The goals of successful sex offender management are enhanced public safety and the prevention of future victimization. The best sex offender management programs will incorporate a wide variety of research-based strategies including surveillance, monitoring, and treatment. The more of these tools states integrate into supervision, the better they can manage this high-risk population. States that adopt supervision and management strategies to stop these offenders before they commit additional sex crimes and before they inflict additional harm can offer the greatest public safety benefits.

Simply denying fundamental rights to a class of citizens — even a class loosely defined by past criminal conduct — under the guise of protecting society probably renders us all a little less free and secure.

First, what is the difference between normal law enforcement policy and a 'war' on crime? Second, assuming such a line can be discerned, has the enactment of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act ('AWA') in combination with other sex offender laws triggered a transition to a criminal war on sex offenders? Third, if such a criminal war is emerging, what will be the likely effects of such a transition? Fourth, if such a criminal war is emerging with substantial negative consequences, can it be stopped? By reviewing America’s history of criminal wars, primarily in the War on Drugs, the article identifies three essential characteristics of a criminal war: marshaling of resources, myth creation, and exception making. It concludes that the federalization of sex offender policy brought about by the AWA elevated law enforcement to a nascent criminal war on sex crimes. This change could have repercussions as substantial as the drug war has had on American criminal justice and society. COREY RAYBURN YUNG John Marshall School of Law

Benjamin Franklin once said " any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both."

Although Public Act 91-911 has a purpose other than the simple punishment of child sex offenders, a serious question arises regarding whether the legislation rationally serves its alternative purpose of protecting children from child molesters. This part of my analysis relates to my reasons for thinking that due process has been violated, as well as one of my reasons for believing that Public Act 91-911 has a punitive effect that constitutionally prohibits retroactive application.

If what we seek is to better protect children from child sex offenders, how do we possibly accomplish that aim by imposing a 500-foot residency restriction around schools, playgrounds, daycare centers, and the like? When we consider what the legislature is trying to accomplish by banning certain past child sex offenders, and all future child sex offenders, from living in certain zones, close in proximity to facilities that deal exclusively with children, we must necessarily question what goal a 500-foot residency restriction hopes to attain.

State statutes that impose 2000-foot residency restrictions bear at least some reasonableness in their relationship to the interest that the legislation hopes to serve. Those restrictions place children out of sight and mind, beyond senses that could stir the perversions of known child sex offenders. At least arguably, a 2000-foot restriction reduces opportunity, diminishes temptation, and thereby decreases the risk that a proven child sex offender will reoffend.

Illinois child sex offenders can reside close enough to playgrounds, schools, and daycare centers to tempt their inner desires and promote their ability to reoffend. A 500-foot residency restriction inhibits nothing. Child sex offenders can live just outside the restricted area, gaze out their kitchen window, and covet the children that they see playing on a school playground some 500 feet away.

The restriction does not prevent child sex offenders from either seeing or communicating with children. It does not remove opportunity and temptation, the rationale that attempts to provide constitutional support for this kind of law. Any Illinois child sex offender can easily sit on his front porch with a cheap pair of binoculars and closely eye the features of any child that he chooses. Indeed, he can watch a target of his sexual fancy from just the right distance not to find notice, and his watchful eye can still rest beyond any area where his kind are prohibited from living. Any Illinois child sex offender can still call out to children, lure them to the house, engage in sexual exposure, or do all manner of things that child sex offenders do, with all the ease that befalls a child molester who moves into closer range with the aid of a car. As long as child sex offenders can live around 500 feet from where children gather, they can still look at and crave the objects of their sexual desire. When they can still see children, and can still be heard by children, child sex offenders can still lust after children and take all the steps needed to reoffend against them.

The innocent children of this state, frolicking upon playgrounds, within eyeshot of some child sex offender, remain every bit the temptation that they present to child sex offenders at large, regardless of where those offenders live. Simply put, the statutory restriction is pointless. The restriction bears no rational relationship to a legitimate state interest. It is a mindless effort that does nothing to prevent any child sex offender intent on reoffending from doing so. The restriction does not remove temptation or opportunity, for the restriction does not remove child sex offenders from either earshot or eyeshot of children. Whatever prompted our legislature to arrive at a 500-foot barrier is unknown. Perhaps cases like Doe v. Miller, 298 F. Supp. 2d 844 (S.D. Iowa 2004), that have struck down 2000-foot residency restrictions played into the decision to reduce the scope of the ban. Whatever it was, the result is a statutory prohibition that bears no rational relationship to the interest that it seeks to serve. Children going to school are no safer with a safety net that bans child sex offenders from living 500 feet from their school than they were before that legislation was passed. The opportunity and temptation remain around the schools and playgrounds of this state.

The word "rational" connotes insight and logic. This legislation constitutes a totally blind imposition of disability and restraint. A man who was convicted 18 years ago of an offense that brands him a child sex offender, who had consensual sex with a 17-year-old underage teen and who has not reoffended since, must relocate, if not purchasing his home, even if that home rests 499 feet from an infant daycare center. But a recently released child molester, with a lengthy history of molesting very young children, and a diagnosed pedophile to boot, can live in any house he chooses, so long as it rests at least 501 feet from a place attended on a daily basis by infant children, the prime targets of his known sexual propensities. Moreover, that same individual can move back into a house next door to a child daycare center provided that he was purchasing the house prior to the Act's effective date.

I fail to understand how the restriction imposed by Public Act 91-911 bears any rational relationship to the protection of children from people capable of taking sexual advantage of them. I suspect that Patrick Leroy, after 18 years without committing another child sex offense, is no longer one of those people. Hopefully he is not, for his expulsion from the house in which he used to live, a home located just a short distance from Miles Davis Elementary School, will not protect the school's students from him, if he is intent upon reoffending. As previously noted, Patrick Leroy can return "on a daily basis" to the home from which he has been removed. I would assume that on any given visit, he could do the kind of things our legislators feared that he might otherwise do, if he lived there. As my colleagues observe, Leroy has the right to be precisely where legislators did not want him to be, every morning when the children of Miles Davis Elementary School arrive, and every afternoon when the same children leave. Since school is a daytime event, Leroy has essentially all the access that he had before the State of Illinois, for no rational reason, banned him from the place where he wanted to live.

Public Act 91-911, viewed in light of the Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez, 372 U.S. 144, 9 L. Ed. 2d 644, 83 S. Ct. 554 (1963), factors, exceeds its legislative intent to craft a civil regulatory scheme for the protection of children and is, in all truth, punitive in nature. It cannot be applied to Patrick Leroy, whose conviction predates the imposition of its disability and restraint by 13 years, without violating the constitutional guarantee against ex post facto punishment. And because the restriction bears no rational relationship to the legitimate state interest it was intended to serve, because it in no way furthers the safety of children from known child sex offenders, the restriction violates Leroy's right to due process of law.

For these reasons, I respectfully dissent.
JUSTICE KUEHN ILL. SUPREME COURT ILLINOIS RESIDENCY RESTRICTION LAW IS PROTECTING NO ONE !!!!

Lode, of the Iowa Department of Public Safety, warns that the more people marginalize sexual predators, the more isolated they become from society -- and the more likely they are to recommit crimes.

Said Lode: "It takes political courage to step up and enact changes"

oldtimer - if you have read all my post's I did relate to how to help and prevent we cant predist who is going to offend but we can educate and protect our kids, residency restrictions and the registry isnt working look at the facts, illinois government does what they want no matter if it helps public or not they are just concerned on their positions and not protecting or educating, feel good laws dont protect they harm, well the news over dramatizes stranger danger, facts are over 90% of victims know their attacker, less then 7% are strangers distance doesnt protect anyone, example school is in session during the day,residency restrictions are for where the offender sleeps when school isnt in session,there for protecting no one, offenders can visit their home or relatives etc that are with the distance during the day when school is in session,so lets change our thinking and the way we protect our children.