Over the past couple of weeks, the news media has been capitalizing on something that already happened months ago: the rejection of or failure to comply with the Adam Walsh Act by thirty four states. The Adam Walsh Act, or AWA, was the federal government’s attempt at standardizing the sex offender registry in all 50 states. The penalty for a state choosing not to comply with the act was a 10% loss in Byrne Grant funding.
In many recent news articles, the language is indisputably slanted to make it seem as though state governments are “failing to comply,” “rejecting the Act outright” and “not even trying,” – as if there have been no issues with the Act for the states that did decide to adopt it; as if the states that opted out have no sex offender registry or legislation; as if rejection of the Act means those states don’t care about child safety.
The state of Texas would have had to spend $38 million to fully comply with AWA – the $1.4 dollars it will lose in Byrne Grant funding is 3.6% of what the total implementation costs would have been. Arizona would have had to spend $2,000,000 to become compliant with AWA – the $146,700 it will now lose is a mere 7.3% of compliance costs. This chart by the Justice Policy Institute makes it painfully clear: in all 50 states, compliance costs trump the 10% loss in Byrne Grant funding.
Funding isn’t AWA’s only issue. It requires lifetime registration for juveniles – children - which many states believe unconstitutional. Ohio, one of the few states compliant with AWA, was challenged on the issue earlier this year, and federal courts ruled it was “cruel and unusual punishment.” Several states have also faced challenges to its retroactivity. AWA’s “tier system”, used to replace the “level” system many states currently use, supposedly to classify risk level posed by the offender, has come under fire for inaccurately classifying the majority of registrants as “Tier 3” – even registrants who were teenagers in consensual relationships with younger teens.
The problems with the Adam Walsh Act actually reflect some of the more major problems with non-AWA sex offender legislation quite well: treating and prosecuting all offenders with the same broad brush, including children; unreliable and sometimes inaccurate risk assessment; and overall ignorance of the fact that sex offenders have very low recidivism leaving our country’s most vulnerable citizens dangerously unprotected.
What AWA does give us is an opportunity to understand what the limits are for lawmakers considering sex offender legislation. We need as many people as possible to stand up and tell their legislators that the problems AWA poses are still alive and well in the current systems we have in place – and that we all deserve something better.
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