Free Range Kids Mom Talks About Jacob’s Legacy
By Lenore Skenazy Sept. 3, 2016
Jacob Wetterling Found At Last
It is painful in a more intellectual sense to contemplate the effect that Jacob’s unspeakable fate had on American families. Not only did it grip us with dread, but that dread — and anger — directly paved the way to sex offender registry. As Jennifer Bleyer explained in this extraordinary article in City Pages about Jacob’s mother, Patty, in 2013:
[T]he Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act…was part of a landmark violent crime bill in 1994 that required law enforcement in every state to maintain registries of convicted sex offenders and track where they lived after being released from prison.