Megans Law Essay example

If a registered sex offender never truly became clean of their perverted thoughts and sexual urges, they could once again bring harm. So knowing where the sex offenders are may or may not be very helpful.

When we hear the phrase, sex offender, we normally feel repulsed. We think of dirty old creepy men. I for one used to do this, I won’t lie. This is because people like to rush to judgment. But my opinions changed when I came to the realization that it’s not just creepy old men who are sex offenders. I want to talk about them, but not those who are serial rapists or child molesters; they don’t deserve to be talked about. I’m talking about people who are convicted, whether it’s falsely, or unjustly, and have to wear a stamp on their forehead for the rest of their lives saying they are a sex offender.

Sexual violence in the United Stated has become a significant problem over the past decade. Besides being a health problem for the individual, it is a crime that every State punishes in accordance to their laws. In an effort to decrease the incidents of sexual assault, many states and legislators have passed laws geared towards reducing recidivism among convicted sex offenders. As a result, sex offenders living in the United States are subject to different laws, including sex offender registration, community notification, monitoring via a global positioning system (GPS), and loitering and internet restrictions. In addition to these boundaries, sex offenders are subject to civil

Timmendequas had been a twice convicted sex offender who had lived with two additional sex offenders in a house across the street from the Kanka family. The Kanka’s were unaware that their neighbor was a threat to their safety. Megan was lured by Timmendequas into his house by offering to show her a puppy. He then raped her and strangled her to death with a belt. After this horrific murder, he dumped her body in Mercer County Park. The killing of Megan generated an enormous amount of public outrage. In the wake of the tragedy, the Kanka family sought to have local communities warned about the sex offenders that reside in the area. Shortly after Megan’s murder, the New Jersey Legislature began the task of revising New Jersey’s sex offender laws. The entire process took less than three months and on October 31, 1994, Governor Whitman responded to public pressure by enacting nine sex offender statutes that have become known as Megan’s Law (Brooks, 1996, p.

1. Subsection (1) provides registration requires persons convicted of a sex crime under either federal or state law to register.

In the article “Sex Offender Registries (SOR’s): TIME-FOR-A-CHANGE”, the topic of changing the se offender registries was discussed and elaborated upon. It began by giving a summary of the history of the sex offender registries. There was a case where a young child was murdered by a sex offender that no one knew lived in the area. To fix this problem, every person convicted of a sex crime had to register as a sex offender. The author of this article, Phil Locke, explained the effects of the sex offender registry on those convicted of sex crimes. Not only are the years served in prison for the crime uncommonly longer than for those who have committed murder, but the offender is then required to go to “treatment” programs and meetings after serving

Sex offenders have been a serious problem for our legal system at all levels, not to mention those who have been their victims. There are 43,000 inmates in prison for sexual offenses while each year in this country over 510,000 children are sexually assaulted(Oakes 99). The latter statistic, in its context, does not convey the severity of the situation. Each year 510,000 children have their childhood's destroyed, possibly on more than one occasion, and are faced with dealing with the assault for the rest of their lives. Sadly, many of those assaults are perpetrated by people who have already been through the correctional system only to victimize again. Sex offenders, as a class of criminals, are nine times more likely to repeat their

The number of registered sex offenders have increasingly grew over the years. Every day you see a man or women added to the registry for crimes against women and mostly children. The sex offender registries biggest and main focus is to keep the people in the community in each city and state informed and protected. ”Sex offenders and sex crimes provoke a great deal of anxiety in our society.” Baker, J, Brannon, Y, N., Fortney. , Levenson, J.S. (“Public Perceptions about Sex Offenders and Community Protection”). The sex offender registry is based solely on protecting the public from being a victim

Convicted offenders who must register are required to comply until “ten years have elapsed” since they have been released from prison, paroled, given supervised release or put on probation. The requirement of a person to register may also be terminated when it is determined the person “no longer suffers from a mental abnormality or personality disorder that would make the person likely to engage in a predatory sexually violent offense.” A person who knowingly fails to register and keep registration current is subject to

A public tragedy often leads to measures being taken to avoid similar tragic events in the future. In 2006, proposition #83 was officially passed by 70% of California voters for the protection of children from repeat sex offenders who had been convicted before. The story behind why the proposition # 83 was originally passed is also a another tragic. Jessica Lunsford, only nine years old, was kidnapped, raped, and murdered by a convicted sex offender named John Couey who was not under the police surveillance and he had relapsed into the same criminal behavior, after receiving sanctions that was not strict enough. Stricter sanctions could had hold him still in jail. If he received rehabilitation, the chances of him relapsing into the crime would had been lower according to the data showing a reduction in recidivism therapy. According to Weinrott & Blackshaw (1989), the recidivism rates for offenders who were treated were reduced compared to recidivism rates for offenders who were not treated. With better police surveillance, the crime could have been prevented if the sex offender was on guard and on lifetime global positioning (prop 83). After proposition was passed, officers are now ordered to keep track of sex offenders and they are forbidden from entering in areas near schools and parks where kids are usually present. It also increased the penalties for repeated sex offenders. Because of this new law, children are now better protected from sex

In 1994, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act were passed and establishing new rights for victims of sexual assault, domestic violence, sexual assault and child abuse. The federal Community Notification Act was enacted in 1996 to ensure community notification of the locations of convicted sex offenders. Additionally, the community notification laws were designed to give members of the community the right to know if there are any sex offenders in their community. Consequently, sex offenders cannot reside or work within a certain mileage within the school grounds and they must notify the authorities if their living arrangement changes (Alarid, 2015).

The recent publication of the New York Times’s Editorial Board, titled “The Pointless Banishment of Sex Offenders” published in September 8, 2015 is an eye opener to the public that the vast majority of the laws made around the country in different states restricting sex offenders living close to schools so to speak but technically it is the “banishment” of sex offenders is “ pointless” according to the author, not because the law is not trying to protects our children from sex offenders, but because some of the so called “sex offenders” do not pose threat to the children, the blanket residency-restriction by law makes it difficult to track sex offenders to offer them the help needed, restricting where they can live thereby making them a potential threat to the safety of the public making the banishment of sex offenders pointless according to the title of the article.

This issue actually is very relevant to me. After learning of the tragic death of Reagan Tokes by a convicted sex offender, my roommates and I took it upon ourselves to look up how many registered sex offenders lived nearby our apartment, here off campus in Columbus. The number was astronomically high, and truthfully kind of scared each of us. Thus, I did not respond greatly to this news, it made me uncomfortable and uneasy to think about someone like that living so close to me.

check-ins with their parole officer. The sex offender’s registry is a monitoring system that tracks the location of sexual predators when they move into or out of a community. This system is a way to give the community sufficient warning that a sex offender is in the neighborhood, and to be on guard. Although we can’t keep sex offenders from living among us, we can take steps to protect ourselves and our families. Prevention is key to protecting ourselves from these people.

Critics often argue that notification is a form of double jeopardy through which a criminal suffers punishment twice for the same crime. However, this is a gross misunderstanding of the law. The intent of the law is not to inflict additional harm on the offender. Rather, it is to provide a crucial service for the public. It is true that released sex offenders may be inconvenienced by Megan's Law, but this is merely a side-effect of protecting our children and not a deliberate method of additional punishment. And let us think about the individuals who are adversely affected by Megan's Law, for it applies only to those individuals who have committed multiple acts of violent molestation. Thus, Megan's Law is aimed squarely at those who pose a clear and present danger to their community, and it directly and effectively reduces the chances that these select "high risk" individuals will harm children.