About a year ago, the US Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals found that Michigan was treating people as “moral lepers” with its sex offender registry and needed to change it. The US Supreme Court has decided not to take up the state’s appeal of this decision, which means, says JJ Prescott, that “for all intents and purposes, the decision is final.” The problem as Prescott sees it is that the current sex offender law in Michigan works against social safety by making social reentry much less likely for offenders. The restrictive laws “make life so difficult, even for those who never would have committed a crime again, that it’s actually not all that different from being in prison…Why should they continue trying hard to integrate into society given how difficult it is for them to be on the outside?”

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