ABSTRACT
The USA is renowned for its highly regulatory, punitive and stigmatising approach to sex offenders, and, beginning in the late twentieth century, the oversight and control of such offenders when they are finally released from prison or from civil confinement into the community have become ever more meticulous and intrusive, and sometimes deliberately shaming (Janus 2000; McAlinden 2005; Shaffer 2010). The Jacob Wetterling Act 1994 created state sex offender registries, requiring such offenders to notify law enforcement agencies of their addresses. This had barely taken effect when, in 1966, ‘Megan’s Law’ – named for Megan Kanka, a 7-year-old girl murdered by a registered sex offender living near her home in New Jersey – went a step further, requiring law enforcement agencies to notify the public of sex offenders’ whereabouts in their neighbourhood, either through personal visitation, lists in local libraries or, latterly, police websites. Courts, and town and city ordinances, ensured that residence restrictions on sex offenders followed shortly afterwards. What is perhaps distinctively American about these forms of community oversight is their democratically devolved, populist nature – the sense that information-empowered citizens know better than trained, state-based professionals how best to prevent sex offenders from doing harm. Elected officials can make easy capital out of sex offenders, stimulating moral panics that have made rational professional strategies towards them difficult to implement without compromise (although, below the media radar, and apparently without much public support, probation and parole-based treatment programmes continue to exist).
