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It's about time these people, who are ruining hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives, look into the registry!
07/14/2011
By James Coburn
EDMOND — State Rep. Lewis Moore, R-Edmond, will participate in an interim study on the state’s sex offender registry.
House Speaker Kris Steele, R-Shawnee, announced Friday that the House will conduct a total of 80 interim studies this fall.
Moore’s study is combined with another study by state Rep. Jeannie McDaniel, D-Tulsa, to investigate the implementation of the Adam Walsh Act and its impact on public safety.
The AWA calls for increased monitoring, registration and jurisdiction of registrants.
Moore calls the sex offender registry the Forever Registry, because a small fraction of the offenders are 18-year-old males who land on the registry because they had sexual relations with a younger teenage female.
“That’s not very good,” he said.
Another questionable scenario that places somebody on the registry would be a guy driving home from a ball game with a painful bladder, needing to relieve himself. So he decides to pull off on the side of the highway to discreetly relieve himself.
“He is charged with indecent exposure,” Moore said.
The study also will study if sex offenders should be located in group settings. He said sex offenders in an Oklahoma City group setting were reporting each other’s offenses in order to keep each other honest.
- And yet politicians and the media continually hound hotels/motels when two or more are living near each other or together, when makes things worse.
“It’s not like a jail where you learn worse things,” Moore said. “I guess in a certain way it does help them, but nobody wants that kind of conglomerate near their home, school or park. I can understand that.”
“Seventy-six percent of Oklahoma City is off-limits to sex offenders,” Moore said. “It’s not quite as bad as it is in Florida and places where they have to live under bridges as homeless people. But if we break up some of these communities, that’s what will end up happening."
Moore said group settings make it easier for law enforcement to keep track of sex offenders living in society. Reforming the sex offender registry is not something that a lot of lawmakers want to face, Moore said.
Edmond Family Counseling Executive Director Jackie Shaw said she is glad Moore is introducing the interim study.
“It seems obvious to me that we as a society have a long way to go in understanding the makeup of a true sex offender, the types of offenders and the prognosis of the offender regarding treatment and recidivism,” Shaw said.
- Well, you might first start off by listening to experts who treat sex offenders, not people like Nancy Disgrace or Jane Valez-Mitchell, who run on emotions for sensationalism and ratings.
Increases in reporting sex offenders also results in more sex offenders in the criminal justice system, Shaw said. So more sex offenders return to communities after being paroled or serving their sentences, Shaw said.
“This leaves probation and parole in a uniquely critical situation,” Shaw said. “They must monitor those sex offenders on parole while protecting our communities.”
- Well, that was suppose to be their job, not they just let the Gestapo FBI and Marshalls storm buildings to show boat, instead of the probation/parole doing their own jobs.
Shaw hopes lawmakers will be able to determine more effective, efficient ways to manage this problem, she said.
Sex offenders can be healed physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually, Moore said. So the study would investigate how sex offenders can best interact with society, family and work. How to prevent more people becoming sex offenders will be a focus of the study, he said.
- For starters, you remove the residency restrictions, which do not work, then take the registry offline and used by police only, that would help tremendously.
“Learning about it especially if you’re a family, public awareness of different behaviors, attitudes and that kind of thing — can that help? Yes,” Moore said. “And this is a huge deal, but is cleaning up the Internet going to help? Absolutely. … To what extent? I don’t know.”
Moore said he understands the importance of free speech in the U.S. But he said pornography feeds sex offenses.
“You can speed up the path of depravity faster by feeding these things,” Moore said.
