TAKE Josh D., who was molested by an uncle when he was 11 or 12. Soon afterward, he had sex with a younger cousin. “I acted out what was done to me,” he said. At 13, he was placed on the Delaware registry for 10 years and sent for two years of treatment in South Carolina. He returned to Delaware and finished high school in 2007 with a 3.7 grade point average. In 2014, he entered Wilmington University in Delaware, but soon received a letter from the school telling him to stay off campus.

The reason? He was still on Delaware’s registry (the state had by then extended the number of years offenders were on its registry to 15 years or more) and he hadn’t formally notified the school. Had the school looked further, it would have found that he was also on Virginia’s and South Carolina’s registries. He had lived in Virginia for eight years with his mother, and any sex offender who goes to South Carolina for more than 30 days appears on its registry. In 2014, judges and officials in Delaware and Virginia agreed to take his name off of their states’ registries.

“It’s like the government wants me to be a monster,” he said.

Bobby Garza’s lifetime involvement with the criminal justice system started 20 years ago with a broken bathroom light bulb. Scared of entering the dark bathroom of their Taylor, Tex., house, 11-year-old Bobby and his brother went to urinate outside. A little girl saw them and reported that Bobby and his brother had exposed themselves to her. A charge for indecent exposure to a child resulted, as did Bobby’s placement in a foster home. He fled when an adult in the foster home tried to molest him, which led to his being held in custody, including youth prison, until he was 17. Upon release, he had to register as a sex offender for 10 years. He refused, and spent five years in prison for it. In 2013, he was arrested for aggravated robbery, for which he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

“I was robbed of my childhood,” he said in a letter from prison.

The expansion of sex offender laws to include juveniles was based on the assumption that kids who sexually transgress cannot be reformed. However, research has shown this assumption to be false. Only 1 percent to 7 percent of children who commit sexual offenses will do it again — much lower than the 13 percent recidivism rates for adult sexual offenders.

The policy seems to succeed only in making life difficult for offenders, subjecting them to harassment and isolation. Of the more than 500 youth sex offenders whose cases Ms. Pittman examined, about 100 had attempted suicide. “If you wanted to make things worse, we could not have designed a better policy,” Ms. Letourneau said.

Knowing this, prosecutors like Vicki Seidl, the senior lawyer in the juvenile division of the Kent County district attorney’s office in Michigan, now push for pleas that keep youths off registries. Other prosecutors are following suit.

But that alone will not solve the problem. Juveniles, particularly ones under 14, need to be off the registries entirely. In 2011, the Department of Justice relaxed the requirement for registering juveniles, but legislators still fear that they’ll be accused of being “soft” on sex crimes.

Matthew Grottalio, who has had a second child with Jennifer, has decided to stop trying to keep his story secret. “I have two boys now and I don’t want the same thing to happen to them, or to anyone,” he said. “I just can’t sit around and act like it never happened. I want to do something about it.”