A manager I know at a large company that considers itself "family friendly" had to fire an employee with good job performance when it was discovered that he was listed on the local sex-offender registry.

The employee hadn't disclosed his listing at the time of his hire because it had cost him jobs before. It became an issue when a new employee spotted his name on the registry while researching a home he was thinking of buying.

The fired employee had committed his crime many years earlier, it wasn't one of the more egregious sex offenses and he'd maintained a clean record since.

Nevertheless, his firing rendered him virtually unemployable.

The case renewed my mixed feelings about sex-crime registries that often give convicted offenders no opportunity to ever get their names removed no matter what they do to reform themselves, leaving a permanent stigma that mars all aspects of their lives.

Perhaps it's a fitting outcome for criminals who prey on vulnerable women and children, almost always leaving horrible physical and psychological scars on victims that stay with them forever. These are onerous crimes by any measure.

But at the same time, it seems somehow un-American to forever place scarlet letters on the foreheads of criminal offenders that deny them any chance for a clean start after they serve their time and pay their debt to society.

And I wonder if the registries, which will expand under the federal Adam Walsh Act, are really effective in reducing crime.

Is the problem that we don't do enough to publicize offenders after their release or that we don't do a good enough job of judging which are most likely to re-offend at the time of sentencing and parole?

I was browsing through the registry and wondered why one man with a nearly 20-year-old offense and an apparent clean record since still needed to be listed.

And I wondered why another man with two serious offenses in the mid-1990s and a repeat offense six years later wasn't still in jail.

Some of the things that trip up sex offenders after they register have nothing to do with sex crimes.

One offender almost was sent back to prison for failing to list a car he owned and another faces deportation for not accurately listing his foreign nationality.

A nagging question has always been: Why single out sex-offenders and not register even more serious violent offenders such as murderers? If it's good policy for one, why not for the other?

Interestingly, we'll get a chance to consider just that issue as a result of a proposal by Sen. Will Espero, chairman of the state Senate's Public Safety Committee, to create a registry of convicted murderers.

Espero is concerned by recent high-profile cases in which paroled murderers were accused of committing heinous new crimes — including one charged with sexually assaulting and murdering a 20-year-old woman and another accused of viciously raping a 12-year-old girl.

"There is a price you pay for committing these crimes against society," Espero said. "Why aren't we having murderers being registered and notifying government and the public about where they are living? Wouldn't you want to know if a murderer moved into your neighborhood?"

It's a fair point for discussion; if we're going to register sex-offenders, perhaps it's only right that we be consistent and also register other seriously violent criminals.

But let's use the discussion to gain insight on the bigger question of whether there's any real value in blanket criminal registries that make no valid case-by-case assessments of the threat of repeat crimes that each offender actually poses.

David Shapiro, a veteran Hawai'i journalist, can be reached by e-mail at dave@volcanicash.net. Read his daily blog at blogs.honoluluadvertiser.com.