UPDATE: The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act Reauthorization is legislation introduced again Feb 16, 2017 that will just make a failed system even more expensive and wasteful with no improvement to public safety. It will cause a decrease in public safety, and an increase in suffering to millions of children and family members. These children are already suffering because they have a parent or family member that can not earn a living because of the public registry of former sex offenders listing their home address. These children suffer because all of their potential friends know that they are off limits because school officials make sure that everyone knows that they have a parent on the public registry. These millions of children know all to well "The hateful and hurtful whispers of cruel former friends" (quoting Lauren Book). Even after they graduate from high school the stigma follows them they have great difficulty attending college due the the financial hardship and the stigma and hateful and hurtful whispers, etc, because of the family’s situation and even co-workers treat them differently because they know that their parent or family member is listed on that list of former sex offenders.. Across the United States with 844,000 citizens addresses listed on that public registry there is a loss of more than 20 billion dollars in income tax revenue because of their unemployability and a cost of more than 20 billion in public aid support of their family because their primary breadwinner can no longer find gainful employment. There are many millions of dollars spent on police efforts to keep the registries up to date and to harass the former offenders and to notify all of their neighbors every year and 4 times a year. Well over 40 billion dollars cost to taxpayers and after decades no decrease in the incidence of sex offences, no decrease on the rate of recidivism which has always been the lowest of any crime category at between 1% and 7% depending on which states were examined. And the extremely rare incidence of brutal rape and murder still remains constant at less than .001%, unaffected by the public listing of former sex offenders. With the current laws on the books it is more likely that your child will be put on the public list than that they would ever be touched by someone on the list. 95% of sex crimes are committed by first time offenders that are not on any list. Most likely, children will be sexualy offended by a close relative or by a public official such as a police officer or school teacher or other person who has been trusted. Of the 844,000 on the public registry, less than 5% will ever reoffend. These statistics are backed up by countless research reports from government agencies and scholars. A sample of those reports can be found here, here, and here
Please join the action to stop legislation in it's tracks that would make our nations children more at risk. Stop the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act Reauthorization of 2017, that would waste another $86 million dollars each year with no benefit to anyone other than those whose pockets it lines.
Oppose U S House bill H.R. 1188 seen here.
https://judiciary.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/BILLS-115hr1188ih.pdf
July 27th, 2016 did mark the 35th anniversary of Adam Walsh's abduction and lawmakers wanted to pass this bill before then but failed. Now they have introduced another version of it in 2017. Contact your representatives directly and educate them about how damaging the Adam Walsh Act is. Then do the same for your senators who will most likely see this bill very soon.
Don't accept lawmakers canned responses, demand their direct attention to this issue.
