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55 Crim. L.Q. 188 (2009-2010)
Sex Offender Registries: Labelling Folk Devils

handle is hein.journals/clwqrty55 and id is 190 raw text is: Sex Offender Registries: Labelling Folk Devils Vanessa Amyot* 1. Introduction There is no crime more abhorrent or more shocking to the public than a sex crime. When the victim is a child, public outrage is all the greater. The criminal justice system has developed various means of dealing with offenders of this kind: one of the most recent is the sex offender registry. This measure is often coupled with laws allowing the police to notify the public of the offender's presence in the community. Offender databases are meant to help police to prevent and solve crime by tracking the whereabouts of released sex offenders; they are also intended to deter recidivism by subjecting the offender to increased scrutiny. And the notification provisions are a means of warning the public of the offender's presence so that they may exercise increased vigilance. However, there is mounting evidence suggesting that these laws are not effective in attaining their objectives; in fact, many critics maintain that they actually achieve results opposite to those intended. This is partly because the motivation for the passage of these laws is typically political; the sense of moral panic caused by high-profile sex crimes against children is usually the real driving force behind them. In Canada, we can see this dynamic clearly in the sequence of events leading from the murder of Christopher Stephenson to the creation of the provincial and federal sex offender registries. Following a brief review of the relevant literature, this article will trace the history of sex offender registries and notification laws from their inception in the United States to their widespread adoption in the 1990s and their fairly recent * 2009 J.D. graduate, Osgoode Hall Law School. This paper was originally written for the intensive program in criminal law taught by Professor James Stribopoulos.

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