Preventing sex crimes in the Usa Federal Sex Offender Laws

Abstract

The impact of the increased number of sex offenders has put pressure on governments to enact legislation with the aim of preventing those offenders in the USA. Federal law determined minimum standards for the prevention of sexual offences and mandated states that their laws should conform to minimum federal requirements even if they may go beyond the limits of those standards. In doing so, federal law gives states wide discretion to enact harsher legislation to deal with sex offenders. Within this mandatory framework, states have provided alternative approaches to address the concerns about sex offenders, namely sex offender registration, community notification, civil commitment, three-tier system laws and even chemical and/or surgical castration. For these reasons, in this work, the principle issue at stake is to examine and give a general explanation of federal sex offender laws with a view to understanding the aforementioned requirements and conclude that these measures can be implicated into the Turkish Criminal Justice System, if and to the extent that all arrangements are made and all legal requirements are fulfilled.