08/05/2011
Last week Saratoga became the latest Capital Region county to have its sex offender residency law struck down in court. That’s a situation to welcome, not regret, because these measures, passed within years of each other (2005-2008) by Albany, Rensselaer, Schenectady and Saratoga counties at a time when sex offender hysteria was running high, were unfair, unnecessary and didn’t enhance public safety — may have even diminished it.
All of the laws were slightly different, but all severely restricted where sex offenders could live or work — banning them from within a certain distance (in Saratoga County’s case, 1,000 feet) of schools, daycare centers, swimming pools and other places children congregate. It didn’t matter that their crime may not have involved kids, or that most child abusers target friends or relatives, not strangers. It didn’t matter how serious was their offense, or how likely they were to offend again. What mattered was that politicians could claim they were doing something to protect “our kids” from these “dangerous predators.”
In reality, they may have been making things more dangerous. A sex offender facing such draconian restrictions would be less likely to register with the state, which allows authorities and neighbors to keep an eye on him. A sex offender facing these restrictions would also be less likely to hold a job, establish roots in the community, get treatment — and otherwise lead the kind of normal life experts tell us makes a person less dangerous.
Interestingly, no county that has had its law thrown out has appealed. This may be an indication that the politicians weren’t really committed to the laws; they were just taking advantage of what they saw as an easy, popular issue (sex offenders don’t have a strong lobby; nobody is, or wants to be seen as, for them). A more practical consideration is that if they had appealed they would almost surely have lost, because the judge’s decision in each case was based not on the merits of the case but the fact that the state has its own sex-offender residency legislation which pre-empts the local law.
The state law is a milder version of the local ones, making distinctions, such as the sex offender’s level of danger, whether his victim was a child, and whether he is on probation or parole, that they did not. But it still deserves to be challenged — not strengthened, as Waterford Town Supervisor John Lawler suggested asking the state to do after the county law was shot down.
