Illinois Bans Social Network Use By Sex Offenders

RobotsDinner writes "Illinois Governor Pat Quinn has signed into law a bill that bans all registered sex offenders from using social networks. '"Obviously, the Internet has been more and more a mechanism for predators to reach out," said Sen. Bill Brady (R-Bloomington), a sponsor of the measure and a governor candidate. "The idea was, if the predator is supposed to be a registered sex offender, they should keep their Internet distance as well as their physical distance."'"

Re:Social Networks?

[bky1701]

October 1998. [wikipedia.org]

What is a "sex offender" anyway?

[Manip]

"At least five states require registration for people who visit prostitutes, 29 require it for consensual sex between young teenagers and 32 require it for indecent exposure. Some prosecutors are now stretching the definition of âoedistributing child pornographyâ to include teens who text half-naked photos of themselves to their friends. For example, Janet Allison was found guilty of being âoeparty to the crime of child molestationâ because she let her 15-year-old daughter have sex with a boyfriend. The young couple later married."

I'm glad you're banning all 600,000 people 2/3rds of which are said to be "no danger" according to a state's own review board.

Re:Are there levels of Sexual Offence???

[Rosyna]

What happens when a 18 year-old is convicted for statutory rape of his 17 year-old girlfriend when they have consensual sex? He's now most likely a registered sex offender. Is he banned from Facebook?

Yes. He's labeled a sex offender for life, can't get a job, can't find a place to live and is banned from social networks like facebook.

America's unjust sex laws

[Mr_Blank]

From the most recent Economist [economist.com]

America's unjust sex laws

Aug 6th 2009
From The Economist print edition
An ever harsher approach is doing more harm than good, but it is being copied around the world

IT IS an oft-told story, but it does not get any less horrific on repetition. Fifteen years ago, a paedophile enticed seven-year-old Megan Kanka into his home in New Jersey by offering to show her a puppy. He then raped her, killed her and dumped her body in a nearby park. The murderer, who had recently moved into the house across the street from his victim, had twice before been convicted of sexually assaulting a child. Yet Megan's parents had no idea of this. Had they known he was a sex offender, they would have told their daughter to stay away from him.

In their grief, the parents started a petition, demanding that families should be told if a sexual predator moves nearby. Hundreds of thousands signed it. In no time at all, lawmakers in New Jersey granted their wish. And before long, "Megan's laws" had spread to every American state.

America's sex-offender laws are the strictest of any rich democracy. Convicted rapists and child-molesters are given long prison sentences. When released, they are put on sex-offender registries. In most states this means that their names, photographs and addresses are published online, so that fearful parents can check whether a child-molester lives nearby. Under the Adam Walsh Act of 2006, another law named after a murdered child, all states will soon be obliged to make their sex-offender registries public. Such rules are extremely popular. Most parents will support any law that promises to keep their children safe. Other countries are following America's example, either importing Megan's laws or increasing penalties: after two little girls were murdered by a school caretaker, Britain has imposed multiple conditions on who can visit schools.

Which makes it all the more important to ask whether America's approach is the right one. In fact its sex-offender laws have grown self-defeatingly harsh (see article). They have been driven by a ratchet effect. Individual American politicians have great latitude to propose new laws. Stricter curbs on paedophiles win votes. And to sound severe, such curbs must be stronger than the laws in place, which in turn were proposed by politicians who wished to appear tough themselves. Few politicians dare to vote against such laws, because if they do, the attack ads practically write themselves.

A Whole Wyoming of Offenders

In all, 674,000 Americans are on sex-offender registries--more than the population of Vermont, North Dakota or Wyoming. The number keeps growing partly because in several states registration is for life and partly because registries are not confined to the sort of murderer who ensnared Megan Kanka. According to Human Rights Watch, at least five states require registration for people who visit prostitutes, 29 require it for consensual sex between young teenagers and 32 require it for indecent exposure. Some prosecutors are now stretching the definition of "distributing child pornography" to include teens who text half-naked photos of themselves to their friends.

How dangerous are the people on the registries? A state review of one sample in Georgia found that two-thirds of them posed little risk. For example, Janet Allison was found guilty of being "party to the crime of child molestation" because she let her 15-year-old daughter have sex with a boyfriend. The young couple later married. But Ms Allison will spend the rest of her life publicly branded as a sex offender.

Several other countries have sex-offender registries, but these are typically held by the police and are hard to view. In America it takes only seconds to find out about a sex offender: some states have a "click to print" icon on their websites so that concerned citizens can put up posters wit

The Economist this week

[g8oz]

On the cover of the Economist this week:

America's Unfair Sex Laws
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14164614 [economist.com]

The one story of the woman classified as a sex offender for performing oral sex as a teenager is unbelievable.
It's hard to argue that at the very least a threat level classification for sex offenders wouldn't be a good idea

Re:This is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the rates are not "unfortunately high" compared to other offenders. Any serious examination of re-arrest rates for sex offenders will show that the rates are actually lower.

See the Bureau of Justice Statistics, for example (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/press/rsorp94pr.htm)

Re:Why are sex offenders treated worse than murder

[geekoid]

in your scenario, they would still be a sex offender.
Just sayin'

Re:This is stupid

[schon]

The re-offense rate for sex offenders is unfortunately high.

[citation needed]

I would like to point out that someone has posted recidivism rate for sex offenders is 5% [usdoj.gov], whereas the recidivism rate for *all* violent offence is 62% [happinessonline.org].

Please either cite your source, or admit that you are wrong.

Re:Punishment doesn't fit the Crime

[gad_zuki!]

>What's wrong with this picture?

Other than urination in public isnt a sex crime in Illinois?

I live in Illinois and have done searches on sex offenders near me, and none of the charges are remotely comparable to your example. Lots of sexual assualt on a minor. A lot. At least half of them and Im not talking 19 yo guy with 17 year girl, but someone with a 10 or 11 year old. Illinois lists the ages of the victims. The rest are regular sexual assault and a few rape charges here and there.

While I have mixed feelings about sexual registrtion in general, I do not see it as the weirdo legal dystopia you suggest it is, at least in my state.

Re:Incoming 1st Amendment Challenge

[mftb]

It's rape if one of the partners doesn't consent or if it's a situation in which statutory rape applies, of which the situation described betterunixthanunix's post is a type.

Here's the Economist article.

[Dr. Manhattan]

Illiberal Politics: America's Unjust Sex Laws [economist.com].

Re:Incoming 1st Amendment Challenge

[QuantumRiff]

My favorite. Oral sex and Sodomy used to be considered illegal in some states. Some people are on the list because of that, even though those laws are all gone now, they were on the list, and were grandfathered in. (don't want to look soft on child molesters, do we)..

Not to mention, the rules keep changing, after their conviction, which seems a little unfair.. Think of the republicans the bitch that congress keeps changing the rules for accepting TARP money.. yet many of them are all for this...

Re:Why are sex offenders treated worse than murder

[ukyoCE]

You're raising two different (valid) questions.

One is "why are sex offenders treated worse than murderers". The answer is because *some* types of sex offenders have an extremely high recidivism rate. They're very likely to commit repeat offenses, while *most* murderers are not.

If you're thinking "why are we letting criminals that are almost guaranteed to continue to commit crimes out of jail?", you're probably right.

Your second question is "why are public urination, consumption of porn, and other passive acts categorized together with rape and molestation?"

I don't have a good answer for that one, but it is clearly absurd. Something needs to be done to differentiate the recidivist and harmful crimes from the minor ones and punish the two independently.

Re:Those are old and short-horizoned

[ring-eldest]

10 years? Here you go.

http://voice-of-reason.pbworks.com/f/CA-Ten%20year%20recidivism%20study%20CDCR%206-17-08.pdf [pbworks.com]

We bounce these guys back to jail for nitpicky violations of parole pretty much exclusively. A 3.38% cumulative recidivism rate for sex offenses is INSANELY low. The odds are probably much better that a slashdotter will commit a sex crime during that same time period.

betterunixthanunix (980855) is willfully spreading misinformation either because he's a massive idiot or because he has some kind of agenda.

Re:Punishment doesn't fit the Crime

[ArsonSmith]

Funny, my insurance company hit a registry that had my driving record.

No so ineffective after all

[cdrguru]

I see a lot of comments about how effective this could be - like with the offender just making up a screen name and lying about his status.

Sorry, won't work. Most sex offenders have mandatory logging on all Internet activity. So if the law says they can't have a MySpace account and the log shows they are going to MySpace - BUSTED. And that likely as not is a violation of their parole, so it is back to prison.

Sex offenders have pretty much zero civil rights today. Your actions online are monitored and if you tamper with the monitoring you are violated. If the monitoring (which is collected remotely) shows you are doing something wrong, you are violated. There are really few differences between life in prison and life for a sex offender on the street today.

And the registration laws make it even more interesting. You might as well just have people wear a bright yellow star on their clothes to indicate their status as an outcast. Oh, I guess that has been tried before. It did seem to work for a while, but only for a while.

Maybe we can get a country set aside for sex offenders.

Re:This is incorrect

[Sandbags]

You're correct. There are a rare few sexual offenders who repeat. However, within certain small bands of sexual offenders (child molesters, aggrevated rapists, certain types of stalkers, etc) there are chemical or phychological imbalances that make it far more likely.

I think the reason a 5% repeat rate is thorwon out there is partly to convince the public these released felons may not be as much of a risk as the public would like to believe, and also that this number is skewed by "sexual offences" that really are not (streaking, sex in public, pissing in the woods, etc). I live near a beach resort. You would not believe how many people are completely shocked to find out their life is ruined and they're being added to sexual offender lists because they got caught getting frisky in the waves at 2AM. If people knew what the punishment was, they probably would not have done it, and trust me, those who do never will again, and that's considering most never see a night in prison, potentially accepting a night or two in holding before seeing a judge.

Re:This is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with this is that they simply don't.

Repeated studies show that sex offenders are much LESS likely than other types of criminals to repeat their crimes. These studies include the US DOJ, several states DOJ and several European countries

However, in a twist of logic, they do point out that sex offenders ARE more likely than other criminals (robbery, assault, fraud etc) to be re-convicted of a SEX crime.

So, sex criminals are much less likely to be re-convicted of the same crime, but are more likely than the average burglar, to be re-convicted of a sex crime.

It is worth pointing out that violent rapists of adults are by a large margin, the MOST likely to re-commit sex crimes (having absolutely nothing to do with children).

And this is how statistics have been contorted to have people believe that sex criminals are slobbering monsters. Frankly, more than two thirds will never be re-convicted. Can we really justify throwing away the key on the whole group?

Re:Incoming 1st Amendment Challenge

[StrategicIrony]

One of the big issues is that sex offender registries have been challenged in the past and were held enforceable under the premise that they are SOLELY FOR NOTIFICATION PURPOSES. The supreme court specifically said that they are not punitive in nature and therefore are allowed, but cannot be applied in a punitive way.

I really don't see how this will fly.

There are two classes of "convicts" that are still under the guise of the justice system. Those incarcerated and those on parole/probation.

The third category of "released, but registered" doesn't really exist and won't withstand a constitutional challenge. The Supreme Court narrowly allowed public registries, purely on the grounds that it was "informational".

Re:Those are old and short-horizoned

[ring-eldest]

I meant OriginalSolver (552648)... God, I'm sorry betterunixthanunix. :( Stupid cut-and-paste happy fingers.

What is a Sex Offender in Illinois?

[Velcroman98]

I knew a gal in an apartment I lived in (in Phoenix) who once flashed er boobs to a couple of adult males (I missed 'em). The manager called the police and they charged her with a sex crime. I spoke with her about a year later, she was homeless and living on the street or with any guy that would let her stay. After the flashing and sex crime she was thrown out of the apartment. No other apartment in Phoenix would rent to her because of the crime free lease addendums.

How many other stories are there about people getting charged with a sex crime for taking a leak outside?

If this gets enforced strickly, how many people will have to log-off? Is Slashdot considered a social network site?