Really? An 'Arson Registry'? Must we?

Tomorrow's Senate Criminal Justice Committee agenda is chock-full of interesting bills, so I'll break up an analysis up into shorter posts instead of trying to plow trough them all at once. Let's start with a bafflingly unnecessary piece of legislation from state Sen. Mario Gallegos, SB 1191, which creates an elaborate arsonist registration program modeled after the Oh-isn't-that-so-successful-why-don't-we-copy-it sex-offender registry. Rep. Dan Huberty is carrying identical legislation in the House. What possible value does an arson registry have? I'm sure insurance indutry lobbyists or somebody will be able to articulate that at the hearing, but it's already possible to search people's criminal convictions and find out if they committed arson or any other type of crime.

The only big addition to that already public information is that the registry would include juvenile offenses, as well as online aliases and a variety of other data that seems to have no use for the general public, but which politicians can point to and say, "I'm doing something about this. See, now you can arm yourself with information," whatever that means. It's not hard to predict an arson registry will become a smaller-scale albatross for law-enforcement just like the sex-offender registry, mandating a misallocation of scarce resources. The Wall Street Journal recently quoted "Lt. Ruben Diaz, who heads the sex crimes unit at the Harris County sheriff's department, [who] said it was very rare to find the perpetrator of a new sex crime among those already in the registry." There's little doubt the same will be true for arsonists.

Setting aside the cartoonish futility of such registries, it's especially ironic the good senator is pushing this idea at a time when the Forensic Science Commission just suggested that the state fire marshal develop protocols to review old arson cases where negligent methods or flawed, since-updated science might have led to false convictions. The registry idea doesn't seem cognizant of that debate at all, gathering data on arson convictions not to assess potential innocence claims but to ostracize those convicted without having done so.

There are some legislative code words for "unfunded mandate" in the bill that might make counties sit up and take notice, creating a "Centralized registration authority," which is defined as "a mandatory countywide registration location." And presumably the Department of Public Safety will incur some costs from managing the statewide database, though LBB could always claim it's "insignificant."

Juveniles are defendants in about half of arson crimes. They typically don't all continue to set fires as adults, so I don't understand their long-term inclusion. Why not set a limit  - say, five years on the list then de-registered unless they commit another arson crime? How long should they really be subject to that requirement into adulthood? While I don't know much about the sociology of juvenile fire setters, who have been studied to death, from what I do know, there are different categories of juvenile fire fascination, quite a few accidental fires, and for most early intervention and fire education is more effective than piling on post facto punishment for youth. But of course, funding fire education would cost money in the state budget, whereas this bill passes costs along to counties, who must try to collect from registrants. The question of which juvenile arsonists merit registration, assuming there's any benefit to it at all, receives little nuanced attention in this bill. Registration is based solely on the crime someone was convicted of without applying any additional risk-assessment tool.

On the other side of the coin, the registry doesn't even pick up all alleged arsonists. I mentioned the other day that, in addition to those with criminal convictions for arson, there's an additional class of people who may have been harmed by junk arson forensics: People whose insurance claims were denied because insurance investigators determined the loss resulted from arson. For my part, I think any such review should include not just criminal cases but also insurance disputes where the company prevailed in denying claims based on arson where no criminal conviction was ever secured. There are a lot more arson investigators working for insurance companies than for law enforcement, an I'm guessing some subset of people with  denied claims, of what proportion I wouldn't hazard a guess, may be owed some money if old cases are ever vetted. (Whether as a function of siloing and tunnel-vision or as a testament to the power of the insurance lobby, that's a piece of the arson puzzle that nobody in official circles - either at the Forensic Science Commission or this bill - has addressed yet.)

A judge can choose not to require registration, but prosecutors are given leeway to appeal on the basis of "procedural errors" or "abuse of discretion" by the judge. From what I can tell, though I'm not completely sure after reading and re-reading the lengthy bill, registration requirements seem to terminate, mercifully, at the end of the defendant's community supervision or parole term. But for however long that is, it's the offender who must "pay ... all costs incurred by the [local probation] department in providing the notice." Even so, if there is a positive fiscal note on the bill when it comes out for the Departments of Public Safety and/or Criminal Justice, in the current budget environment that might be enough to kill this bad idea for the "wrong" reason, which is as good a reason as any as far as I'm concerned.