I'm an ex-sex offender. Florida should use fact, not emotion, to write laws

I’m an ex-sex offender. Florida should use fact, not emotion, to write laws.

No matter how a person may have corrected his or her actions and paid for failures, in the state of Florida, it’s “once a felon, always a felon.” What is such a policy as this supposed to solve?

On a recent evening I listened in on a Reform Sex Offender Laws Inc. conference call about sex-offender registries, whose effectiveness increasingly is being called into question.

It has been proved that isolation and disenfranchisement only contributes to recidivism. And when evidence is not based on emotion but facts and statistics, sex offenders have the lowest recidivism rates of any felonies — despite efforts by legislators to keep them out of their homes, their families, their communities and the job market.

Don’t get me wrong: There are some offenders who are dangerous. If released to society, they need to be in a registry and monitored. But that applies only to about 10 percent of sex offenders.