It's good to determine actual effects of policies, rather than assuming they will have a desired effect. I haven't read the actual studies themselves, but have to wonder: if registration doesn't deter them, what will?
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-eff ... -laws.html Studies question effectiveness of sex offender laws
Two studies in the latest issue of the Journal of Law and Economics cast doubt on whether sex offender registry and notification laws actually work as intended.
August 30, 2011
One study, by J.J. Prescott of the University of Michigan and Johan Rockoff of Columbia University, found that requiring sex offenders to register with police may significantly reduce the chances that they will re-offend. However the research also finds that making that same registry information available to the broader public may backfire, leading to higher overall rates of sex crime.
Meanwhile, another study by University of Chicago Ph.D. student Amanda Agan finds no evidence that sex offender registries are at all effective in increasing public safety.
Using data from 15 states over more than 10 years, Prescott and Rockoff examine the evolution of sex offense rates as states passed and began to enforce their registration and notification laws. Why would public notification encourage sex offenders to re-offend?
Agan tested whether registries discourage convicted offenders from re-offending. To do that, she looked at data on over 9,000 sex offenders released from prison in 1994. About half of those offenders were released into states where they needed to register, while the other half did not need to register. She could then compare crime rates in the two groups. She found little difference in the two groups' propensity to re-offend. In fact, those released into states without registration laws were slightly less likely to re-offend.
The studies (sorry, no links, just titles):
J.J. Prescott and Jonah E. Rockoff, "Do Sex Offender Registration and Notification Laws Affect Criminal Behavior?" Journal of Law and Economics 54:1
Amanda Y. Agan, "Sex Offender Registries: Fear without Function?" Journal of Law and Economics 54:1.
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This study can be pretty easily picked apart. In the old days, you had to do something pretty nasty to get registered as a sex offender, now I know one guy who had to register after drunkenly peeing in front of school age kids.
I am going to guess the old school bad boy offenders are going to keep doing sex crimes no matter if they have to register or not. All the people now getting busted by overzealous prosecuters never intended to commit sex crimes the first time and are unlikely to repeat them.
So I am going to guess that the chances of people committing new sex crimes will drop since your data pool is so much higher and many fewer actual pedophiles and rapists are included as a percentage of sex crime people.
Thomas Sowell: There are no solutions, just trade-offs.
