There is no short word or phrase that captures the phenomenon, but it repeats itself over and over. Yes, that’s George Santayana banging his head against a wall, because we never seem to learn.  And from the front page of the New York Times, another example appears.

In December, Mr. Anderson met a girl through Hot or Not, a dating app, and after some online flirting, he drove to pick her up at her house in Michigan, just miles over the state line. They had sex in a playground in Niles City, the police report said.

That sexual encounter has landed Mr. Anderson in a Michigan jail, and he now faces a lifetime entanglement in the legal system. The girl, who by her own account told Mr. Anderson that she was 17 — a year over the age of consent in Michigan — was actually 14.

The boy was Zachary Anderson, age 19, and generally a pretty ordinary kid. And now he’ll be a registered sex offender for life. Why life? Because they couldn’t make it longer.

Some advocates and legal authorities are holding up Mr. Anderson’s case as the latest example of the overreach of sex offender registries, which gained favor in the 1990s as a tool for monitoring pedophiles and other people who committed sexual crimes. In the decades since, the registries have grown in number and scope; the nearly 800,000 people on registries in the United States go beyond adults who have sexually assaulted other adults or minors. Also listed are people found guilty of lesser offenses that run the gamut from urinating publicly to swapping lewd texts.

The flow is always the same: high profile case putting a terrible tragedy on people’s radar, where people immediately resort to the default that somebody ought to do something. The media whips up hysteria of an epidemic of creepy sickoes next door in white vans luring kids inside with peanut butter cups.

There is, of course, no epidemic. In fact, it’s a total outlier, a one in a million plus occurrence, but the cost/benefit analysis by parents is easy to calculate. They want zero risk to their children, and why shouldn’t they? So some enterprising politician makes his bones by offering a hasty solution, grounded in popular mythology (because empiricism is hard), of putting all the sickos on a list, limiting their actions after completion of their sentence so they can never harm again.  Or urinate in public. Or have sex with a girl who lied about her age on the internet.

The game plan for such solutions is always the same, promote the most tragic case as the harm requiring a law, and ignore the multitudes who are swept along with the tide.  Do it for the children, the women, the people who are too weak, needy, feeble to protect themselves.

And, of course, the tacit piece of the puzzle:  Who cares that some kid like Zach Anderson, someone for whom such a law was never intended, will see his life ruined.  We care about the children, and so Zach gets burned. You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.

But once Mr. Anderson leaves jail in the coming week, he will be bound by the same restrictions that apply to more extreme sex offenders, tagged with a “scarlet letter” for life, as his father, Lester Anderson, put it.

“At the end of the day, he might be out of jail, but he’ll still be in his own jail,” his father said. “He has to walk down the street every day and think: ‘Am I too close to a school? Is there a child who’s close to me?’ ”

Ironically, Zach’s father appears to distinguish between the “more extreme sex offenders” and his son. Perhaps even he can’t bring himself to appreciate that the flaws in the concept that will ruin his boy’s life will ruin other people’s lives too.

Many sex offenders have ended up broke and homeless, living in clusters under freeways because they are routinely rejected by employers and landlords, and because they are banned from living in so many neighborhoods that contain public places like parks.

“It’s like a conviction on steroids,” [Director of Reform Sex Offender Laws, Brenda] Jones said. “Being on a registry becomes a liability for employers, no matter how minor the offense was. Other people will say: ‘I saw your employee on the Internet. He’s a sex offender, and I will not come to your establishment.’ ”

Even when the registered sex offender isn’t just one teen who had sex with another, albeit too young, who lied about her age, the problem of what they’re supposed to do with themselves for the rest of their lives remains unanswered.  They can’t get jobs. They can’t live anywhere, even if they have enough money to pay rent. What a great way to reintegrate a released convict back into society.

What exactly do you expect these people to do, happily starve themselves while living in a cardboard box under a bridge, all to assure that no parent has bad dreams at night of a crime that is less likely to happen than their kid being hit by lightning? Well, pretty much yeah, that’s what they expect, if they ever bothered to think about it. The truth is that brains shut down the moment one gets past the immediate fear, the imminent concern that panic raised in your stomach, that it might happen to you or yours.

As soon as some half-baked palliative measure is created, and the media announces that their heinous problem is solved, everybody lets out a deep breath and goes about their way, living their merry lives without another thought of the havoc their solution brought onto others.

So Zach Anderson is no Ian Anderson. Who cares? At least your kid is safe, and that’s what really matters. Who cares that Zach Anderson is someone else’s child, also deserving of a future unencumbered by the ruinous demands of the sex offender registry.  Who cares that Zach Anderson really isn’t a sex offender, like most people on the registry.  As long as yours is safe.