Health & Fitness
USA FAIR: Parents for Megan's Law Not Qualified to Administer Suffolk County's New Sex Offender Law - Urges RFP
"Parents for Megan's Law has no experience in sex offender management. This contract should consider truly qualified parties - such as mental health professionals and sex offender policy researchers."
February 6, 2013 – USA FAIR, Inc., (Families Advocating an Intelligent Registry) today condemned the $2.7 million sex offender management contract to be awarded to Parent for Megan's Law. "Parents for Megan's Law has no experience in sex offender management - none. To sole-source such an important and costly contract without even considering truly qualified parties - such as the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (http://www.atsa.com/), who are mental health professionals and sex offender policy researchers - that the vote last night by the Suffolk County Board of Legislators was a political attempt to purchase Laura Ahearn's support for the controversial proposal at great cost to the taxpayer. County Executive Steven Bellone should conduct a Request for Proposals (RFP) to find the most qualified organization to perform this service," said Shana Rowan, Executive Director of USA FAIR.
"As Executive Director of Parents for Megan's Law, Laura Ahearn has shown herself to be a zealot who has built a career demonizing the very people she is now to be charged with monitoring. She has perpetuated the myth of high sex offender recidivism, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, to enrich her organization. To give semi-policing powers to a victims’ advocacy organization is unprecedented and unwise. How can law abiding former offenders and their family members in Suffolk County possibly expect her to be fair and objective in the administration of her duties?”, asked Rowan.
"The role of monitoring registrants has been performed by professional law enforcement agencies since the registry's conception. This contract amounts to government-sanctioned vigilantism," concluded Rowan.
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USA FAIR has been attempting to get Parents for Megan's Law to take down misleading statistics from their website that reinforces the "big lie" of high sex offender recidivism. Numerous studies, including a landmark 2003 study by the U.S. Justice Department have found that sex offenders actually have one of the lowest recidivism rates in the criminal justice system, about 5.3% (http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/rsorp94.pdf.)
