Why This Issue

Why focus on registries, housing banishment laws, and exclusion zones

Support Crime Survivors, Not Conviction Registries

Advocates for crime survivors and advocates for formerly convicted people are working together to challenge public conviction registries. We know the life-shattering impact of violence and incarceration. We also see how registry and banishment laws lead to homelessness and weaken the resilience of families. And they waste public safety resources that should be spent preventing victimization, supporting survivors, and restoring people responsible for harm.

Hyper-incarceration in the United States followed decades of concentrated economic and political divestment. Neighborhoods with high incarceration rates also have high crime rates. Violence prevention means supporting the whole health of a community—jobs, housing, healthcare, childcare, mental health, behavior health, recreation, education, sex ed, reentry, relationship ed, wraparound support, reentry support. But instead, for the past twenty years, we have tried to explain crime by creating categories of people who commit crimes. These classifications also produce confusion about why crimes are committed and to whom, and therefore fail to address the tremendous harm that comes from violence, or to recognize the causes of it.

Some 47% of Illinoisans have arrest or conviction records. And we have high rates of people on registries. In Illinois, we have a murder registry, violent crimes registry, gun registry, an arson and meth manufacturing that aren’t even functioning, and a sex offense registry. But gun violence, sexual violence, domestic violence, substance abuse, child abuse and neglect will not be prevented by listing people with past convictions on the internet. It's hard to identify even one thing we are doing to address entrenched inequality and unemployment, or the trauma and desensitization that comes from childhood neglect, poverty, deprivation, and the frustration of being shut out of economic and social prosperity.

The insight of #MeToo
Victim advocates and scholars have long understood that there are many pathways to sexual misconduct of all kinds. Since the vast majority of sexual assaults are situational and based on context rather than the inherent character of the person who has caused harm, cultural education and transformation are necessary for prevention. Unfortunately, sexual assault and harassment are commonplace, and committed by ordinary people, usually the people we already know. #MeToo demands a sustained and supported commitment across all sectors to stop tolerating harmful sexual behaviors. But what we have instead is a system that makes it far more likely that sexual crimes will go unreported, and where prevention is not a priority.

Why target formerly incarcerated and convicted people?
More than 95% of reported sexual offenses are committed by people without criminal records. (And that’s only the reported cases. Imagine the unreported numbers.) Clearly, targeting people with past convictions does not address the need to reduce sexual violence—even less so because these administrative regimes of policing and surveillance would be the polar opposite of what legislators would do to prevent crime and create safe communities. Again, our state responses to sexual abuse and violence miss the big picture of prevention. They create confusion about the nature and causes of sexual abuse and violence and prevent victims from coming forward.

Once held accountable, reoffense is unlikely
People with criminal records in their past are not "special"—they are regular people. (About 1/3 of people in the United States have a past conviction.) The vast majority of people with past sex offense convictions will never have another one. In fact, after a certain number of years offense-free in the community, they reach a “redemption point” at which point the probability that they will commit a new sex offense is so low, that it is unremarkable compared to anyone else in society. Many people reach this redemption point immediately after conviction, others at the 10 year mark. And because of this, many people on registries actually have a lower probability of committing a sex offense than a group at elevated risk, such as college-aged males.

These are the people who have already been held accountable
Much of the deep outrage behind #MeToo is that so many people have acted with impunity for so long. We all agree that people who have committed sexual harm should be held accountable and punished. Yet, people with convictions are the very few people in the United States who have been. Our never-ending byzantine maze of incoherent and damaging laws is directed at people after they have already been subject to severe and often excessive punishment.

These laws are used to exploit sexual violence, not address it
Even with the cultural and political surge in resistance to mass incarceration, the criminal justice advocacy and prison art worlds have not opposed these destructive policies, and even “deplatform” this issue out of concern for survivors. Yet, these registry regimes were cobbled together one law at a time by state legislators exploiting sexual violence for their own political gain, not preventing it. And worse yet, these policies are directly counter to best practices for reducing sexual violence. They also defy common sense: the state should not sabotage people’s efforts to build a positive and productive live and take care of their families. People need to be given a chance to move on with their lives. Those of us challenging mass incarceration and the New Jim Crow should be the first to oppose state codes that close off the public sphere to a subclass or people and create zones where people can't live or travel for the rest of their lives. Because that's just like the old Jim Crow.

In looking the other way, we completely transformed the criminal justice system
Sex offense laws represent a paradigm shift in the reach of the carceral state, including:
—unprecedented expansions in police surveillance, supervision, and control
—mandatory incarceration for violations of administrative requirements and the rise of the administrative state
—the criminalization of housing
—banishment from being present in the public sphere including parks, bike trails, campgrounds, schools (and other land developed for public access such as the entire Chicago lakefront and museum campus)
—prohibition from essential social services such as agencies, hospitals, rehabilitation centers, shelters, and group homes where people go for treatment, disability services, assisted living, and hospice (most recently someone with a spinal and cranial injury from 10 gunshots was prohibited from being at a center where he could learn to walk again)

Narrative change and policy change
Addressing this particular policy catastrophe requires a strong narrative change in the public realm, where misinformation from legislators, the media, and social media continues to drive support for these laws. The heart of this project is countering the demonization of people in the criminal legal system, which normalizes these exceptional policies and creates new categories of people who are subject to them. Making truly indefensible policies visible is a big step toward that goal. We should listen to the people impacted by these policies. We should never trust the state to have rational policies for demonized people and we should never support policies we do not fully understand.