The Adam Walsh Act and its effectiveness in enhancing public safety

The Adam Walsh Act and its effectiveness in enhancing public safety

Introduction

The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act is a Federal law that was signed into law in 2006 by President George W. Bush to protect children against sex offenders. The Act came into effect 25 years after a six-year-old boy Adam Walsh was abducted at Sears Mall only to be found dead in a drainage Canal. The Act requires that sex offenders be divided into three tiers based on the seriousness of the crime committed. Furthermore, the law requires the establishment of a national sex offender registry and website that has the data of all sex offenders within US borders. The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze the implementation of the Adam Walsh Act and recommend viable solutions to enhance public safety against sex offenders. In this paper, I argue that the AWA implementation has failed to enhance public safety against sexual offenders, and it is time that it is reviewed.

Background

The problem with the AWA has been its implementation. There has been a conflict between the Federal government and State governments on the best practices to achieve optimal results, which has undermined the whole policy. The Federal government requires that each State implements the AWA and failure to do so attract a 10% penalty from the annual Bryne program funds. The argument is that all sex offenders in the registry have a high recidivism rate than any other criminal offenders. Today only 17 states have implemented the Adam Walsh Act (AWA). Most states have struggled to enforce the law citing an unfavorable cost-benefit analysis. Texas, Arkansas, Nebraska, and California have completely foregone the federal government’s 10% and are investing in what they consider more effective strategies. The goal of the policy was to create a central database system for easier access and identification of child sex offenders, and states have resisted mainly the policy claiming that it is too expensive to run the database. However, this has failed because the policy brands all crimes involving children sex offenders, track people suspected of associated crimes despite low recidivism rates and unfairly shares and labels and treats even rehabilitated sexual offenders as criminals. Most State governments have argued that the policy is not effective in enhancing public safety since it is cumbersome. There have also been concerns over the Federal government undermining the jurisdictional authority of State governments, and that best practices do not factor in unique needs and that effective best practices are different across States. Studies show that the policy has failed, and it needs to be reviewed.

Policy Implementation

The AWA was meant to be a full replacement of the Jacob Wetterling sex offender registration requirements of the 90s. According to McPherson, provided the guidance for the AWA to be established to ensure sex offenders were easily tracked and monitored because of the risk of recidivism. The advantages of the AWA are well documented on paper with proponents citing the need to protect children against dangerous and violent sex offenders. The AWA program has received praise for its centralized way of doing things where a registration system is used to acquire details and aid in the tracking of sex offenders. The FBI has been granted the right to collect fingerprints and conduct background checks for people under the system or with a history of related crimes. Secondly, the system has been hailed for strengthening the registration and notification system in the country for sex offenders, allowing better and easier verifications. Certain types of juveniles have also been required to register while adults that have had past convictions and put under tier 3 have been expected to have higher recidivism cases. Recidivism is the tendency of a criminal to re-offend. This has been the major backing point for supporting the AWA. Another advantage is that the Federal government has provided Marshals to track down and ensure the sex offenders in every State. The policy program, such as the Sex offender registration and notification act (SORNA),, has also been labeled a success because it protects children against sex offenders and supports States to strengthen the offender tracking system. According to Barker, the AWA national registry will deter convicted criminals from engaging in similar crimes, which will, in turn, increase the punishments and strengthen the existing system against related crimes such as child pornography.

Failures

Despite the successes of AWA, the issue of implementation and suitability has been of great concern. The first challenge has been Federalism. Federalism is the division of government power between the Federal government and the State government. Federalism provides for a balance of power between the Federal and State governments. It gives autonomy to States to do what is in the best interests of its people while the Federal government to do what is good for the country. This is where the debacle is as States feel that the Federal government’s policy did not factor in their unique needs when it was being designed. At the same time, the Federal government expects the State governments to implement the policy at the state level without fail. According to Morse, critics have pointed out the requirement to provide civil commitment and making failure to register a crime are ways in which Federalism laws are being flouted by the Federal government while requiring State governments and law enforcement to implement the policy.

According to Logan, the Adam Walsh Act has failed due to the lack of effective collaboration between the State and Federal government. According to the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA), requirements suit only Federal regulations but not State governments. Logan argues that social control of sex offenders was resolved mainly using police power with heavy reliance on State governments and court rulings to muzzle state governments and require them to unflinchingly implement federal laws. However, the reality has been different from the plan as State governments understand local needs and want to do what is sustainable and best for the populations under their jurisdictions. Indeed the Federal government has intruded State interests using the commerce clause while evading federalism safeguards. Neither the executive branch nor federal agencies sought to incorporate state views when developing the policy, which explains the slow implementation of the policy.

By 2014, only 17 states had complied with the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA) requirements. The rest of the States said the policy was less effective and that preexisting registration requirements were enough.

Another reason for the resistance was because States believed that compliance with AWA had high costs that could not be met by State governments. For example, in Nebraska, Senator McGill claimed that the State was being forced to put resources and people into a database they did not really belong to. This shows that States realized that the system created a database that put people that had even reformed, which is unfair. It seems like a punishment for life, and thus it is not effective in encouraging previous criminals from engaging in similar crimes in the future. This has caused the States to ignore federal requirements because they believe that doing so actually increases the rates of recidivating.

According to Farley, the AWA is increasingly being labeled the Scarlet letter of the 21^st century. Farley argues that the term sex offender has increasingly been mismanaged ever since the AWA was enacted. Any crime against children has been caused adults to be labeled sex offenders haplessly. It also seems that anyone labeled a sex offender is a criminal for life and should be treated as such even after they have reformed and are part and parcel of the community. This is quite unfair because it ruins the reputation of the individuals forever and does not give them a chance to genuinely rehabilitate and contribute positively to society.

Lave argues that AWA has lowered the threshold for sexually violent predators too far by labeling almost anyone a sex predator. While it is a severe crime, the term has been used wrongly to discredit people’s reputation even after they have turned over a new leaf. Unless a person is not an imminent threat to the public, their face and identity should not be published for everyone to see while labeling them sex predators. Lave argues that it is unjustified to label a person a sex offender for life, and it is not the same for other crimes.

A recent study by Zgoba et al. sought to compare the AWA risk assessment tools with State classification tools inaccurate identification of sex offenders that were most likely to commit the crime again. To do this, the researcher tracked 1789 sex offenders in Minnesota, Florida, South Carolina, and New Jersey. The results depicted that the rate of recidivism stood at 5% in five years, and in 10 years, the rate of recurrence stood at 10% on average. Tier 3 has some of the people considered to be most likely to commit the crime again, while tier 1 has the least likelihood recidivism. The results indicated that most sex offenders who repeated the crime were tier 2 offenders as opposed to tier 3, but the likelihood was still lower than the researcher had hypothesized. This shows that the current criterion used to classify sex offenders are not accurate predictors of recidivism as portrayed by the Federal government and consequently cannot be relied upon in enhancing public safety.

The second issue that has been of most concern for the States is the cost of compliance. States claim that policy implementation is more expensive and less effective. Indeed, noncompliance often comes with a penalty. However, the 10% penalty is largely dwarfed by the costs required to add people to the registry since staffing of law enforcement, purchase, and maintenance, as well as carrying out multiple checks yearly, must be carried out.

For example, in Texas, the costs for implementing AWA were 38 million dollars, while the penalty for not implementing it was 1.4 million dollars. In California, another state that has rejected the Federal government program, implementing the AWA would cost 30 million dollars while the penalty would not even surpass 1 million dollars. At the same time, the States are complaining of a lack of an effective system to deal with sex offenders because the AWA is not robust enough. For California, they have chosen to rely on a more effective individual risk assessment system to identify and profile sex offenders rather than a predetermined system. In Arizona, the State has focused on a rehabilitative approach as opposed to SORNA because it is more effective and sustainable in the long term, according to Matthew Benson, the communication director for the Arizona governor.

Another issue that shows how the AWA has largely failed to be properly implemented is the rate of recidivism and the associated risk factors in states that have implemented AWA and those with alternative policies. According to Freeman, recent research on recidivism and risk factors depicted that sex offenders are not the same, and some types are more likely to carry out the crimes again than others. A study by Harris and Hanson tracked 4724 sex offenders in Canada and the UK for a period of 15 years and discovered that 73% of the offenders had not been charged with any similar crime for that period. However, younger offenders with a prior history of sexual offenses were more likely to commit the crime again, which represented 27% of the offenders.

The policy has also been shown that it infringes on the individual rights of past offenders, thus rendering them helpless to change for the better. In most cases, past offenders are denied liberty without following due process. Also, their privacy is infringed as they are subjected to regular police searches and restricted from traveling from one state to another. In served cases, their lives are put on the line as vigilantes bay for their blood while taking the law into their own hands. An example is the sex offender’s murder in Bellingham, WA, where an FBI officer went into their apartment and discriminately shot the suspect instead of arresting them.

Conclusion

As I have argued in this paper, the AWA implementation has faltered big time, and it is high time that it is reviewed by Congress and recalibrated, strengthened, and improved for the benefit of everyone. The Federal government should respect State powers and concerns and initiate strategies to enhance the law to be more sensitive to individual freedoms and rights while managing costs. Embracing flexibility in policy implementation can help state governments work more closely with the Federal government. For example, sex offender notifications, showing their faces and unfair definition of people who have reformed as sex offenders, must be reviewed and corrected. Another recommendation is the development of a fairer way of assessing threats based on research findings instead of political conviction. The cases of repeating crimes are very low to warrant such humiliation and discrimination of reformed past offenders. In most cases, putting the sex offenders on the database causes law enforcement to lose focus on exactly who poses the most risk. Federal governments and State governments should work collaboratively to address cost discrepancies and develop a working strategy to ensure states get funding and vare not penalized for using more effective strategies. AWA needs to be reviewed by Congress after comprehensive consultation of State governments to iron out the issues that hamper the effective implementation of AWA. The AWA needs to be recalibrated and aspects such as Federal policy registration and notification eliminated. Otherwise, without fully involving the States reviewing costs and treating sex offenders, more humanely AWA will continue to falter or probably get worse in the long term.

Abstract

AWA has been poorly designed for effective implementation by State governments. Most states have struggled to implement the law citing an unfavorable cost-benefit analysis. Studies have also shown that the risk assessment tools used by the Federal government to mark offenders are inaccurate and too rigid since high-risk individuals portray the lowest recidivism rates. The word sex offender is destroying lives as people with any crime are labeled and subjected to lynching by vigilantes, isolation, and stigmatization, which encourages them to stay condemned forever. The Federal government should respect state powers and concerns and initiate strategies to enhance the law to be more sensitive to individual freedoms and rights while managing costs. Sex offender notifications, showing their faces and unfair definition of people who have reformed as sex offenders, must be reviewed and corrected. A fairer way of assessing threat based on research findings instead of political conviction should be reviewed. The AWA needs to be recalibrated and aspects such as Federal policy registration and notification eliminated.