Northwest Ont. has highest ratio of sex offenders in province

The area north of Sioux Lookout has the highest rate of sex offenders per capita in Ontario, according to new data released by the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services.

The court ordered the ministry to release it's information about the location of people listed on the sex offender registry.
It lists the number of offenders per postal code in 2008.

The P0V postal code, including Red Lake, Ear Falls and more than a dozen First Nations, has 122 registered offenders.
The 2011 census records the population of that area at 16,347, giving a ratio of offender to resident of 1/133.

By comparison, most areas of Thunder Bay have a ratio of about one registered sex offender per 500 residents.
Some postal codes in the province have no registered sex offenders.

But an expert in sociolegal studies said the data may not say much about the community safety.

"The recidivism rates for sex offenders are much lower than people assume and indeed are lower than they are for many other kinds of offenders," Rosemary Gartner said. 

The professor at the University of Toronto's Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies said "the best evidence suggests that sex offender registries are not effective at all at deterring future sex offending, they're also not effective at helping solve cases when they occur."The Ontario Sex Offender Registry requires anyone convicted of a sex-related crime to register with police in the jurisdiction where they're living. It is accessible only to police.