A Stitch in Haste

I told you this was going to happen:

Fresh out of prison, Kerry Skora would much rather be known as a murderer than a sex offender. The law said otherwise.

Skora ... found out that because the victim was 16, he would have to register as a sex offender -- even though the crime didn't involve sex.
...
[Illinois] lawmakers in the mid-1990s added a host of crimes against minors to the sex offender registry requirements, including first-degree murder, kidnapping and child abduction -- regardless of whether the crime involved a sex offense.

People on the state's sex offender registry can't live within 500 feet of schools and other public places where children are found. The public can look up their names, pictures and addresses on the state's Web site, which makes no distinction between people who committed sex crimes and people who committed violent crimes involving minors.

The Illinois Legislature has passed a bill to make two distinct registries; the governor has yet to sign it. Montana and Indiana also have single registries that fail to distinguish sex offenders from other ex-convicts.

The dual canards: that "sex offenders have greater recidivism rates" (the Department of Justice says the opposite is true), and that "child molesters prey on the community" (they overwhelmingly tend, in fact, to prey on children they have proximate access to, such as stepchildren), have both been discredited. There is therefore no clear logic for singling out sex offenders for a registry.

Which can lead you down either of two mutually exclusive paths: either scrap the sex offender registry or insist on "registries for everything." It is increasingly clear that public figures, chasing the Politics of the Warm Fuzzy Feeling, are sprinting down the latter path.

Some previous examples here.