Chapter 7 describes what we know about the effects of SORN laws on criminal behavior. A coherent story emerges from this review: there is virtually no evidence that SORN laws reduce recidivism or otherwise increase public safety. The chapter first delineates the various ways registration and notification alter the legal environment not only for registrants but also for nonregistrants, the public, and law enforcement. There are many channels through which SORN laws might impact the frequency of sex offenses, including some that would produce an increase in overall offending. The chapter assesses these possibilities in light of a large body of relevant empirical research, focusing on potential changes in registrant recidivism, nonregistrant criminal behavior, the geography of victimization, and the distribution of types of sex offenses and victims. Scholars have plumbed many different data sources using a range of methodologies, yet nearly every study finds no evidence that SORN laws – in particular, community notification laws – reduce sexual recidivism. In fact, notification laws may increase recidivism risk. The final section discusses registrant beliefs about the effects of SORN laws. In sum, the chapter comprehensively engages with the pressing question of whether SORN laws protect the public and concludes that they do not.

Friedrich Lösel was born in Germany in 1945. He is Emeritus Professor at Cambridge University (UK), as well as Erlangen University and Berlin Psychological University in Germany. He received the Stockholm Prize in Criminology, the Sellin-Glueck Award from the American Society of Criminology, and the Joan McCord Award from the Academy of Experimental Criminology. He created the Erlangen–Nuremberg Development and Prevention Study (ENDPS), which combined a prospective longitudinal and experimental design and investigated more than 600 children and their families from kindergarten to adolescence. The ENDPS showed that accumulated individual and social risk factors at preschool age predicted behavior problems in youth, but there was also developmental flexibility. The prevention part of the ENDPS implemented a universal training of child social skills, a parent training on positive parenting, and a combination of both. There were substantial short-term effects and promising outcomes after 10 years. The ENDPS team trained about 2,000 facilitators for a nationwide dissemination of the program. He also carried out an important longitudinal study on school bullying showing that intensive bullying perpetration was not only a school phenomenon but correlated with violence in other contexts and with criminal behavior in adulthood.

If we are unlikely to possess the kind of free will that legitimates desert-based punishment, the rationally defensible route is to adopt a cautionary perspective that draws on non-desert-based criminal justice procedures that are fair and just to all parties. This chapter analyzes the options: (1) we can acknowledge that we have no justification for desert-based moral responsibility but disregard this at both trial and sentencing phases; (2) we can acknowledge this and disregard it at trial but not sentencing phase; (3) we can acknowledge this and take it into account during both the trial and sentencing phase. The author therefore presents some potential models to effectively address criminal behavior and critically assesses the most striking difficulties each of these models faces. The chapter concludes that innovative criminal justice systems must continue to identify causal responsibility, promote taking responsibility for future behavior, and thoroughly respond to victims’ rights and needs. The attribution of moral guilt and the implementation of desert-based punishment face numerous objections. Debate is needed on the desirability of a criminal justice model focusing on causal responsibility and taking responsibility; a model that aims at victim recovery, restitution, and restoration by implementing forward-looking justice mechanisms.

The two instruments the state uses to maintain order are the corrective and the preventive. Those who reject the notion of moral responsibility either prefer to abandon punishment in favor of preventive techniques or seek to justify (nonretributive) punishment. Although I think punishment is essentially retributive and cannot be justified, I also think we must, if possible, avoid yielding to the preventive worldview. We must distinguish the lengths to which we are willing to go with incompetent or irrational individuals who are dangerous from the lengths to which we are willing to go with rational and competent offenders. My view is that borrowing from punishment its harsh methods we maintain the dignity of competent offenders when we subject them to these methods with the aim of leading them to abandon the defective motivational traits that resulted in the crime. I call this approach correction rather than punishment, because it lacks the retributive element that makes punishment punishment. Here I suggest how this view might be defended if we start, as Fichte does, from the assumption that those who violate any law deserve to be made outlaws; in current terminology, to be subjected to preventive detention and preventive techniques generally.