Sex Crimes and Progressive Prosecution: Reimagining Sex Offenses and SORN Laws as an Opportunity for Criminal Justice Reform

As progressive efforts to reform the U.S. criminal legal system continue to take form, one category of crime has been consistently overlooked: sex offenses. While the carceral system is often condemned for its excessive punitiveness, severe punishments for sex offenders remain largely unchallenged and even popular. A primary example of these punishments is sex offender registration and notification (SORN) laws, which significantly constrain the lives of sex offenders after they have served their time in prison. Though subject to decades of empirical criticism from scholars, much of which has found that SORN laws have no significant impact on sex offender recidivism, these laws have remained a fixture of the American legal system since their nationwide introduction in the 1990s. This note seeks to understand the persistence of the SORN framework and ultimately argues that progressive prosecutors, through a rich normative model of prosecution, should target the SORN framework as an area ripe for reform.