According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, a state audit showed that the states registry “is flawed with error-ridden, out-of-date and incomplete information.”
Just one example:
A special state review board, set up to rank offenders by their danger to the community, is so understaffed and backlogged that it has not classified thousands of offenders. The report found that only 6 percent of the state’s almost 20,000 offenders have been classified by the board, which due to budget cuts has only four full-time and four part-time staffers.
A parent’s perspective:
Christina Barnette, 40, an Atlanta mother of three young children, said that she checked the sex offender website in the past — and didn’t find it very helpful. “All it told me was there’s a lot of sex offenders and it doesn’t matter where you live,” she said.
Sex offender registries are one of the more irrational manifestations of the hysteria surrounding sex crimes. Disguised as a measure to protect children (as is the case with nearly all bad programs), they do little to alleviate any danger and a lot to inflame the public fear. Most sex crimes against children are perpetrated by people known to the family, not strangers. Sex registries have now acquired the same reputation as the “No Fly List” in terms of inaccuracy and ineffectiveness. Basically they are a joke supported by a lot of very vocal self-serving fear mongers who want to feel like they are “making a difference”.
I remember reading that when somebody first noticed most sex crimes against children are committed by parents, the “relation to victim” suddenly disapeared from the reports. That aspect is now back in the statistics, but it’s interesting to note that at one point there was an attempt to hide and thereby distort the data.