Texas concerned about cost, flawed risk assessments in Adam Walsh Act

The Wall Street Journal has a story about states including Texas refusing to participate in the federal Adam Walsh Act expanding sex offender registries. Here's a notable bit:

Objections have arisen in such states as Texas, where officials say existing local laws are tougher on sex offenders than the new standards.  The federal act "contradicts what our research over 30 years indicates," said Allison Taylor, executive director of Texas's Council on Sex Offender Treatment, an advisory body with a governor-appointed board. "Public safety would not be enhanced."

Texas also complains that the price of implementing the federal law — about $38.8 million, according to one state estimate — far exceeds the $1.4 million in federal money the state would lose if it didn't comply....   Federal officials say states' worries about costs are overblown. Scott Matson, a senior policy adviser in the U.S. Justice Department office that is helping states implement the act, said one estimate pegged the cost at $18 million in Ohio, but the program turned out running closer to $400,000....

Police say the vast majority of sexual assaults are committed by family members or acquaintances of victims, not unknown perpetrators who might appear in a database.  In Houston, Lt. Ruben Diaz, who heads the sex crimes unit at the Harris County sheriff's department, said it was very rare to find the perpetrator of a new sex crime among those already in the registry....

Other states are also balking at the federal standards.  In a letter to Congress last month, the office of California's attorney general cited "serious concerns" with implementing the Adam Walsh act, including not only cost, but also its inclusion of some juvenile offenders. Some states are raising another concern: that the federal standards use the crimes for which offenders were convicted to assess the threat they pose.  Several states, including Arizona and Texas, prefer a ranking system that uses factors such as the offenders' ages and their relationships to their victims to determine how likely they are to offend again.

Lt. Diaz's comment hits the nail on the head: It's "very rare," by any measure, for new sex crimes to be committed by those on the registry, making  all the extra supervision for such offenders a quite expensive, if ineffective, dog and pony show. Indeed, from the beginning the concept was flawed: In Texas, our registry was created in a bill dubbed "Ashley's Law," after a past sex offender named Michael Blair was convicted of raping and murdering a girl named Ashley Estell. Mr. Blair turned out to be actually, factually innocent of the Estell murder (he was cleared via DNA). So literally from its inception, Texas' registry was based on a false premise.

The grant money Texas would lose is de minimus compared to the cost of implementing the Adam Walsh Act, but misplaced public safety priorities stemming from the law arguably are an even more important reason to reject this unfunded mandate. In an era of scarce resources, there's little cost-benefit argument for devoting so much extra supervision resources toward low-risk offenders on what's become a bloated, politicized listing.

Via Sentencing Law & Policy.