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Social scientists, and geographers in particular, have long been interested in examining spatial patterns of offending in order to generate a "geography" of crime and criminality. This paper examines what value, if any, a geographical approach to the study of sexual offending might offer. Utilising published official data from England and Wales it presents for the first time geographical analyses of the registration, risk assessment and management of Registered Sexual Offenders (RSOs) across 42 Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangement (MAPPA) areas. In doing so it considers and evaluates the methodological issues pertaining to the use of such data and such a geographical approach. We conclude that geographical interpretations of both the incidence of RSOs and the rates of risk allocations between MAPPA areas provide valuable insights and raise new questions about the way in which RSOs are managed nationally and are thus worthy of further exploration.

The Benthamite workhouse principle of 'less eligibility' dates back to the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 and, since its application to the sphere of criminal justice, has long dictated that prisoners and other lawbreakers should always be last in the queue for access to scant welfare resources because of the moral censure attached to their behaviour.T his continues to be problematic for those advocating penal reform with debates about imprisonment often descending into objections to any material improvement in conditions on the basis that they would be unfair to 'hard-working taxpayers' or the supposedly 'law-abiding majority'. An allied but lesser known principle is that of 'non-superiority' which Mannheim (1939) described as 'the requirement that the condition of the criminal when he has paid the penalty for his crime should be at least not superior to that of the lowest classes of the non-criminal population' .

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In this article, we highlight the existence and expansion of so-called ‘collateral consequences’ (CCs) of criminal records in Europe to challenge the prevalent view that these are features of the claimed ‘American exceptionalism’ within the penal field. First, we consider how CCs have been widely presented as a quintessential example of American penal exceptionalism within extant scholarship before problematising the adoption of such a framework from a European perspective. Second, we demystify the issue of CCs within Europe by highlighting the deleterious effects which CCs have on the lives of European people with a criminal record. Third, we consider precisely what can be regarded as ‘exceptional’ about CCs in the United States as compared to Europe by analysing key areas of possible differentiation. We conclude by cautioning against the view that European penality is necessarily – and always homogeneously and consistently – ‘progressive’ in relation to its treatment of criminal records and criminal record subjects. We also suggest that far greater attention and vigilance is required from criminologists and criminal justice scholars regarding the expansion and operation of CCs in Europe.