Stoneleigh Fellow Nicole Pittman is featured by National Public Radio.
Instead Burkland says prosecutors and judges should have more discretion to figure out who needs to be registered and who doesn’t. One of the few people working to change this practice is Nicole Pittman, a director at the advocacy group Impact Justice.
“We are criminalizing normative child sexual behavior in large fashion,” she says.
Pittman adds that the practice of registering juveniles developed in the ’90s, when a series of federal and state laws establishing registries ran head-on into the child super predator scare. In 2006, a federal law started to hold back funding to states that didn’t register kids for certain sex crimes. Pittman says the result is that kids are labelled as sex offenders for acting like kids.
