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Sex registry wrongly labels children

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The goal of the sex registry is to prevent sexual assault, but it is not working, according to a Reason Magazine article by Lenore Skenazy. A child is more likely to end up on a sex registry than to be molested by someone on it.
“Only a tiny fraction of sex crimes against children are committed by people who are on the registry,” according to George Mason University sociologist Roger Lancaster, author of Sex Panic and the Punitive State.

Lancaster was cited in Reason Magazine , saying about 5 percent of people on the list go on to commit another crime, a far lower recidivism rate than most classes of criminal, including drug dealers, arsonists and muggers.
This is well known among academics, according to Lancaster, as “40-50 studies have come to the same conclusion.”
What is not commonly known, however, is “The single age with the greatest number of offenders [on the Sex Registry] from the perspective of law enforcement was age 14,” according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.
“Only a tiny fraction of sex crimes against children are committed by people who are on the registry”
Kids can end up branded for life simply for horsing around. In New Jersey, two 14-year-olds lost an appeal to be removed from the registry for pulling down their pants and sitting on the faces of two 12-year-old boys. “I thought it was funny,” said one.
While the NJ appeals court sympathized with the boys, they upheld putting the boys on the registry for life as “mandated by the legislature.”
Once on the Sex Registry, a person has numerous restrictions on jobs and movement and can’t live near a school, park or playground.
The courts impose these requirements on the “flawed but pervasive idea that those convicted of sex offenses become incurable and predatory monsters requiring – and deserving – lifetime punishment,” asserts Emily Horowitz, a professor of sociology at St. Francis College and author of two books on this subject.
If the Sex Registry were to disappear, all other criminal laws would still apply – including stiffer penalties for repeat offenses, but the life-long stigma would disappear.
As a “crime-fighting tool [it] is not doing the job,” said Lenore Skenazy of Reason Magazine.

San Quentin News & Wall City Merchandise

Prison reform could free 30,000 inmates says CSJ

FBI Stings entangle victims and perpetrators


https://sanquentinnews.com/states-sex-offender-registry-low-recidivism-rate/

Wrongfully convicted of a sex crime cleared after eight years


Boatwright
 

FBI Stings entangle victims and perpetrators

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Justicia rota

Justicia rota

Under the guise of stopping sexual predators and human trafficking, the FBI coordinates annual sting operations with local law enforcement agencies. 

The FBI states its “primary goal is to recover children” through Operation Cross Country (OCC), an operation it has conducted for over a decade.

The line between victim, bystander or perpetrator is blurry for these operations, states Reason Magazine.

“The vice agents pretty much just took me to my parent’s house and dropped me off,” said a 17-year-old when swept up in OCC. “Never offered any counseling, any emotional/physical support. They just wanted to get me out of their way.”

When the agents realized she was only 17, they converted her from prostitute to “victim” in their tally and simply took her home.

Swept up again in the 2017 OCC, having turned 18, she was arrested for prostitution (a misdemeanor) and possessing a small quality of marijuana (a felony in her state).

“I’m a single mother with a felony and I will be labeled as a loser and a whore for the rest of my life,” she said. 

The young women’s actual experience stands in contrast to FBI Director Christopher Wray’s announcement of OCC XI results as it “isn’t just about taking traffickers off the street. It’s about making sure we offer help and a way out to these young victims who find themselves caught in a vicious cycle of abuse.”

“Mere months ago, she was being exploited. Today, for the same behavior, she’s a criminal,” concluded Elizabeth Nolan Brown, Reason Magazine’s associate editor.

While 2016’s OCC X resulted in the arrest of nearly 1,000, fewer than a dozen were booked on federal charges. None of these federal charges involved children being sex trafficked by force or threat, according toReason Magazine. This result compares to an average of more than 7,000 felony charges of all types per month in Los Angeles County.

Not all federal programs have such results. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children says law-enforcement agencies have identified at least 9,400 juvenile victims of online sexual exploitation since 2013. In the preceding decade, there were about 5,000 such identifications, which officials call “rescues” because the children are often removed from abusive environments, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Based on work by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), agent, Jim Cole, ICE founded a victim identification program outside Washington with a high-tech computer lab, where analysts digest tips, examine evidence and send reports to the field.

The effort has earned praise from advocates and from victims and their families, who say survivors cannot begin to recover until they are discovered.

“The psychological injuries are lifelong and affect their functioning in family life, work life, everything,” said Carol Hepburn, a lawyer who has represented more than a dozen people who were sexually exploited as children. “It means so much to the families and the victims to know that law enforcement had been looking for them. Jim has been a big part of that effort.”

“We had been approaching this all wrong,” said Cole, a former policeman and U.S. Army intelligence officer. “I saw how impactful this all was, how much they appreciated how hard we tried to find her [a victim]. I realized we need to be looking at these cases in a victim-centered way. I also thought it would not only help us find the victims, but also the abuser.”

According to Cole, identifying the victims had multiple benefits. The children got badly needed psychological support, they were removed from hostile environments, and the offenders were often apprehended.

Resilience: A key factor in growth

Deportation Crimes Explained

New Sex Offender Registry limits


Boatwright

News Quotes November 2017

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FATE v. WISDOM


 

“There were more than 61,250 technical parole violators in 42 state prison systems as of early 2017,”reports The Marshall Project. Seven states, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, New York and Pennsylvania, have more technical violators than the remaining 35 states combined. ttp:/www.themarshallproject.org/2017/04/23

 Los Angeles Police Department doled out almost $81 million dollars in the last fiscal year to settle high-profile lawsuits, the Los Angeles Times reported.

http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-in-lapd-litigation-costs-20170509-story-html

Intimate partner violence accounts for 15 percent of all violent crime. One in three women and one in four men in the United States has experienced some form of physical violence by an intimate partner. Husbands are five times more likely to kill wives than vice versa. A third of female homicide victims are killed by an intimate male partner or ex-partner, according to FBI reports. http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ndv0312.pdf

“It’s so much more comfortable to fear the unknown, the stranger, but that doesn’t fit the facts. Depending on the age of the child, between 90 and 99 percent of those who sexually molest children are the friend, the acquaintance, the family member,” says Sandy Rozek, spokeswoman for the National Association for Rational Sexual Offense Laws in “We all scream for the ice cream man’s head” by Lenore Skenazy in Reason magazine June 2017.

“Police departments in 13 of the 25 largest U.S. cities did not post their (operating and use-of-force) procedures online.”

“The Opaque Blue Line” by C.J. Ciaramella in Reason magazine May 2017

“It’s not a coincidence that Louisiana also has the highest incarceration level in the country and the second-highest wrongful conviction rate, according to the National Registry of Exonerations,” concluded Reason. According to Reason, 85 percent of criminal defendants in Louisiana qualified for a public defender in 2016. Due to a lack of resources, 33 of the state’s 42 public defender offices began turning away cases.

“The Disappearing Sixth Amendment” by C.J. Ciaramella in Reason magazine June 2017

“Securus (phone and video conferencing for prisons) will oversee 2.4 million video calls this year (2017), two-thirds of them remote, i.e., paid. Rates vary by jail (most are county jails), from $5 to $12.99 for a 20-minute call and, in at least one jail, $40 for 40 minutes,” said Securus Chief Executive Officer Richard Smith to Bloomberg. 

BUSINESSWEEK.com Oct. 9, 2017 

Securus now controls about a third of the video market.

“Half of the state’s foster-care population is made up of children with opioid-addicted parents,” reports Bloomberg according to Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, a Republican. 

BUSINESSWEEK.com Oct. 9, 2017

States seeking lethal injection cocktails from black market

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Lethal injection chair in Texas’ Huntsville Penitentiary

Some states have turned to the black market to obtain scarce lethal injection drugs that have caused botched executions, according to www.Reason.com.

According to the report by C.J. Ciaramella, investigative journalists found that, “these states have turned to untraceable cash transactions, unregulated pharmacies, and overseas scammers to buy drugs to fill the veins of condemned inmates.”

Some experimental combinations have even resulted in botched executions.

Further complicating the matter, Virginia and 14 other states have passed secrecy laws that may hide the identities of pharmacies that provide death penalty drugs.

“Even in the cocaine and crack days, people didn’t die like this.” THE WALL STREET JOURNAL 12-18-17  Cmdr. Thomas Fallon of Hamilton County, Ohio on opioid epidemic.

“Officials argue such secrecy keeps the flow of necessary drugs unimpeded—but it also leaves death row inmates, their lawyers, the press, and the public in the dark about how governments are wielding the gravest of their powers,” Ciaramella reported.

Some other findings:

In an attempt to avoid leaving a paper trail, an Oklahoma state official drove across state lines and purchased execution drugs from a pharmacy using petty cash.

Despite a U.S. Food and Drug Administration ban on importing sodium thiopental, the active ingredient in executions, three states paid an India company, Harris Pharma, run by a man with no pharmaceutical background, to send the drugs to them.

More than one-third of the national’s 9 percent increase in homicides occurred  in Chicago. “Homicides Are a Neighborhood Problem” THE NEW YORK TIMES 12-28-17

Nebraska ordered $54,000 worth of the drug from Harris—enough to perform 300 executions. The FDA confiscated the shipment, leaving Nebraskan taxpayers on the hook.

Due to the difficulty of obtaining Midazolam and sodium thiopental. Nebraska is looking into using a never-before-tried mix of four drugs: diazepam (Valium), potassium chloride, cisatracurium besylate (a paralytic, banned for animal euthanasia) and fentanyl citrate, the super-strong opiate responsible for a wave of overdoses in the U.S.

Death Row inmate freed after serving more than 25 years

Detailed report about prison healthcare

Overburdened public defenders

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“You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided to you.”

We have all heard the Miranda rights promise more times than we can count, either when catching a case or on TV where cop shows dominate. They always arrest their man and promise a fair trial.

The police arrested Shondel Church for felony theft in 2016. They read his Miranda rights and his Missouri public defender said his case was winnable. All he had to do was wait six months in county jail for his defender to prepare his case. After three months in jail, without a job and away from his family, he took a plea deal, reports Reason Magazine.

Arguing that Missouri’s public defenders are so inadequate as to violate poor residents’ constitutional rights, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal class action lawsuit in March, according to Reason.

The reality of the criminal justice system rarely matches the intent of the Supreme Court’s 1963 Gideon v. Wainwright decision or the Constitution’s promise of a fair trial wherein the Sixth Amendment guarantees a right to effective legal counsel.

This chronic under-funding of public defender services is nationwide. Colorado has 370 attorneys handling more than 80,000 cases a year. A 2014 study by the American Bar Association (ABA) found that 97 percent of the Missouri public defenders failed to meet the ABA’s recommended minimum hours to effectively represent their clients.

Justicia rota

Justicia rota

According to Reason, 85 percent of criminal defendants in Louisiana qualified for a public defender in 2016. Due to a lack of resources, 33 of the state’s 42 public defender offices began turning away cases.

“It’s not a coincidence that Louisiana also has the highest incarceration level in the country and the second-highest wrongful conviction rate, according to the National Registry of Exonerations,” concluded Reason.

Unlike a TV drama, if your choice is between waiting in jail or trusting a chronically over-committed court-appointed attorney to defend you, winning is not an option.

http://sanquentinnews.com/optionb-org-support-group-overcoming-effects-incarceration/
Boatwright

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