> According to data compiled by the U.S. Justice Department ( http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/crimoff.htm#sex ), the high recidivism rate of sex offenders is a myth. Sex offenders have an overall recidivism rate of less than 6 percent over three years, and 40 percent of those who do reoffend do so in the first year after their release. More detailed analysis confirms that a sex offender’s likelihood of committing a new crime decreases the longer he or she remains free; in other words, if they’re going to commit another crime, it will probably happen in the first few years after their release.

Of course, this sort of data doesn’t make for good sound bytes for politicians seeking to foster a “get tough” image to bolster their chances for election or re-election; but it’s the truth, as much as they may deny it.

Nonetheless, the supposedly high sex offender recidivism rates that politicians seem to pull out of thin air (when was the last time you heard one cite an actual study to validate the numbers they quote?) have created an environment where the mere presence of an individual who commited a sex crime five, ten, or twenty years ago is enough to cast a community into a state of panic. Given the misinformation and lies of the politicians (and the media’s dutiful reporting of same), it’s no wonder that some, at least, feel that vigilante justice is an appropriate response.

In the end, it all comes down to a simple question: Should our government be in the business of facilitating vigilantism? Certainly the legislators who wrote these laws will argue that that was not their intention, but the effect is the same.

These laws remind me of the “attractive nuisance” concept in liability law. People who work with potentially dangerous equipment (circular saws, pesticides, chemicals, and so forth) are required to safeguard those items to prevent curious children (and others) from hurting themselves. If a carpenter leaves his circular saw unattended and a child picks it up and cuts himself, the carpenter is liable for costs and damages related to the child’s injuries. The argument that it wasn’t the carpenter’s intent that a child pick up and play with his circular saw is irrelevant. By leaving it unattended, he created an attractive nuisance; and he is therefore liable.

Creating a public hysteria about sex offenders, and then publishing their names and addresses on the Web, where anyone can access that information without so much as providing identification, is akin to leaving a power saw unattended. Anyone — stable or unstable, honorable or malicious — can access that information and use it in any way they like. This opens the door not only to vigilantism, but also to innocent people being killed because of mistaken identity.

If this information is to be made public at all (personally, I think it should only be available to law enforcement professionals), then the only safe balance between the public’s “right to know” and the concept of the rule of law is to release the information only to adults who physically walk into a police station, present identification, and make an inquiry about a particular individual. This creates accountability and helps safeguard against random vigilantism.

In other words, if the neighbor down the street seems to be a bit too friendly towards your children and you want to check him out, that seems to me a legitimate use of sex offender registration information. But to simply publish all of this data on the Web, with no safeguards to prevent it from being used irresponsibly or criminally, is unconscionable in a society whose conduct supposedly is based upon the rule of law.

Comment by Bugsy — May 4, 2006 @ 10:01 am <

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> Anyone who values their liberties and who has studied history should be afraid – very afraid — of these laws.

Long before Hitler killed the first Jew in Nazi Germany, he paved the way for the wholesale disenfranchisement of human beings by — you guessed it — attacking the rights of sex offenders. From 1933 through 1936, a series of amendments were passed to Paragraphs 173 through 188 of the German Penal Law specifically targeting homosexuals and others determined to be “sexual deviants.”

The sex offender laws created under the Nazi Third Reich may as well have been the model for “Megan’s Law.” They established the first sex offender registry, required sex offenders to register their whereabouts and to wear pink triangles, and established draconian punishments for sex crimes that included long prison terms, loss of voting rights, confinement in concentration camps, and (sometimes) the death penalty. All of these laws were justified by the Nazi’s in the same way that our present-day politicians justify Megan’s Law: to protect the children from sexual predators.

Of course, Hitler had other things in mind, as history shows us; and targeting sex offenders was just a way to establish the precedent of wholesale deprivation of human rights in preparation for his later attacks against the people he truly hated.

It’s doubtful that the German people would have acquiesced to Hitler’s rounding up Jews, Gypsies, Communists, Socialists, trade unionists, and so forth, and sending them off to death camps in 1933 when he first ascended to power. Hitler had to first establish a precedent that some people were subhuman and unworthy of human rights — and he started with the most universally despised group he could find.

Anyone who thinks that this couldn’t happen again is delusional. The simple fact is that history shows that you can’t single out one group for deprivation of civil rights without weakening those rights for everyone else.

Comment by Liberty Lover — May 7, 2006 @ 8:54 am <

It it doesn’t work this time just copy and paste it