At first glance, when you hear of Stephen Tidwell insisting that he should be called a ?sexually oriented offender? instead of a ?sexual predator,? you wonder why a rapist is splitting hairs. Is this a new form of political correctness for sex offenders?
No, it turns out. We?ve created a byzantine system where mind-numbingly small distinctions between assailants actually make a huge difference. It started because of laws requiring local authorities to register and track certain kinds of sex offenders. Because the authorities don?t have the resources to do this, they?ve figured out ways to apply it only to certain types of offenders. But the task of assigning classifications to these felons is, in itself, daunting and enormous.
Hence ?human error? like Tidwell?s incorrect label. Also, according to the Boston Globe, the Massachusetts Sex Offender Registry Board is so backed up with trying to classify the state?s sex perps that it may take years just to figure out which ones are dangerous enough to warrant a warning to local parents. Partly this is due to legal challenges. In Massachusetts, the least dangerous offenders aren?t publicized, the slightly more dangerous ones are publicized only if someone requests the information and the identities of the most dangerous are broadcast far and wide.
To make the classification process easier, legislatures are automating it as much as possible. A paper in the Buffalo Criminal Law Review criticized the prevailing form of actuarial justice, where courts try to come up with formulae and rules of thumb for determining which offenders are most likely to repeat their crimes. The problem with these risk tables is that they assume that certain types of offenders are doomed to slide back into bad behavior. They also ensure that people accused of those types of crimes won?t plead guilty, for fear of a lifetime of having their names in the paper.
In other words, all of this nitpicking over labels happens because we have no way of knowing which rapists and abusers will come back to the well. Instead of acting like insurance companies trying to predict a flood or fire, the authorities need to use a combination of treatment and assessment to identify the likely recidivists. But instead, to make our ?blunderbuss? approach (as the Review paper calls it) possible, we have to resort to a bizarre taxonomy.
