Halloween and the Absurd Sex Offender Roundups

Even more predictable than Jersey Shore costumes this Halloween was the wave of paranoid, misdirected policies claiming to protect kids from sex offenders. As they do every year, cities and towns across the country have been passing regulations restricting the movement of people convicted of sex offenses. And every year these policies are misdirected and counterproductive.

As kids head out to trick-or-treat across the U.S., they'll do so in a world made "safe" by adults -- which apparently entails requiring people convicted of prior sex offenses to stay home, skip any Halloween decorations and turn out the lights.

Scott Henson at Grits for Breakfast wrote a comprehensive summary of these ridiculous regulations and he finds plenty of fodder in Texas alone -- including El Paso, which is so pleased with its Halloween restrictions that it's thinking of extending the rules to Christmas.

Baltimore is among the dozens of cities that require registered offenders to post "NO CANDY" signs like a scarlet letter. Police officers across the country will be checking on registered sex offenders to make sure they're following the rules and countless local TV stations are pointing parents to state registry websites.

Grits also pointed to a Wall Street Journal op-ed by blogger Lenore Skenazy, where she writes that Halloween is among the safest days of the year -- in fact there has apparently only been one reported incident of a child abducted and molested on Halloween in U.S. history, in Wisconsin in 1973, and the perpetrator was not a convicted sex offender so strict regulations would have missed him.

These misguided Halloween restrictions demonstrate perfectly the problems with society's focus on sex offender registries. As Grits points out, 95 percent of sexual offenses are committed by first-time offenders, so registries direct 100 percent of our fear to 5 percent of the problem. Even worse, registries marginalize and publicly shame convicted offenders, regardless of whether their offense was a Romeo-Juliet relationship, indecent exposure or a violent sexual attack.

For people convicted of sexual assaults years ago but working to lead productive lives, sitting at home in the dark on Halloween doesn't help. And it doesn't make the world safer.

Photo Credit: Dryad & Sprite Photography