Sex Offender Registry: Good or Bad?

Millions of parents, employers, and others are concerned about sex offenders living in their neighborhoods. It is imperative that a citizen has the right to find identifying location information on sex offenders where they reside, work, and go to school.

There is a debate on Forbes about sex offender registries value and whether or not they actually protect citizens.

Understand that a sex predator is “normal”. It’s their version of normal. It’s the way they are wired. This breed of human may look like you and I, they often appear to act like us, but their thought process is one that differs significantly from ours. They have an entirely different set of boundaries that doesn’t equate to what most people agree to as proper. Talk to any psychologist or psychiatrist and they will tell you there are many versions of what normal is.

Sex offender registries have been around for over a decade and are often decentralized public and private resources.

For more than 50 years, states like California have required sex offenders to register with their local law enforcement agencies. However, information on the whereabouts of these sex offenders was not available to the public until the implementation of the Child Molester Identification Line in July 1995. The information available was further expanded by California’s Megan’s Law in 1996 (Chapter 908, Stats. of 1996). Since that time sex offender registries have popped up in every state and federally.

Some argue that people who end up on the different registries that were accused of crimes such as urinating in public, or an 18 year old having consensual sex with a 17 year old is a reason why the sex offender registries need to be abolished. I agree that laws need to be revamped and some sex offenders need to be re-categorized, But the mere fact that we have hundreds of thousands of living breathing predators in our midst, it’s definitely necessary to take a head count and keep tabs on their whereabouts.

Robert Siciliano is a Personal Security Expert and Adviser to Intelius.com. For more information see Intelius at Sex Offender Check to reduce your chances of encountering a bad guy. See him discussing sex offenders on CBS Boston. (Disclosures)