Prisoners in their own country: IML as a deeply flawed case of mobility control

Grace Lee is a Senior Policy Analyst with the Government of Canada, interested in modern securitization processes and digital responses to global disorders. She completed an MA in Global Criminology at Utrecht University, fully funded by the Utrecht Excellence Scholarship. Her undergraduate degree was in International Relations and Criminology at the University of Toronto. This blog post is based on Grace’s Border Criminologies Dissertation Prize winning thesis, which you can read here.

For border criminologists, people convicted of sex offences against minors (PCSOMs, hereafter referred to as ‘registrants’, a widely-used self-referential term in the community due to the shared experience of being listed on a sex offender registry) are likely not the first population to come to mind when thinking about the harms of mobility controls disproportionately punishing a specific group. Nonetheless, the experiences of U.S. registrants under International Megan’s Law to Prevent Child Exploitation and Sexual Crimes Through Advance Notification of Traveling Sex Offenders (IML) highlight many themes that academics and policymakers in the field will find familiar. These include: sentiment-driven rather than evidence-based policy, stigmas extended beyond the individual, database inconsistencies with carry-forward impacts, powerful and long-lasting categories and labels, and the exploitation of systems for political and private benefits.

Signed into law in 2016, IML intended to address the problem of U.S. registrants travelling abroad to commit new offences. It required them to register travels, obtain marked passports, and have travel notices sent abroad to destination countries. Proponents of IML emphasized the horrors of extraterritorial child sex exploitation and suggested that the program would directly prevent crimes, by more heavily regulating the travels of every registrant.

However, there have been sustained critiques of IML as being overbroad and unconstitutional by legal experts, civil rights activists, and registrants as well as their families. Their core argument is that IML fails to differentiate between high- and low-risk registrants, resulting in ineffective outcomes and inhumane stigma. While the existing scholarship on IML is predominantly critical, its assessments of the law are limited to abstract legal standards and hypothetical test cases.

The study

For this reason, I designed a study to explore the lived experiences of registrants and their family members, aiming to capture rich empirical data of the law’s impacts more generally. Throughout my research, I critically reflected—to what extent is punishing those who have already served their time effective or just? Who stands to benefit from these systems of mobility controls? How transferable are these technologies and which other groups may be readily targeted?

In terms of methodology, I conducted online discourse analysis, ethnographic content analysis, and in-depth interviews. This involved regularly immersing myself in IML-related materials on advocacy websites frequented by registrants, such as NARSOL, RTAG, and ACSOL. I also followed mainstream and government news sources on the topic, as a point of comparison. Most importantly, I spoke to 20 registrants impacted by IML as well as two expert advocates familiar with the law.

Findings

Online discourse analysis revealed that mainstream media narratives on the law were often law enforcement-centric and pro-government. They depicted IML as justifiably restricting the movement of dehumanized ‘predators’ towards the rational and important ends of protecting ‘vulnerable’ children everywhere. U.S. registrants were often treated as a homogenous group and labelled as ‘high-risk dangers’ in need of management as opposed to individuals capable of rehabilitation. In contrast, registrant advocacy websites challenged these narratives, emphasizing that IML unconstitutionally limited the freedoms of registrants without any empirical justification, and were the outcome of media, NGO, politician, and state manipulation toward each group’s own gains.

In terms of systems-level effectiveness, I again found that government and registrant perspectives diverged. The ‘official’ line was that IML was operationalized through seamless processes. Despite the many domestic and international entities involved, the system was presented as efficient and effective. The U.S. government claimed that any difficulties faced by registrants abroad were at the sole discretion of foreign governments. Yet, every registrant story I came across suggested the contrary.

At the core of the program was notices originating from the US, but registrants trying to plan travel had no official domestic information source on where would turn them away based on the notices, despite the data being readily available to the government. Then, when trying to register travel 21 days in advance in compliance with the law, registrants encountered unknowledgeable local authorities who often provided incorrect information due to communication breakdowns with federal entities. After that, registrants faced significant barriers when attempting to obtain a marked passport; some even had their passports revoked while already abroad.

Finally, during their travels, notifications sent abroad often amplified errors in domestic data entry or lacked crucial context, leading to unpredictable and often unfavourable interpretation by foreign authorities. In one illustrative example, a registrant whose registration requirements ended was detained and turned away from Thailand on a business trip a year later. Thai authorities provided him with information they had received from the U.S. government, erroneously indicating that he was a lifetime registrant. Despite the registrant’s documentation of legitimate travel and release from registration requirements, Thai authorities adopted a ‘zero-tolerance’ approach to eliminate the perceived risk.

On the whole, respondents felt that IML was ineffective towards addressing its stated intent because of its flawed design. Specifically, they referenced its flawed notion of risk, categorically branding all U.S. registrants as dangerous as opposed to considering individual mitigating and aggravating characteristics. They felt that this was problematic because there was no statistical evidence that registrants as a homogenous group were more likely than other groups to participate in extraterritorial child sexual exploitation. One interesting comparison that was made was hypothetically issuing “country bans” for Americans charged with driving under the influence as a means of protecting people in other countries from drunk driving—policy that most would agree is overreach.

Perhaps the most striking findings of my study were the personal stories of IML’s impacts: careers ended; families separated, and important personal travels for legitimate reasons curtailed. These stories outlined practical repercussions, including financial costs, immensely uncertain and inflexible planning around travel, and undue delays and detention during travel. They also involved emotional burdens including embarrassment, stigmatization, and fear. Significantly, these consequences extended to registrants’ families and loved ones, resulting in stigma by association.

Conclusion

In the end, my research confirmed the hypothetical critiques of IML from the literature: that it was unquestioningly supported by the mainstream media, that it introduced significant systems-level inefficiencies, and that it stigmatized registrants and their families based on unnuanced perceptions of risk. The clear priority for future research is the contentious premise of the policy: empirically assessing whether registrants actually pose any increased risks of travelling to re-offend compared to the general population. Importantly, such research should carefully consider diverse categories of registrants, to determine if targeted controls on any segment of the population would lead to statistically significant results. If not, then IML should be repealed in its entirety.

Lawmakers continually expand the IML regime, recently passing a bill to increase international information-sharing on registrants. Because the stated policy aim of protecting children is so politically potent, they do this with little public scrutiny. Yet, we all should be asking about what types of information are being shared and to what ends, as well as what systems and private companies are involved, and who is profiting. Greater transparency, regulation, and oversight of such programs is critical, as in today’s ‘crimmigration control industry,’ similar technologies will inevitably find applications to the greater populace.

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