SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES
Study: Sex offender registries don’t reduce crime
Aug 30, 2011, 8:15 AM | Updated: 2:07 pm
 Users can search the King County Sheriff’s Office’s online sex offender registry to locate offenders near them. (icrimewatch.net) |
Every state in the U.S. uses a sex offender registry, but a new study suggests the lists are not effective means of increasing public safety.
“It does look like in the aggregate, in the overall, it’s not necessarily reducing crime,” says Amanda Agan, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago, who studied the registries.
Agan tells 97.3 KIRO FM’s Ross and Burbank Show that she looked at the rate of rape instances in states and what happened before and after they had a registry.
“I found that the sex offenses, the rates of rape instances, did not decrease after we started the registries, and after we started public notifications via the internet,” she says.
Listen to interview: Researcher Amanda Agan – Sex Offender Registries Don’t Work
In the study, Agan says she also looked at data collected by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The information had details on individual sex offenders that upon release from prison, were tracked for three years.
“It just happened to be that some were released in states that had sex offender registries at the time, and some were not, but I found that being released into a state with a registry did not reduce the recidivism of those sex offenders,” says Agan. “They were just as likely to commit another sex crime after they were released from prison.”
Agan says she thinks it’s unlikely that any politician would step up to change the laws requiring registries, but that someone should be exploring how to make the system more effective.
“States have some flexibility in how they implement their registries currently. Some states register sex offenders for ten years, some for life. Some states only put their most violent criminals on the registry,” says Agan. “Nobody as far as I know has looked at how these different policies can affect the effectiveness of the registry.”
“Giving them [states] some more flexibility may actually help us understand what the best policy could be.”
Search the Washington state sex offender registry
By JAMIE GRISWOLD,MyNorthwest.com
