The publicly available sex offender registry should be abolished.

Your first rebuttal seems to have things backwards. You found statistics to tell you how likely a sex offender is to commit a non sex related offense. What would be useful is to know how likely a non sex offender is to commit a sex based offense. Here are some appropriate numbers: "Within 3 years following their 1994 state prison release, 5.3 percent of sex offenders (men who had committed rape or sexual assault) were rearrested for another sex crime" http://www.bjs.gov... "Within 3 years, 2.5% of the 3,138 released rapists were rearrested for another rape, and 1.2% of the 4,443 persons who had served time for homicide were rearrested for a homicide. Among other offenses, the percentages rearrested for the same category of offense for which they were just in prison were 13.4% of released robbers 22.0% of released assaulters 23.4% of released burglars 33.9% of released larcenists 11.5% of released thieves of motor vehicles 19.0% of released defrauders 41.2% of released drug offenders." http://www.bjs.gov... As you can see, the only group less likely to repeat their crime are murderers. Every other category is significantly more likely to repeat their crime. As to people who had not been reformed, I already clearly said that people should be evaulated and possibly monitored by law enforcement, but not by regular citizens. Personally, I think a very easy way to make burglary less likely is to not move into an apartment that houses burglars. A registry would be very helpful with this. Also, what makes you think it is easier to prevent a sex crime than a burglary? If someone breaks into your house to commit a crime whether it is to rape you or to rob you, there is not much you can do about it at that point. To your second rebuttal: The point of the Letzgo hunting group is that they are a symptom of the idea that attacking sex offenders is acceptable which is perpetuated by the registry which flags the second least likely group to repeat their crime as the most appropriate people to target. To your safety argument: You can already get the rate of sex offenses in a city, you do not need the individual names of offenders to know how likely rape is in the community. Additionally, the registry only lets you find these people at their home and place of work. It does not help you identify them anywhere else. A new haircut, not having mugshot face on, or wearing sunglasses will make the person anonymous, so knowing the individual's information will not help you in places like parks or outside of schools. Another problem is that this suggests that if nobody has yet been convicted of a sex offense in a community it would be a good idea to let small children wander around unsupervised. Sex offenders are not born on the registry, they need to offend before this happens, so assuming that nobody on the registry means kids won't be raped is not a particularly good assumption. Using a registry to guess that your kids will not be assaulted is not a good way to prevent assaults. Making sure they are supervised is. Another problem is even if you personally knew and could identify every single past present and future offender in your town, that leaves one big gap. Somebody could just go and do his raping in a town where he would not be recognized. Again, a registry would not help you. One thing must be pointed out at this point, not every sex offender is a child molester. Sex offenses happen to children, adults, men, and women. You seem focused on one subset of offenders. My conclusion at this point is that the registry does not make you any safer, it still only provides a means to harass people who have already served their sentence and prevent them from leading productive lives once they are allowed back into society.