What You Expect Is Not What You Get: The Antitherapeutic Impact of Sex Offender Community Notification Meetings on Community Members

Sex offender registration and notification policies have been subject of much debate. Therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ) scholars in particular have called for the dismantling of many of these policies in light of their detrimental effect on sex offender rehabilitation and their ineffectiveness in promoting community safety. However, the impact of sex offender notification policies on community members has not been thoroughly explored from a TJ framework. This article addresses this gap by studying the impact of sex offender community notification meetings on meeting attendees, with special attention to the empowerment expectation of community members. Specifically, this project entailed a secondary analysis of Zevitz and Farkas’s (2000a) analysis of survey data (N = 704 residents) from 21 community notification meetings conducted across Wisconsin in 1998. A more robust single- and multilevel multivariate analysis of the original data identified the true impact of specific predictors on attendees’ postmeeting concern level. Contrary to previous findings, results indicated that people who came into the meeting with empowerment expectations ended up being concerned, regardless of meeting content and organization and amount of information they received. In other words, rather than being empowered by information control, residents experienced frustration that led to antitherapeutic outcomes from the meeting.