The Sex MonSTer: - John Jay College Of Criminal Justice - CUNY

506 Abby stein, ph.d.
prosecuted in criminal court. On the other hand, less invasive sexual
crimes committed by strangers, such as public masturbation or lewd language
directed at a minor, are often reported to the police and prosecuted,
and many low-level offenders are placed on sex offender registries.
Community notification laws mandate that information regarding
the location of registered sex offenders be made available to the public.
In some states, information is broadly disseminated to the public and the
media, whereas in other states the privacy of offenders is more protected.
In some states, sex offenders are designated as such on their driver’s licenses
even if their crimes were committed as juveniles. Disturbing responses
to what is perceived as a spike in sex crimes, but what more
likely reflects a trend in increased reporting, have emerged in many
states.
Although 10% of the 63,000 sex offenders on Texas’s registry are violent
predators, the other 56,700 consist of young boyfriends of girls not
yet 17 (the age of consent in Texas), mentally retarded offenders who
have exposed themselves, people possessing graphic drawings (not photographs)
of naked children, vagrants who have urinated in public, and
even teens caught “sexting” nude pictures of themselves to friends. Registrants
are barred from living near schools, parks, and homes with young
children (including their own) without regard to the specific nature of
their convictions.
In 2006, the General Assembly of the State of Georgia passed House
Bill 1059, a law that made it illegal for a sex offender to live or work in
Georgia (Geraghty, 2007). Attempts to remove low-level offenders from
the state registry, including those convicted of statutory rape, have all
failed. The state’s plan to force the mass evacuation of 12,000 registered
offenders, including some in nursing homes or hospice, has been delayed
through the intervention of the Southern Human Rights Center and
the American Civil Liberties Union, who filed suit against the State of
Georgia. The outcome of the lawsuit is still uncertain.
Although sexual homicides are very rare, they have always received
outsized attention and resulted in extralegal remedies. Although the first
sexual psychopath law, passed in Michigan in 1937, was soon found unconstitutional,
a raft of similar laws allowing the indefinite civil commitment
of offenders following the completion of their prison terms have
survived legal challenges throughout the 1990s, despite the fact that they
place offenders who have already done their time in double jeopardy
(Zilney & Zilney, 2009). More worrisome is the fact that many of the
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