08/07/2011
By Derek W. Logue
INTRODUCTION
One of the most prevailing myths driving tougher sex offender legislation is the 100,000 missing sex offender myth. This article addresses the history of the myth, questions the accuracy of the myth, and explains what it really means to be “non-compliant.” This article also summarizes the few studies on this myth and determines the number of registrants who are truly “non-compliant."
- And John Walsh goes even further on this lie, saying the "100,000 missing" are Level 3 (The worse of the worst) offenders. Just lies on top of lies. See the video above for his lies.
ORIGIN OF THE 100,000 MISSING SEX OFFENDER MYTH
The perennial news and researcher eAdvocate accurately pinpointed the origin of the missing sex offender myth back in 2006 [1]. The group “Parents for Megan’s Law” (PFML) was credited in the national media back in February 2003 with determining there are over 100,000 missing sex offenders. In fact, the current PFML website still boasts of being the origin of the statistic:
- Being out of compliance and missing do not equal the same, as Derek points out.
“Further, a 2003 registration survey conducted by Parents for Megan’s Law found that nearly 25% of the nations’ registered sex offenders were not complying with state registration requirements. This meant, that over 100,000 sex offenders were ‘missing’ from registries across the country. When citing this statistic, refer to parentsformeganslaw.org.”[2]
The eAdvocate site pointed out the following facts about the PFML survey:
- Though all 50 states were contacted, only 32 responded; 18 states and the District of Columbia did not respond;
- Of the 32 states who responded, it was estimated 24% of those who are supposed to be registered could not be accounted for;
- The states who responded never audited their registries and thus only rough estimates were given, so there are questions how PFML estimated 77,000 were missing from those states;
- Nineteen states gave no estimates or response to PFML; it was merely noted “thousands of the 133,705 offenders in this group may have disappeared.”[3]
It still does not really explain how they ultimately settled on 24%, and because there were an estimated 425,000 registered sex offenders in early 2003, that number came out to 100,000. Since 2003, the 100,000 missing sex offender myth is often quoted (and pretty much unchanged), such as in the February 2011 hearing for the Reauthorization of the controversial Adam Walsh Act[4].
The latest article by Levenson and Harris adds more doubts to the validity of the PFML report. This article confirms the similar problem run into when Once Fallen contacted PFML by phone in 2008 to address their study, namely, that PFML has never released how they came to that conclusion and never responds to inquiries into this study. Second, the article also points out the significance of the era in which the study was made, a fact also noted by eAdvocate; at the time, states have not yet audited their registries. While Megan’s Law was passed in 1996, the survey was actually conducted before the Smith v. Doe decision, and as illustrated by the more recent controversy over states and Adam Walsh Act compliance, each new law has a “growing pains” period. For example, Connecticut had temporarily removed the public sex offender registry in 2001 [6], and Hawaii’s registry was offline between 2001 and 2004 [7]. As noted by Harris and Levenson:
“The fallacy, however, might be that the problem of ‘missing’ sex offenders was more a reflection of failures in the operation and administration of the registries than of noncompliance by individual RSOs. In other words, challenges related to record keeping, personnel demands, and data management during the formative years of sex offender registration laws were likely conflated with the issue of offender noncompliance.”
