Public sex offender registries are unlikely to reduce sexual harm

What is it about?

Public sex offender registries are built on the premise that individuals with past sexual offense convictions pose a persistently elevated risk to public safety. Using comprehensive administrative data from a large, modern state registry, this study examines whether that premise holds as individuals age and remain offense-free in the community. Analyzing the full population of registrants living in the community, we find that sexual recidivism risk declines in systematic and predictable ways over time. When time offense-free is taken seriously, a striking result emerges: roughly half of people listed on public registries now present no greater risk of sexual offending than adult men in the general population. In practical terms, a substantial share of registrants are indistinguishable from nonregistrants with respect to future sexual offending risk. Importantly, these patterns reflect well-established processes of aging and desistance that appear across criminal justice contexts, including in jurisdictions without public notification systems. There is no reliable evidence that broad public registries themselves are responsible for these declines. Yet registries typically provide no meaningful way to differentiate genuinely high-risk cases from the much larger number of very low-risk individuals, relying instead on static offense-based classifications. Using Michigan’s registry as a case study, this research demonstrates at scale how contemporary registries obscure, rather than clarify, meaningful differences in risk. Our findings suggest that broad, offense-based public registries are poorly aligned with modern evidence on desistance and are unlikely to advance public safety. More targeted, dynamic, and evidence-based approaches to risk management are likely to be both more effective and less harmful.

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Photo by Wedding Dreamz on Unsplash

Photo by Wedding Dreamz on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Public sex offender registries are popular, but they rest on questionable assumptions. We had the opportunity to examine these assumptions during a court challenge that provided us to access to one complete registry (45,145 cases) for statistic analysis. We found that it contained many very low risk cases, and the it would be difficult for the public to use the information provided to make informed decisions that would protect them from sexual harm. Given the similarity of this specific registry to other registries in the US, the findings question whether public registries, as currently designed, are capable of delivering on their stated public safety goals.

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