Sex Offender Registry Research Paper

In 1989, an eleven year old Jacob Wetterling was suddenly abducted as him and his brother were walking home from a convenience store one night. An anonymous, masked man had come up to the two boys and told them to lay down on the ground, while he held a gun to their heads. The man proceeded by examining each of the boy’s faces and then told Jacob’s brother to leave immediately or be shot; Jacob was then never to be seen again soon after the man had abducted him. The horrific abduction was quickly responded to by the US Congress with the Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act, which required each state to create a public sex offender registry, due to the likely impetus for Jacob’s abduction . …show more content…
In a 2005 study, Richard Tewsbury, from the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, concluded that “47 percent of 121 sex offenders reported they’d been harassed as a result of being on the state registry” (Yoder “Life on the list”). According to this statistic, almost half of all sex offenders are getting harassed due to the sex offender registry. These statistics also reveal how useless the sex offender registry really is since citizens do not even use the list for its intended purposes, instead they attack and torment small-time and serious sex offenders alike. Such incident occurred in April 2010 when “ a man used a printout from California’s sex-offender registry to try and rob the homes of two registered sex offenders in Grover Beach” (Yoder “Life on the list). This attempt to carry out a robbery additionally shows how the frequent exploitation of sex offenders, as their names and addresses are readily available to the public. If the sex offender registry was non-existent, it would prevent thousands of people in the US from being unjustly harassed or singled out for their past actions. The presence of a registry only creates an archive of potential targets for extreme vigilantes or burglaries. The registry also becomes an ineffective sources when in public, as memorizing all sex-offender faces would amount to an impossible task. The sex offender registry only provides for a free listing of all people who could be potential targets to harassment or some sort of

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