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: Sex Offender Issues, News, Recidivism and Studies

Two Decades of Sounding the Alarm on Sex Offenders

By "eAdvocate"

12-28-2010 Washington: POULSBO ? ?This notification is not intended to increase fear,? the Kitsap County Sheriff?s Office flier reads. ?Rather, an informed public is a safer public.? For 20 years, that statement has accompanied the brief dossier on sex offenders released by the sheriff?s office to the community where they will live. Washington reserves community notification for the sex offenders it ranks as most likely to re-offend. Whether it has made the state safer in the first two decades of notification?s existence is a harder question to answer. The concept of community notification, developed by a task force in the late 1980s, was not envisioned as a crime prevention tool. It was a mechanism for law enforcement to inform residents of dangerous offenders ? something they were prohibited by law from doing before 1990, said Lucy Berliner, a member of the original task force and head of the Harborview Center for Sexual Assault and Traumatic Stress...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sex Offender Issues, News, Recidivism and Studies on December 29, 2010 (boomark / email).