Try as I might, I have not been able to cast these ruminations in anything remotely resembling scholarly objectivity; the package of legislation known as Megan's Law strikes too close to home. Since 1976, I have served as a member of the Special Classification Review Board (SCRB) for Sex Offenders in the New Jersey Department of Corrections, for all but three of those years as chairperson. The Board's function, as originally detailed in the 1947 legislation that established a treatment program for repetitive, habitual, or compulsive sex offenders, is to function as a clinically-oriented dangerousness review body that assesses the readiness of an offender to be released into the community after judicially-imposed confinement for treatment in the state's specialized prison facility, the euphemistically-named Adult Diagnostic and Treatment Center (ADTC). Membership of the Board is comprised of three mental health professionals from the academic and professional community (who serve pro bono) and two representatives of state agencies (the Department of Corrections and the Bureau of Parole, respectively). Although recommendation for parole by the SCRB is a condition, it is not sufficient. SCRB's recommendation is in turn forwarded to the State Board of Parole, whose approval is both and sufficient. Alternately, the State Board of Parole cannot grant release in the absence of a positive recommendation from SCRB. That is quite an unusual process, one that results in a parole rate for inmates under SCRB jurisdiction that approximates 1.5% to 3% annually vs. 20% to 25% for the state's prison system in the aggregate. To be released on parole in New Jersey as elsewhere, it is necessary that a felony offender have served a portion of his or her sentence and have further avoided out while in confinement in ways that merit institutional sanctions. Little inquiry is made during the paroling process into whether there is discernible or demonstrable change in the offender's attitudes, beliefs, values, or patterns of behavior. In contrast, to be released on parole from ADTC, an inmate must convince first those responsible for treatment, then the treatment staff acting as an aggregate body (with one or more members enacting the role of devil's advocate), then the superintendent, and finally the SCRB of just such changes before the case is forwarded to the State Board of Parole for consideration. It is worth observing that the 1994 Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics (at p. 650) indicates forty-four months as the median sentence actually served in state prisons nationally for forcible sexual assault; my 19 years of experience on the SCRB inclines me to believe that the median sentence for that offense among ADTC inmates has been very nearly 100% greater. When called upon to defend the data which reflect our low rate of release on parole in contrast to a rate that is some 1300% higher for felony offenders in the state system (as we are called upon to do with some frequency in Federal court, in cases which allege deprivation of the right to due process inherent in clinical judgment, collective or otherwise), SCRB has replied that our criteria for recommending parole are and must remain essentially clinical--since they lead to a clinical judgment not merely that an offender has benefitted from treatment but that he (or occasionally, she) is unlikely to recidivate in the future, sexually or otherwise, if returned to the community. We are, in essence, called upon to affirm a null hypothesis, a task that would daunt the best of our hard-science colleagues. In most years, the responses from the corridors of political power in Trenton to SCRB has usually been to cavil at our retentionist practices. Not so in the summer of 1994. Megan Kanka's killer had been convicted twice of sexual offenses against children. He had been released not on parole from the second of his sentences, but rather because he had completed his sentence. …