Illustration by Cody Angell

Last week, the Sex Crimes Prevention Act was enacted by the Arizona Legislature. It will give students, faculty and staff access to the names of all registered sex offenders working or living on campus.

"I think it's going to make (campus) a much safer place," Jon Kyl said. "Students on a university campus should have just as much right to a safe environment as anyone living anywhere."

But how does this make campus safer for anyone? Let's say we do find out a student in our class was formerly convicted of a sexual offense. Should we be sure not to sit at a desk next to him or her? Does that make us safer? Should offenders be required to eat alone in the student union? Or perhaps they can pick up a T-shirt they are forced to wear when they gain employment or register for classes, just so we all know and can feel relieved.

I think we can all agree that this is ridiculous, not to mention that it violates individuals' constitutional rights. After all, sex offenders are still citizens. If they are in class or at work, it means they are no longer in prison; they've served their sentence and are trying to get their lives back on track.

Yet, while the rest of us get to keep our pasts to ourselves, the Sex Offenders List re-opens theirs to the public. Why? Because we are afraid.

It's nice to be able to give danger a face; we can pretend it's easy to identify and, thus, to avoid. Never mind that in 84 percent of assault cases, the victim knows the attacker. This is acquaintance rape, and it's often committed by family, significant others and friends. Most of those names will never appear on a Sex Offender List.

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State Sen. Dean Martin said, "It's not designed as a punishment but to try to protect the community from potential risk."

But in the search for protection, a gap has grown between design and actual results. In reality, sex offenders seeking to rebuild their lives will be punished again by being remade into a public stigma.

If they were hired to work here or admitted to the university, someone definitely knows their record. What difference will it make to students to know? Are we to act differently around them? Move if we find out one lives nearby?

Proponents of the law say it will not further punish the men and women who have already served their time, but previous application of this public notice has proven otherwise.

At ASU, police posted fliers at the recreation center after learning that a student employee was a registered sex offender. ASU police spokesman Keith Jennings said, "As soon as the fliers were out, he was gone within a week."

This is no surprise. Why would he want to continue working there, once his face and past was posted for all to see? Likely, it was a past he wanted to close the door on. After all, we can all agree that - while our own experiences are hopefully not as extreme - we are not always what we once were. People sometimes make terrible mistakes and then dedicate their entire lives to recovering. Public notification only further displaces past offenders from the society they are seeking to rejoin productively. These lists are not conducive to rehabilitation when someone can't even feel comfortable getting a part-time job.

UA police Sgt. Eugene Mejia said, "Not every sex offender is going to have a conviction." But the reverse is also true: not every convicted offender will commit a crime again.

So how is this helping anyone, except to give a paranoid and frightened society a false sense of security?

Irene Anderson, director of the Oasis Center for Sexual Assault and Relationship Violence, said of sex offenders, "They have a right to study and they have a right to work and they have a right to live their lives."

As seen by the ASU incident, this is clearly not the case. Fliers with employees' and students' faces and former convictions posted throughout their workplace and classrooms violate their rights to study, work, and live their lives.

There are scary things in the world; we have legitimate reason to fear. But when we turn our fear on others that fear trudges over our greatest protection of all: our rights, which we must remember are inalienable regardless of our pasts. When we forget this, we have ceased to be rational or fair.