Table of Contents

Preface: Worse Than Murder
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Employment Is More Than a Job
2. Does It Help to Make People Homeless?
3. Restricting the Right to Travel
4. Registrants Not Allowed
5. Alive but Not Alive
6. Banishment and Harassment
7. Families Are Collateral Damage
Conclusion: Worse Than Murder?
Works Cited
Index

Promotional Information

Analyzing sex-offense laws and false claims, this book shows that laws based on vengeance rather than justice or evidence create new forms of harm while failing to address the real and pervasive problem of sexual violence.

About the Author

Emily Horowitz is Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, NY, USA.

Reviews

[From Rage to Reason] makes a convincing claim that current policies are hysterical rather than practical or effective, and handles this complex topic with fairness and reason.
*CHOICE*

The compelling stories Horowitz tells in From Rage to Reason bring home, more powerfully than could any statistical analysis, the systematic and gratuitous harms generated by America's unique program of government-sponsored shunning of people who have already been fully punished for a sexual offense. Her stories show how the senseless barriers registry laws erect to gainful employment, adequate housing, and normal parenting often destroy the registrants' families along with their futures, while contributing nothing to public safety. These are stories we need to hear.
*Ira Mark Ellman, Distinguished Affiliated Scholar, Center for the Study of Law and Society, University of California, Berkeley*

From Rage to Reason offers an unvarnished look at the crippling realities of life on the sex offense registry. Crafted from over 100 in-depth interviews, From Rage to Reason is storytelling at its best, vividly portraying the needless abuse and punishment directed at those society deems to be "others."
*Catherine L. Carpenter, Arleigh M. Woods and William T. Woods Chair, Southwestern Law School and President, Alliance for Constitutional Sex Offense Laws*

This may be the bravest book you have ever read. Horowitz’s meticulous interviews with people on sex offender registries returns a modicum of humanity not just to them but, more importantly, to the rest of us. As she aptly describes, registries are utterly useless for preventing new sex crimes. All they do is sentence to social and civil death people who have already served their time of punishment and labored to repent. We can ill afford to deny rights and humanity to anyone in our culture. To do so cuts us all at an Achilles heel that very few are willing to acknowledge. Horowitz won't let us look away.
*Debbie Nathan, Prize-winning Journalist, Author of Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case & Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse And The Making Of A Modern American Witch Hunt*