ABSTRACT
British academics are not alone in denouncing the demand for public notification of sex offenders as a moral panic (Zgoba 2004; McAlinden 2007; Radford 2008; Schultz 2008). However, while the US public remain fearful, and the registers’ regulations generate more crimes in their transgression, panic designation has drawn attention away from the issues behind the headlines; not least the fact that there are not one but two laws associated with the Megan Kanka tragedy (New Jersey (1994) and Federal (1996)), and that these laws form only part of the registration, monitoring and public notification systems in the USA. Apart from the demand for the ‘right to know’, which was born of a lack of confidence in the authorities rather than blind panic, the systems that emerged reflected the ongoing demands to ‘get tough’ on sex offenders from both sides of the political divide in the 1980s (Jenkins 1992), the perennial conflicts between federal and state power, the crime control and due process approaches to criminal justice (Bohm and Haley 2007), and the political exploitation of the victims’ relatives’ desire to establish a positive legacy (McAlinden 2007).
