Sex Offender Registration and Community Notification

Abstract

Although sex offenders and sexual offenses have received an extraordinary amount of legislative attention over the past two decades, few policy reforms have been as far-reaching as sex offender registration and community notification. What began as individual state laws requiring sex offenders to register their addresses with local law enforcement agencies quickly grew into federal mandates for all states to not only gather information on sex offenders and their whereabouts but also to release this information to the public. In this chapter, we review the current state of this legislation on a national level. We remind readers of the assumptions and goals underlying these policies and examine their application and implementation. We also review the legal challenges associated with the implementation of new federal sex offender laws. Finally, we review empirical investigations of both the manifest and latent consequences of these laws and conclude with a discussion of the controversial nature and future direction of sex offender policy reforms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)