Lazy reporters are main constituency for sex-offender registry

Increasingly I've come to believe the sex-offender registry only serves one real purpose and at the end of the day just has one constituency that actually uses the information: It's a crutch for lazy reporters to produce bullshit stories aimed at inciting the mob instead of informing them. Voyeurism is the driving impulse behind public support for the registry. Criminal background checks would already pick up sex-offenses for employers and others, and as a practical matter there's nothing private citizens can do with the information except gin up pointless fear. But with 64,000-plus people on Texas' sex-offender registry (relatively few of them posing a significant risk) and a slew of errors in the database, the list doesn't give average citizens a tool they can actually use for any practical purpose.

For reporters, OTOH, the sex-offender registry is like a Swiss Army knife - there are dozens of things they can use it for. None of them are productive or benefit anyone out in the world, but hyping fear attracts readers and thus advertising, whether or not the hype is actually newsworthy.

A couple of recent stories drive home that point. First, at the Houston Press, Richard Connelly published an article this week titled "The 10 Hottest Women on the Texas Sex Offenders List." To grasp why this is not just pointless demagoguery but offensive, imagine the parallel story: "Meet Texas' 10 Most Handsome Rapists." The story got national play (for it's wrongheadedness, not because the sex offenders were so "hot"), and Connelly apologized later in the day, admitting when he wrote it he "fully intended to shock."

The same could be said for a story from KDFW-TV reporter Becky Oliver out of Dallas in a story, "Nursing Home for Criminals Concerns Neighbors." Neighbors in Lake Worth are complaining because a local nursing home accepts parolees including people on the registry, with 27 sex-offenders registered at the address. This has got the usual NIMBY types up in arms, though the nursing home is privately owned and there's nothing they can do about it. Most of the concern is misplaced: In reality, very few people on the sex-offender registry commit more sex crimes, and the vast majority of molested children are assaulted by family members or trusted acquaintances.

The only actual criminal incidents Oliver reported resulted in parolees being revoked, and the neighbors main concern is the ex-offenders walking to the store or riding a bike down the street. She cites a couple of men caught on camera engaged in activities (drinking beer in a park, urinating outdoors) that may result in technical parole violations, but mostly this is about guilt by association, taking isolated NIMBY complaints and pretending everyone in the nursing home is guilty of such activities. In the next to last paragraph of the long story, Oliver finally gets to the heart of the matter: "The nursing home is not breaking any laws by housing the offenders," she says flatly, in contrast to the breathless hype in the rest of the article. In other words, there's no story here at all, just another lazy journalist who turned to the sex-offender registry and hyping fear to spice up a slow news week.