How Do We Pass Rational Sex-Offender Laws With Psychos Like Phillip Garrido on the Loose?

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted September 4, 2009.

"Philip Garrido isn't a man, he isn't an animal; he is a monster from the deep recesses who preys on innocence and those he can overpower. He is a degenerate who should have stayed locked up in prison. He should have but he was allowed to go free."

-- Kristen Houghton, "Jaycee Lee Dugard's monster from the depths of hell," from the Examiner.com

This pretty much sums up the popular response to the horrific case of Jaycee Lee Dugard, the 29-year-old California woman who, as a young girl, was kidnapped on her way to school and and held hostage for 18 years, during which she was systematically raped, giving birth to two daughters while in captivity.

With the possible exception of Josef Fritzl, the 73-year-old Austrian who drew global revulsion last year after it was discovered he had held hostage his own daughter for nearly 2 1/2 decades, during which she gave birth to seven children, it would be hard to conjure up a sicker, more psychotically grotesque manifestation of a sexual predator's madness than that of Phillip Garrido.

Locally, the Dugard case and the accompanying media frenzy have prompted fresh fear over the threats sex offenders pose to society. News reports have revealed that Garrido, 58, was convicted of rape decades ago, serving 11 years of a 50-year federal sentence for his kidnapping and brutal sexual assault of a 25-year-old woman in 1977. (That crime today would have sent him to prison for at least 25 years.)

Garrido's early release was certainly a miscarriage of justice, given what he went on to do to Dugard -- not to mention the severity of his first crime, in which he drove his victim across state lines to Reno and raped her repeatedly in a storage unit "stocked with pornography, sex devices and a mattress," according to the San Francisco Chronicle. But that was a different era.

"It goes to show you how sentences have climbed since 1984," a Yale Law School professor said. "You're looking at a much harsher climate now."

Sex offender laws have gotten much harsher, no doubt about it. Along with mandatory minimums and post-incarceration monitoring, since 1994, when Congress passed the Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act, all 50 states and the District of Columbia have created sex-offender registries containing the names and addresses of people convicted of crimes ranging from rape, to sexual abuse, to downloading child pornography, to statutory rape. (Megan's Law, which requires community notification about sex offenders, was added to the Act two years later.)

In recent years, laws have passed to impose even stricter measures on convicted sex offenders, long after they have ostensibly paid their debt to society. The sweeping Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006 set about the creation of a national sex-offender registry, "the first national online listing available to the public and searchable by ZIP code." While it would supposedly classify sex offenders into different categories according to the severity of their crime, it has yet to be implemented.

Now, amid the shock and outrage surrounding the Garrido case, some are calling into question how effective such legislation has been.

After all, Garrido was, the New York Times reported this week, "listed, as required, on California's sex-offender registry (complete with a description of the surgical scar on his abdomen and his 196-pound weight) and had dutifully checked in with the local authorities each year for the past decade -- all while, officials say, his victim and the two children he is accused of fathering with her were living in his backyard."

Sex-offender lists have made far more information readily available to the public and the police than before, but experts say little research is available to suggest that the registries have actually discouraged offenders from committing new crimes.

As Richard Tewksbury, an academic and expert of registries, told the NY Times, "We've come to see these registries as a panacea that is going to resolve all sex-offender problems. That's just not realistic."

The Worst of the Worst?

Let's face it: Not every registered sex offender is a Phillip Garrido.

As Human Rights Watch pointed out in 2007, "in many states, people who urinate in public, teenagers who have consensual sex with each other, adults who sell sex to other adults, and kids who expose themselves as a prank are required to register as sex offenders."

Yet registries and residency restrictions have often failed to distinguish between these and those on the opposite extreme, like Garrido, who could justifiably be classified as the worst of the worst. With 674,000 people on sex-offender registries across the country, this has stoked a culture of fear while making it harder for law enforcement to keep tabs on the most-dangerous sexual predators.

See more stories tagged with: human rights watch, sex offenders, garrido, josef fritzl, jaycee lee dugard, adam walsh act, julia tuttle causeway

Liliana Segura is an AlterNet staff writer and editor of Rights & Liberties and World Special Coverage. http://twitter.com/LilianaSegura

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