Sorry, but your numbers don't add up. 263,000 of 763,000 (35%) registrants is not 1 in 5 (20%). So why don't you make your numbers right and quit lying in the headlines to scare the public.

Please don't say the U.S. Marshals are "just" looking for these 450 "worst-of-the-worst" because if Mr. Wilson and McDaniel were forthcoming they would state that they have been given "carte blanche" when it comes to "any" registered former sexual offender. For example, the county sheriff is told a registrant is an "absconder" when they have not moved, failed to register at any time, etc!" Now there are folks who do fail to register for a variety of reasons but first let me state what Mr. Hanson didn't.

There are over 763,000 men, women and children (as young as 8 and 10 in some states) across the nation required to register. What started as 39 offenses in the 1940s is now over 189 and counting. The "crimes" range from urinating in public, sexting, exposure, false accusations by a soon-to-be ex-wife, angry girlfriend, or spiteful student, looking at abusive or suggestive images of anyone up to 16 in some states and 18 years old in others, streaking, solicitation, prostitution, Romeo and Juliet consensual sexual dating relationships, playing doctor, rape and incest. Credible studies indicate that 95% of sexual offenses come from within the family unit, friend or someone know to the family and NEVER gets reported. The registry is a way to make parents "feel good!" And, the Sex Offender Registry is punitive because it singles out and punishes someone "again and for the rest of their lives" after they have paid their debt to society. But, the truth-of-the-matter is there are 1,500,000 people on the registry because the families of registrants live at the same address, ride in the vehicles listed on the registry and suffer the collateral damage when they are harassed, beaten, have their homes set on fire, vehicles vandalized, wives lose their jobs, the family is forced to move from their apartment because the rental company has decided they won't rent to a registrant, signs are placed in the yard, flyers distributed through the neighborhood, people ride by and yell things at the family and lets not forget the teacher who means well by printing out copies of local registrants and plasters them around the classroom and a student recognizes a fellow student's father and the whispering begins.

Our Congress currently has bills before them to spend millions and millions of dollars on maintaining this registry, which by the way has deceased people on it, people who have moved to another state and are still on the first state, as well as every incarcerated person. Why? To inflate the numbers and justify all this money. Not only that, they want to give the U.S. Marshals administrative subpoena powers meaning they won't have to wait for a judge to issue a warrant.....yes, that is what I said....judge, jury and well you get the picture.

Now in light of the fact that the recidivism rate for another sexual offense by a registrant is 5% correct me if I'm wrong but, shouldn't we focus on that other 95%? You know the Jerry Sandusky types who everyone trusts. Take those millions of dollars and develop education programs to teach parents, teens and children about behavior directed at them as well as behavior coming from them.

Vicki Henry

Women Against Registry dot com

The registry is an ex-post facto punishment passed by a legislature with the theory that the registry protects the community. There is no evidence that the registry protects the community, but somehow it doesn't matter.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children makes up numbers. They have been doing it for years. Nobody ever challenges the numbers. Legislatures base laws upon the numbers they produce.

There are not 100,000 missing sex offenders. In fact, most States haven't even a clue about how many sex offenders they actually have.

But what is really important is, that NO REGISTRY HAS TO BE FOLLOWED!

Why?

Because the registry is an ex-post facto punishment that doesn't protect the community!

You people are really stupid to believe you can legislate according to hate. What you do get is to legislate, and then have COURTS apply laws rationally.

There is too much evidence that the registry laws have ridiculous outcomes (the main one being that it INCREASES sex crimes).

Your registry is being LAUGHED AT! You stupid despots think you can affix a label on someone without trial, hearing or challenge and do it decades after a sentence has been served and think you are credible doing it.

Your registry has the only outcome of the loss of safety and/or security. You do know that NO LAW has to be followed when the outcome of the law is the loss of safety and/or security.

I know, despots don't care! But you are sitting on a whole bunch of NOTHING except your police State when you enforce illegal registry laws. You could have done it right through a court of law, evidence and hearings. But you didn't. You decided a legislature will take any information and decide the freedoms for 100's of thousands of Americans, and do so without so much as a peep from those being affected.

Again! Don't expect your laws to be followed! It is irrational to follow laws whose outcome will result in homelessness, joblessness and estrangement from everyone!

STUPID!

Indeed, we see exactly this trend in the panic over sexual predators. News stories invariably exaggerate the true extent of sexual predation on the Internet; the magnitude of the danger to children, and the likelihood that sexual predators will strike. (As it turns out, Attorney General Gonzales had taken his 50,000 Web predator statistic not from any government study or report, but from NBC’s Dateline TV show. Dateline, in turn, had broadcast the number several times without checking its accuracy. In an interview on NPR’s On the Media program, Hansen admitted that he had no source for the statistic, and stated that “It was attributed to, you know, law enforcement, as an estimate, and it was talked about as sort of an extrapolated number.”) According to Wall Street Journal writer Carl Bialik, journalists “often will use dubious numbers to advance that goal [of protecting children] . . . one of the reasons that this is allowed to happen is that there isn’t really a natural critic. . . . Nobody really wants to go on the record saying, ‘It turns out this really isn’t a big problem.’”

In other words, Chris Hansen made it up.

This is pure fear mongering Chris Hansen style, who by the way, was caught cheating on his wife. Their are about 722,000 offenders (PDF) in this country, which I wonder why, since they like fear mongering so much, they just picked a round number (500,000) instead of the actual number? And the 100,000 number is bogus, as well as the old "50,000 online predators" number, which has been proven that Chris Hansen made up as well, but people continue to use it as fact. This is fear mongering and deception for shock value, nothing more.

Were some 225+ registrants intentionally omitted in order to use the infamous 1 in 5 statistic by arriving at a nice wholesome 500,000? Even that isn't accurate: If 500,000 register as they are supposed to according to the above article and 100,000 allegedly don't, wouldn't that make it 1 in 6? Can someone also explain to me how it is that in nine years, and an ever growing registrant population, the questionably arrived at 100,000 alleged absconders hasn't changed any?

All one needs to do is type "1 in 5" into any search engine and they'll notice a trend so prolific that it looks staged.

In 2011, the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry were able to identify only 17,688 whose whereabouts were unknown using actual data from the registry, not mindlessly quoting a 2003 informal telephone conducted survey.

Dropping false statistics and persistent popular numbers (50,000 / 100,000 / 500,000) may have worked in the days before anyone could get the truth in a matter of seconds, but it certainly doesn't now.