Should Juveniles be Included on Sex Offender Registries?

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Advocacy group Human Rights Watch issued a new report Wednesday discussing the many negative impacts—on children and society—of including juveniles on sex offender registries.

Following Wednesday’s story on this site about the report, “Raised on the Registry: The Irreparable Harm of Placing Children on Sex Offender Registries in the U.S.,” JJIE called three experts in the field to ask why including juvenile sex offenders in these registries may or may not make sense.

New Report Argues Registering Juvenile Sex Offenders Does More Harm Than Good

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A new report released by Human Rights Watch examines the impact of registering juveniles in sexual offender databases. “Raised on the Registry: The Irreparable Harm of Placing Children on Sex Offender Registries in the U.S.” argues that forcing youth sex offenders to be listed on such databases has a multitude of negative implications that may impede a young person’s ability to reform behaviors and engage in normal social activity. Sometimes, the report states, the restrictions on where a young sex offender may live, go to school and work are so severe that some juveniles are driven to commit suicide. According to the report, there is no “conclusive evidence” suggesting that registering young sex offenders reduces reported rates of sexual abuse. Furthermore, the authors of the report state that constant police monitoring and notification policies that require a young person to divulge their sexual offense histories are many times unnecessary, since the populations tend to have among the lowest levels of re-offending.

In Honor of Law Day, Organization Wants to Spread Word About ‘Youth Court’ Diversion Programs

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To celebrate Law Day -- an annual event, celebrated May 1, that is sponsored by the American Bar Association (ABA) -- the ABA teamed up with Global Youth Justice (GYJ) in an effort to help youth courts across more than 40 states launch 250 websites. According to the Global Youth Justice website, more than 1,400 juvenile justice programs utilizing youth or student courts have been set up worldwide. By 2020, GYJ aspires to have more than 1,800 youth and student courts established in all 50 states, with more than 200,000 young offenders annually referred to such juvenile diversion programs.

In seven years time, the GYJ wants almost 200,000 young people volunteering for local youth courts, with assistance from 27,000 adult volunteers and 4,5000 full-and-part-time professional staffers. Youth courts entail the training of young people to be judges, attorneys and jurors in low-level juvenile offender cases. According to an Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) JuvJust release, such programs “promote accountability, provide access to youth resources and model peer leadership” for young people.

Historic Juvenile Justice Reform Bill to Be Signed into Law Tomorrow in Georgia

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Thursday, Gov. Nathan Deal is expected to sign House Bill 242 -- a sweeping juvenile justice reform package that also rewrites the state’s juvenile code-- in Dalton, Ga. Advocates have been calling for statewide juvenile justice reform for years, with some of the policies rewritten by HB 242 stretching back to the 1970s. Last year, Gov. Deal reassembled the state’s Special Council on Justice Reform – a body that had proposed recommendations that were adopted as new criminal justice reform laws a year earlier under the recently signed HB 349 -- to make recommendations for reforming the state’s juvenile justice system. A Special Council on Criminal Justice Reform for Georgians report released last December served as the backbone for HB 242, which was formally introduced to the Georgia House in early February by state representatives and state Senate sponsor Charlie Bethel, a Republican representing the state’s 54th district. “As Georgia moves forward with its juvenile reform effort, all credit goes to Gov. Deal and the General Assembly,” said Joe Vignati Justice Division administrator for the Governor’s Office for Children and Families.

OP-ED: The Gun Debate, Round 2: Let’s Learn From Young People, Not Demonize Them

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While investigating the “age-crime curve” literature, we discovered a crucial omission: decades of research associating adolescent age with more crime had failed to include the fact that adolescents and young adults — as a group and within every race and locale — suffer poverty rates double those of older adults. When we included poverty as a variable in arrest rates by age the age-crime curve disappeared, as did other supposed “adolescent risks.” Where 45-49 year-olds suffer the same high poverty levels as average 15-19 year-olds, middle-agers display “teenage” levels (or worse) of crime, gun violence, traffic crashes, etc. Conversely, where teens experience low poverty, they do not display “adolescent risks.”

Long-held beliefs that young age is a causal factor in crime and risky behavior appear to be a prejudice, like discredited past efforts to associate violence and race. Gun control is a critical example of how reasoned debate and policy are sabotaged by stigmas against youth. Round 1 of the latest debate was not about realities, but a recitation of myths about what leaders wanted gun violence to be: just a “youth” problem.