{"id":449,"date":"2005-09-27T00:59:00","date_gmt":"2005-09-27T06:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/2005\/09\/27\/gosh-margy-why-dont-you-tell-us-what-you-really-think-2\/"},"modified":"2005-09-27T00:59:00","modified_gmt":"2005-09-27T06:59:00","slug":"gosh-margy-why-dont-you-tell-us-what-you-really-think-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/2005\/09\/27\/gosh-margy-why-dont-you-tell-us-what-you-really-think-2\/","title":{"rendered":"gosh, margy, why don’t you tell us what you really think?"},"content":{"rendered":"

when i first began studying the collateral consequences of felony convictions in the 1990s, there were few authoritative sources on the practice. one of the best was a 1996 50-state report by then-U.S. pardon attorney margaret colgate love. margy served from 1990 to 1997 under presidents bush (I) and clinton (I), and she always provides a tough non-partisan critique<\/a> of any <\/em>administration’s pardon record. more recently, she prepared a great clemency “resource guide<\/a>” that offers a starting point for anyone seeking to restore their rights after a felony conviction (more personally, i should add, she helped me make sense of the differing rules governing felon voting rights and their restoration in each state).<\/p>\n

today’s crimprof<\/a> blog features an op-ed<\/a> by ms. love on the new national sex offender public registry<\/a>. Her main concerns are (1) the registry’s data quality; and, (2) the absence of controls on its use. while some hail<\/a> the registry as a “proactive and meaningful step in protecting a child’s life,” the former pardon attorney takes a different view — calling it a “half-baked mean-spirited incitement to vigilante Justice.” <\/em>
<\/em>
gosh, margy, why don’t you tell us what you really think? <\/em><\/p>\n

Here are some highlights of ms. love’s editorial:
… [it] relies entirely upon unvetted state registries that are notoriously incomplete and inaccurate<\/span>
… most of [the offenders listed] had very dated and minor convictions, and had had no adverse contact with the law for decades…their houses and offices, marked with a little red flag like they used to put on the door of a plague house in the middle ages. <\/span>
<\/em>… outrageous that the federal government — the Justice Department no less — would rush to publish a list like this without 1) taking any responsibility for the accuracy of the information on it or warning about its shortcomings; or 2) giving the public any guidance at all about how they are supposed to use it.
… the clear suggestion that all 500,000 registered sex offenders in the United States are “predators” is one of the most irresponsible I’ve seen come out of the Justice Department, ever. <\/span>
… the Attorney General is looking into how the FBI can share its criminal history information …the FBI\u2019s information is almost as unreliable … [leading to] the same categorical discrimination <\/span>
… The Justice Department should be trying to address the important privacy and due process issues raised, rather than leading the charge to stir up a public witch-hunt. <\/span>
… The people most hurt by it are those who are already down and are easy to victimize. <\/span>
… There are labor organizations and advocacy groups working on the important privacy and due process issues raised by these initiatives, and Human Rights Watch has written a letter to the Attorney General expressing concern about the Sex Offender Registry. Where are the lawyers?<\/span><\/em>
<\/span>
i have not investigated the registry (beyond looking up my neighborhood), but i am troubled by ms. love’s report and opinion on its use. but this is a call-to-arms for lawyers — where are the sociologists and criminologists? i’m afraid it would be a pretty lonely crusade (that might land one in prison if certain movies<\/a> are to be believed). i’m revising a piece with jeff manza and melissa thompson on ex-felons as a caste-like status group. it seems far-fetched until you see such registries in action and consider their easy extension beyond sex offenders. are sex offenders so different from, say, murderers that we wouldn’t create a more comprehensive registry? it could easily encompass anyone convicted (or arrested — the private search firms use arrest data<\/em>) on felonies (why not misdemeanors, as long as we have the data<\/em>?) as an adult (aww heck, why should the juvenile court hoard all those records down in the basement?).<\/em> the notion of a permanent stain or stigma seems ever more plausible to me in an age of free-and-easy information.<\/p>\n

paradoxically, we now have the technology to apply a permanent<\/em> mark at the very historical moment that life-course criminology establishes that everybody desists<\/a> from crime. so, at the risk of oversimplifying, here’s how i see the mismatch: there are social, political, and (most importantly, in my view) technological pressures toward treating criminality as a fixed characteristic of individuals, even as the science paints a picture of malleability and movement away from crime in adulthood. such pressures will clearly frustrate reintegrative efforts, but unlike ms. love i don’t see a way out of the dilemma — Justice department database or not, the information systems genie seems to be out of the bottle. i think the better long-term plan might be for sociologists and criminologists to attempt to provide an unflinching, evidence-based assessment of risk across different offense groups and the relative costs and benefits of stigmatization and reintegration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

when i first began studying the collateral consequences of felony convictions in the 1990s, there were few authoritative sources on the practice. one of the best was a 1996 50-state report by then-U.S. pardon attorney margaret colgate love. margy served from 1990 to 1997 under presidents bush (I) and clinton (I), and she always provides […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}