I will probably be the only person on here who disagrees with the notion that there is big money in the registry. To spell that out a little more I believe there is a lot of money being spent on the registry. However, I do not believe any one player is gaining enough money from it to make it financially relevant.

Now if you are saying there is big money on private prisons I wholeheartedly agree. Private prisons make me sick. However in private prisons if they had a choice I don't think even they would want more sex offenders in their prisons. Sex offenders are much harder to manage in prison because of all the protective custody. Why would a private prison want to pay more to protect RSOs from other criminals and still get paid the same amount of money from the state? Truly we are pariahs when even the private prisons don't really want us.

Let's look at the other players of the registry and ask what individual players are "gaining all this big money"?

1. Polygraphers: I'm sure they are making a comfortable living. I asked my polygraphers when I was going through probation how many “clients” they saw a week. They told me usually like 2 or 3 non-correction clients a week and the rest is all from probation and parole. The main guy I went to only worked part time as a retirement gig, and he saw maybe 10 people a week. Still if you think about the cost of polygraphs, this is a pretty good retirement job. So yes, polygraphers are making a cushy living not going to argue that, but what power do they have as a group to push policy like this on society? Almost none. Is there a powerful polygrapher lobby on Capital Hill

2. The Corrections Department: This includes probation, parole, state prisons.
According the Bureau of Justice Statistics, State prisons had an estimated 1,314,900 inmates at the end of 2013, only 160,900 or 12.23% were in there for rape of sexual assault. The Bureau of Justice Statistics also tracks parole and probation by crime, there were 3,910,600 on probation in 2013, of which 3% or 117,318 probationers were on probation for a sex offense. In 2013 there were 853,200 on probation of which, 10% or 85,320. So all totaled there are 6,078,700 people in the correction system of which only 5.9% or 363,448 people are in for sexual offenses.

Now is 363,448 a lot of people? Yes, that is a lot of people in the system right now for sex crimes. However if sex offenders and sex crimes were really driving big money to the states wouldn’t you expect there to be more of the total corrections system than just 5.9%? I would definitely think that number would be higher, in a way I am kind of surprised it is so low in comparison to how often I am bombarded by sex crimes in the media. I would love to see a study done where random people on the street are asked what they think the people in prison and on probation/parole are on there for based on percentages. That would tell us how influential the media really is in shaping our reality.

3. Fees registrants pay: If you have been through probation or parole or have ever been on the registry you know all about the fees we have to pay for the state to “manage” us. I know it may seem like a lot of money that we have to fork over for the state to do effectively nothing, but in the long run it really is not that much money when you are talking about a large bureaucracy known as our government.

Let’s say that every person on the registry has to pay 100 a year for “registry upkeep and supervision costs”. Using a rough estimate of 800,000 registrants, that is 80 million dollars a year. I hate to be crass here, but when it comes to a bureaucracy, you cannot even wipe your gluteus maximus for 80 million dollars. The government is spending way more a year in just labor costs than this!

You know why there are only 17 states that are SORNA compliant? Because the government has not made it worthwhile for states to join. The Federal Government has threatened states by saying if they are not SORNA compliant they will lose 10% of their Byrne grant for law enforcement, and 33 states have said it’s not worth it!

http://www.justicepolicy.org/images/upload/08-08_fac_sornacosts_jj.pdf

It does not seem to me that states are rolling around in the dough when it comes to sex offenders. They are turning down more money because it actually costs them more to be compliant.

Let’s also assume that of the approximately 200,000 people on probation and parole that each one of them pays a monthly “supervision fee” of $50. Now not everyone is going to be able to afford that because they are homeless or poor, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that everyone can and does pay every month. That is 120 million a year. Again, you cannot wipe your gluteus maximus in big government with 120 million dollars.

4. The costs states pay outside agencies to handle the registry:
The state of Ohio is paying an independent company 50,000 a year to manage their registry. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that every state is paying 50,000 a year for a company to manage their registry (they aren’t but let’s assume), that would be 2.5 million dollars.

5. Individual grants: Yes the Federal government will give out grants to help stop the flavor of the week crimes, just look at the task forces in central Florida. But again no one is getting rich off of this and moreover they are going where the politicians are directing them to go. If anyone is at fault here it is the politicians, a good majority of our politicians have been to law school and should know better and how to think critically.

6. Treatment providers: Yes do they get money from sex offenders, and can determine how long they have to stay in treatment. This is a probably a conflict of interest in some scenarios, I can see that and understand how some people here would say this is for monetary reasons. However, it is not as if these treatment providers will be out of clients any time soon. I would answer the conflict of interest question by also saying that If they “graduate” people and they are successful the treatment providers may also be more likely to get more clients from corrections. You also do not see treatment providers as a lobbying group.

7. Victim’s advocate groups: I have said it once and I will say it again, these groups are not out for money. I have not ran across a single victim advocate group that got into it to make money. They got into it because they either know someone who was abused or were abused themselves. They are not in it to make a quick buck, most believe deep down that they are doing the right thing to try and stop what happened to them from happening to others.

Conclusion:
In the grand scheme of things, 200 million dollars is a drop in the bucket for the government and all other individual players are not getting anywhere near that amount. This insistence that the registry is somehow making other people rich is a fairy tale in my opinion.