Do Sex Offender Registries Inhibit Violent Sex Offenders from Striking Again?

People are given a false sense of security if they think that being tracked on a sex offender registry will in any way, shape, or form discourage a sex offender from striking again, especially if the sex offender is a psychopath. A psychopathic sex offender either simply does not care about hurting other people (lacks connecting with a working conscience) or actually enjoys inflicting pain upon his victims as he rapes and tortures them. So a sex offender registry is not an effective deterrent to prevent sex offenders from striking again.

A sex offender registry is designed to track sex offenders and warn citizens of the local presence of a sex offender, not to punish sex offenders or inhibit sex offenders from committing new crimes. It is a tool used by police and detectives to track the sex offenders in the case of new crimes. A sex offender registry is a tool for citizens to use to track sex offenders in their neighborhood or city so that they can get a realistic picture of the amount of sexual predators out there and attempt to guard and protect their loved ones and children by taking appropriate actions.

Appropriate actions would include not allowing your children or teenagers to stand at a bus stop alone, not allowing children to bike ride alone in areas with sex offenders, and not leaving children alone with sex offenders. It is unwise to allow children or teenagers to be friends or acquaintances with sex offenders. It would also be unwise to become intimately involved or married to a sex offender. People do it all the time, but it is simply not wise.

To a sex offender, a sex offender registry is similar to when the teacher writes the misbehaving or bad child's name on the board. A sex offender registry is simply a track record. We all know from past experience, that when a child got his name on the board, only the children with working consciences cared and stopped. However, some children could care less and would continue to misbehave until they got a few more Xs beside their name and then they were sent out of the classroom. Eventually these resistant children might go on to get expelled from school because they simply weren't doing what was allowed and were dragging the other students down or distracting the other students.

Some sex offenders state that sex offender registries harm their self-esteem and self-image because they "feel bad" about themselves due to the label which could lead to them committing more crimes. This is actually not very logical. If a person decides not to do something anymore-truly decides, not a promise or a hope-then they stop.

For instance, if I eat a mushroom out of a package and it gave me food poisoning. Would I eat another mushroom from the same package again? No. If I had decided that I either did not like the mushroom or truly did not like the results of eating the mushroom from that package, regardless of how it tasted, I would not eat more mushrooms in that package. There have been many cases of people who have a spouse that pressures them or bribes them to quit smoking, but they don't and appear to be truly unable. Then after their spouse dies or divorces them, this same person who formerly could not quit smoking, will quit cold turkey to catch their new love interest.

Furthermore, one must keep in mind that sex offenders usually enjoyed committing their crime. This is really hard for the "normal" or more psychologically healthy person to fully comprehend; however, rapists or child molesters enjoy raping and enjoy harming their victims-they keep on raping and molesting despite the screams and tears and fighting victims. We must remember that a sex offender did not care about the victim or their pain or their feelings or their future. So even if the sex offender did not like spending time in prison, the prison experience alone will not make the sex offender stop enjoying the actual experience of committing sex crimes and stop their actual sexual arousal when inflicting pain and suffering on another person during a sex crime. When people understand this clearly, maybe we will see longer sentences for sex offenders. It is very simple really, if you remove the sex offenders from mixing with the general population, then they cannot commit any new sex crimes in the general population.

Sources:

FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation,Background on the National Sex Offender Registry, US Department of Justice

SMART: Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking, United States Department of Justice Nation Sex Offender Public Website, Department of Justice