About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

7 JIJIS 143 (2007)
Growing Media and Legal Attention to Sex Offenders: More Safety or More Injustice

handle is hein.journals/jijis7 and id is 151 raw text is: GROWING MEDIA AND LEGAL ATTENTION TO SEX OFFENDERS: MORE SAFETY OR MORE INJUSTICE? Emily Horowitz St. Francis College Abstract Proposed new legislation addressed at policing sex offenders continues to spread throughout the United States. The fear of releasing convicted sex offenders from prison back into society without supervision has captured the attention of the state and public. The mainstream media, together with politicians in both parties, is pressing for these measures and the public generally supports these efforts. Politicians are aware that when a paroled offender commits a crime, particularly a paroled sex offender, the media blames legislators responsible for their release. Elected officials seen as soft on perverts will inevitably pay a political price. This paper provides evidence that the United States is in the grip of a media fixation and collective moral panic about sex offenders, and argues that many of the new legal remedies emerging from false fears, false assumptions, and hysteria are ineffective, costly, and an affront to civil liberties. Most troublingly, this context sets the stage for future miscarriages of justice, as individuals (including juveniles) accused of even minor sex crimes are subject to a rush to judgment, an inability to get a fair trial, and harsh, long-term penalties that can be disproportionate to the severity of the crime. Growing Media and Legal Attention to Sex Offenders: More Safety or More Injustice? Research Questions, Hypotheses, and Methods his paper asks the research questions of whether media coverage of sex offenses is excessive relative to their incidence, and whether newly enacted sex offender legislation is politically motivated rather than data-driven. To address the first research question, I examine the frequency of major newspaper coverage of sex offenders in the context of incident-based and self-reported sex offenses over the past two decades. Using the LexisNexis (2007) news database, I examined the frequency of news headlines with the terms sex offender and sex predator between 1996 and 2006. In order to analyze the rate trends of both reports and self-reports of rape, sexual assault, and child sexual abuse, I present crime statistics and survey data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and the Crimes against Children Research Center. To address the second research question, I analyze the policies and the accompanying political context of legal remedies aimed at addressing sex offenses and punishing sex offenders. The legal initiatives studied in this paper are state civil commitment laws, focusing on the debate surrounding the passage of the 2007 New York law, and the 2006 federal Adam Walsh Act requiring community notification and website registration for all types of sex offenders. This paper hypothesizes that an Direct correspondence to ehorowitz@stfranciscollege.edu © 2007 by the author, published here by permission The Journal of the Institute of Justice & International Studies Vol 7

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most