Megan Kanka Case

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In response to the horrific crime that happened to Megan Kanka in a quiet New Jersey neighborhood, a law named after her name, Megan’s Law, was proposed and signed into law on Oct. 31, 1994. Since then this law, and other like it, require convicted sex offenders to give up their constitutional rights by notifying police and the surrounding community where they are going to reside and what crimes they are convicted of, which could be aim directly toward the offender privacy. At first, sex offender laws only required sex offender to registry information with law enforcement only, but later statutes indicate a growing movement among states to allow public access to such information. Megan’s family truly believed that if they would have at least …show more content…
The main purpose of registration laws from the aspect of law enforcement is to aid in providing more protect to the community. On the other hand, the purpose for inform the public that there is a sex offender within the community is avoidance. These current sex offender law moves away from traditional justice system responses, which is treatment/rehabilitate. These “registration laws explicitly reject the idea that the state can rehabilitate sex offenders.” (Bedarf, 1995).
In 1989, the United States Department of Justice conducted a study and found that rapists have a lower recidivism rate, 7.7%, for the same offense than any other class of offender except murderers (Beck & Shipley, 1989). Another study funded by the U.S. Justice Department in 2008 determined that Megan’s Law had no real effect on preventing either first-time sex offenders or re-offending sex offenders. The combination of both study high suggest that these laws are only appropriate for violent and repetitive sex offenders, and not the common type, which is the 92.3% of all sex …show more content…
At first, Criminological theories start with the offender biological makeup, then rational choice, then it moved to the offender’s environment as the main source for why they are criminal. Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay was one of the first criminologist to recognize that convicting an individual to a crime could possibly deepen the offender’s involvement in crime. “By labeling a juvenile with the official status of a delinquent, the person becomes the thing he is described as being” (Cullen, 2014). Having a record of being a criminal and living in a strict environment’s conditions will make single minor offender in becoming career criminal. Shaw and McKay argue that they did not choose that career, the community around them force them. For an example, looking at employment after sentencing, offenders will often have no place to work because no company want to hire a criminal. The offenders would then look at criminal way to earn money to pay for living expense. The same effect could happen to sex
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