Sex Offender Law and the Geography of Victimization

December 2014:

Abstract:
Sex offender laws that target recidivism (e.g., community notification and residency restriction regimes) are premised — at least in part — on the idea that sex offender proximity and victimization risk are positively correlated.

We examine this relationship by combining past and current address information of registered sex offenders (RSOs) with crime data from Baltimore County, Maryland, to study how crime rates vary across neighborhoods with different concentrations of resident RSOs.

Contrary to the assumptions of policymakers and the public, we find that, all else equal, reported sex offense victimization risk is generally (although not uniformly) lower in neighborhoods where more RSOs live.

This paper is seriously flawed in a few respects: 1) There are zero studies showing RSOs chose a location to commit another offense based on where other RSOs live; the assumption is absurd. 2) The Dep't of Justice has already shown that over 93% of of sex offenses are caused by people within the daily lives of the victim. Many if not most of the assumptions made in this paper would not support the findings of the DOJ in the largest victim offender study ever performed (See here). 3) The study of before and after recidivism rates and the start of registries have not shown any increase in recidivism rates; public knowledge of where RSOs lived has not affected recidivism or victimization rates. And there is more if you read the paper, nothing location wise syncs with known studies.

To further probe the relationship between where RSOs live and where sex crime occurs, we consider whether public knowledge of the identity and proximity of RSOs may make offending in those areas more difficult for (or less attractive to) all potential sex offenders.

We exploit the fact that Maryland’s registry became searchable via the Internet during our sample period to investigate how laws that publicly identify RSOs may change the relationship between the residential concentration of RSOs and neighborhood victimization risk.

Surprisingly, for some categories of sex crime, notification appears to increase the relative risk of victimization in neighborhoods with greater concentrations of RSOs. ..Source.. by Amanda Y. Agan, Princeton University and J.J. Prescott, University of Michigan Law School