Friends of Justice

“Recidivism rates — the rates at which juvenile sex offenders re-offend — are so low as to be indistinguishable from the rate that non-offenders offend. But that’s not what the public believes. Instead, it believes that juvenile sex ‘criminals’ (including a slew of teens who had consensual sex) can never stop pouncing.”

Read the article in Free Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy.

“There is something truly odious — “Scarlet Letter”-esque, one might say — about requiring people to bear, for their entire lives, this conspicuous badge of dishonor, whatever their prior crime (for which they have already been duly punished) may have been. And the fact that the category of “covered sex offenders” includes many thousands of people whose crime involved consensual sexual relations with an underage partner, in many cases when they themselves were teenagers, just serves to make it seem even more wildly disproportionate; the notion that this entire class is somehow predisposed to engage in child sex trafficking is nonsensical, and squarely at odds with the actual recidivism data.”

Read the article in the Washington Poist by David Post.

“And what is absolutely mind-blowing is that the SOR’s have been proven not to work, and they cost the taxpayers gobs of money (see reference ‘a’ above). But now that they’ve become institutionalized in the justice system, they’re a political football. Now we have lots of people whose livelihoods derive from the SOR’s, and an entire industry has built up around the maintenance and support of SOR’s (just like the prison system). To advocate sensible, logical approaches to the problem has become political suicide for the politicians and legislators.”

Read the full article by Phil Lcoke, Science and Technology Advisor, Ohio Innocence Project.

“Today, though, the town of Pahokee does more than tolerate the sex offender colony. It has come to embrace it. And nowhere is that turnaround more evident than at the United Methodist Church, where many offenders attend service.”

Read the full article by Anne Schindler in First Coast News.

“Travis Russ is founder and artistic director at Life Jacket Theatre, an “investigative theater” company based in New York City. He and creative partner Amelia Parenteau came to Pahokee for a week in October to conduct hours of interviews. Those will be transcribed into verbatim scripts, and eventually performed at their Off-Broadway theatre.”

Read the full article by Anne Schindler in First Coast News.

“And then there are the patent absurdities created by such laws—signs that legislators, in search of novel ways to torture so-called sex offenders, have abandoned consideration of efficacy or justice. In the case of underage sexting, for instance, a person is both offender and victim at the same time.”

Read the full article by Judith Levine in Boston Review.

“I’ve said it many times before — these sex offender cases are of the deepest importance, not because of any special concern we might have for convicted sex offenders but because they’re the despised minority du jour, subject to the harshest treatment that legislators and law enforcement officials can dream up, and unless the courts stand up and make it clear that there are lines the government cannot cross without running afoul of the Constitution, government action will become more and more abusive, and then all of our rights are at risk. A shame that the NC court didn’t view things that way.”

Read the op-ed by David Post in the Washington Post.