This may not be a popular topic, but I think it is pertinent this election season, as Obama has taken a leading role in sex offender registration legislation, and now that it has been aplled all over the country, a lot of problems have emerged. It is difficult to discuss this issue, because the crimes involved are so neinous that the perpetrators receive very little sympathy from the public. However, it is precisely in such situation, with a nearly unanimous majority on one side and a despised minority on the other, when democracy can become very oppressive and extreme solutions can take hold.
Sex offender laws exist in nearly every state at this point, and there is also federal legislation. Most felony level offenses having sex as an element, from lewd behavior to child molestation to rape, now carry mandatory lifetime registration, with permanent stigmatization and restrictiosn on where people can live. Many states are also regularly employing civil commitment for offenders whose incarceration term has expired, keeping them in state mental hospitals indefinitely without the need for a sentence from the court. The result is the creation of a permanent institutionally persecuted pariah class.
More after the flip, with Obama's position on the subject.
Obama's website has this to say regarding his position on this issue:
Senator Obama cosponsored Dru's Law which creates a nationwide sex offender database and requires greater monitoring of sex offenders upon their release from prison. The bill passed the Senate in July of 2005. This legislation was incorporated into a larger bill, the Adam Walsh Child Protection Act, which Senator Obama supported and which has been signed into law.
He also cosponsored the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act. This bill increases the penalties for sex crimes against children under the age of 12 and creates a national Internet site known as the National Sex Offender Public Registry. The bill would also provide grants to local law enforcement to assist in preventing and investigating sex crimes against minors.
Senator Obama is a cosponsor of the KIDS Act, which requires convicted sex offenders to provide their Internet identifiers, such as e-mail addresses and instant message addresses, for inclusion into the national sex offender registry.
Now this is the majority position, and is touted by the Senator in his list of achievements on crime. No doubt it is popular with the voters, who have been taught by the media to fear the predators lurking around every corner. But here's the reality - these laws are creating a class of people with no privacy, no place to live, whom the public, encouraged by the government, feels free to run out of their neighborhood or vilify as they please.
Here's a more detailed synopsis of the ever increasing punishment of sex offenders.
But forget for a moement the heinous crimes sensationalized by the media. The vast majority of these registered sex offenders are non-violent and committed acts far less ghastly than the ones that make the news. Furthermore, they are generally less likely to reoffend than other criminals. But, once they are in the system all of them lose their rights just the same. And once they get out (that is,if they ever get out, the restictions on where they can live mean that they cluster together in the same house or rehab center. However, even if they do not violate any conditions of their parole or living restrictions, the public outrage when people find out that a bunch of sex offenders are living in their town knows no bounds, is carefully stoked by various populist media personalities, and often results in their expulsion from their residence even though they broke no laws and were placed there by the parole board, because the coummunity doesn't want there and will even resort to threats of violence to drive them out.
Where are these people supposed to go? What are they supposed to do? Should we care? Shouldn't we just drive them as far away from us as possible and hope they hole up in some desert motel and die? Maybe it's the contrarian in me, the one who has got me troll rated so many times, but I think these people are still Americans who should still have basic civil rights, no matter what they did. This isn't like a gun registry, which prevents felons from owning fire arms, this is a permanent stigma that gets your computer searched, your emails tracked, your residence restricted, gets you run out of neighborhood after neighborhoood, gets you assaulted regularly in prison with the tacit approval of the guards, gets you indefinitely confined after you serve your sentence, and generally means you are no longer a human being on par with the rest.
What should be the Democratic Party position on this? Obama has clearly chosen the "tough on crime" approach, which is always popular with the voters. But if the left won't speak for these people who will? Will you? We spend so much time talking about the rights of terrorism suspects, but what about these Americans right here at home? Don't they deserve rights?
As I viewed the comments, the points I was trying to make crystallized in my mind.
- How does lifetime registration and residency restrictions for these people make anybody safer? All it does is allow the politicians to appear tough, ruin the convicts' lives, stoke fear among the public, and raise the chances for vigilante violence. Can't the offender just go 1003 fret to the school? How does having a face posted on the Internet somewhere save the next victim of a determined predator? Even if you believe these people are as dangerous and deserving of punishment as the media says they are, I think you have to agree that these programs won't make anybody safer.
- We need to have a discussion about what exactly constitutes a sex crime. Who decided this anyway? Statutory rape with the age difference between victim and perpetrator of less than 3 years, or exposing yourself in public should not be registrable offenses. And yet I know from my expeirence in the justice system that the prosecutor will always push for a registrable offense, they are like dogs hunting rabbits, they want to get all they can in their slavering mouths. So if they can, they will make you register, without any consideration of the usefulness of the penality in a particular case. And people threatened with lifetime registration will plea to anything just to escape that. We need to be very precise about who can be charged with a registrable offense in our legislation, otherwise the prosecutors will just have a field day. And this is a general problem I have with the criminal justice system, the prosecutors have too much power and they always go for the msximum charge they think they can get, not what actually reflects what happened.
Someone has kindly posted the address for a petition which you can sign if you agree that the current laws and attitude need to be changed.