Despite controversy over whether even adults should be required to register as sex offenders, currently 41 states have some form of policy requiring adolescents adjudicated or convicted of sexual offenses to register with local law enforcement agencies upon completing their sentences. Moreover, 30 states allow or require online community notification of adolescents who committed sexual offenses, posting information on public websites or “registries†to inform residents about the young offenders living in their communities. Registration and notification policies are partly rooted in deterrence theory, which presumes that the risk of these outcomes will prevent potential sexual offenders from offending in the first place. However, criminological and psychological theories predict different outcomes of these policies, and whether they actually deter adolescent sexual offending remains unknown. Prior research suggests that many adolescents are not aware of the risk of registration and notification posed by their sexual behavior. Moreover, even if they are aware, psychological science suggests that their developmental immaturity may override that knowledge and result in offending anyway. This interdisciplinary project investigates whether and how registration and notification policies deter adolescents from engaging in criminalized sexual behaviors that are common in their age group. Findings will inform policymakers working to develop evidence-based strategies that effectively achieve justice while also protecting developmentally vulnerable adolescents from excessively punitive and stigmatizing outcomes.
This study explicates the criminological processes that are prerequisite to general deterrence as well as the developmental psychological mechanisms that may condition those processes. Specifically, it experimentally manipulates whether adolescents are exposed to educational information about the risk of criminal justice involvement and sex offender registration and notification associated with illegal sexual behaviors. The results will reveal whether and how, even when adolescents are aware that certain sexual behaviors are prohibited and carry legal risks, their ability to engage in rational choice and their perceptions of the net cost of sexual offending moderate the impact of registration and notification over the course of one year. This project’s experimental and longitudinal approach will allow for causal determinations about the criminological processes that are thought to underlie general deterrence as well as the developmental psychological mechanisms that may condition the ability of sex offender registration and notification policy to affect adolescents’ risky sexual behavior. This will transform current understanding of relations between criminological theory on deterrence, social-developmental psychology, and legal policy.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
