and for the &#x27;safety of the AirBnB platform,&#x27; they don&#x27;t want my money.<p>We have a long way to go until this country can truly start to fix the &#x27;prison&#x27; problem, but, it won&#x27;t start until the country, as a whole, starts taking a different view of rehabilitation, corrections, and punishment.

Well if the predilection towards pedophilia could be managed or &quot;cured&quot; and if prisons did more than just house inmates I.e if they worked on rehab instead of punishment then perhaps the lifetime listings wouldn&#x27;t be necessary. I won&#x27;t begin to insinuate that I have the right balance between parents wanting to be cautious with who their kids interact with and the belief that people can change for the better. And then there&#x27;s the case of adolescents who get caught up in the system before their minds are fully formed...

Why not just make it a complete registry. Put speeding on the list too so I don&#x27;t have to worry about my kids getting hit by an unrepentant speeder.

Interesting catching a thread about America before all the americans wake up and start defending the status quo

IMHO acts committed prior to 18 should not warrant inclusion on the sex offender registry, unless they are so egregious and violent that a high bar has been crossed.

The key problem is the registry seems almost like a minimum penalty. Life in prison is a major penalty, life on the registry should be also considered as such. It loses all meaning when it contains people who have been convicted of taking selfies.

The article mentions machines attached to young men&#x27;s penises to &quot;measure their arousal&quot;, a prosecutor demanding a photo of a teenage boy&#x27;s erect penis, masturbation diaries – their so-called &quot;therapy&quot; sounds like a sexual assault in itself, sexual abuse committed by the state and its agents.

cruel and unusual punishment anyone?

lets be clear. rich people do not have to deal with this. denny hastert rapes a bunch of people and is still thought of as a good guy by the powerful and wealthy. how many more like him are protected? catholic church institutionalizes criminal sexual abuse but nobody in management goes to prison. corey feldman knows who raped him but cannot say it because that person has too much money and power in hollywood. hedge fund managers go to thailand and fuck child prostitutes but they come back here and invest in private prisons that make money putting kids in lockup for playing doctor.<p>some teenager sends a nude pic and get years in prison.<p>welcome to &#x27;freedom&#x27;<p>i actually support the &#x27;crackdown on sex crimes&#x27;... if it went after actual criminals!!!! politicians, CEOs, cops, bankers, all those people who routinely rape kids and get away with it.<p>but as usual, it just is a way for the rich to enslave the poor, extract money from them, abuse them, and discard them.