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Human sexualityRetributive justice increases
danger from sexual offenders
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On 2006-DEC-30, The New York Times published the following editorial
titled "Sex Offenders in Exile." They described on the dangers to the
community of enforcing retributive justice on sex offenders after their release
from jail. 
Of all the places that sexual predators could end up after prison, the worst
is out of sight, away from the scrutiny and treatment that could prevent them
from committing new crimes. But communities around the country are taking that
risk, with zoning laws that banish pedophiles to the literal edges of society.
There is a powerful and wholly understandable impulse behind laws that forbid
sex offenders to live within certain distances of schools, day care centers and
other places that children gather. Scores of states and municipalities have
created such buffer zones, then continued adding layer upon layer to the
enforcement blanket. This has placed a heavy burden on law enforcement agencies, which already
must struggle to meet exacting federal and state requirements for registering
and monitoring the ever-growing population of released sex offenders, many of
whom must be tracked for life. ... As the areas off limits to sex offenders expand to encompass entire towns and
cities, if not states, the places where they can live and work are shrinking
fast. The unintended consequence is that offenders have been dispersed to rural
nowhere zones, where they are much harder to track. In confined regions like
Long Island, they have become concentrated in a handful of low-rent,
few-questions-asked areas -- an unintended and unfair imposition on their wary
neighbors. Many offenders respond by going underground. In Iowa, the number of
registered sex offenders who went missing soared after the state passed a law
forbidding offenders to live within 2,000 feet of a school or day care center.
The county prosecutors' association has urged that the law be repealed, for the
simple reasons that it drives offenders out of sight, requires 'the huge
draining of scant law enforcement resources' and doesn't provide the protection
intended. The prosecutors are right that any sense of security that such laws provide
is vague at best and probably false. Just as it would feel foolish to forbid
muggers to live near A.T.M.'s, it is hard to imagine how a 1,000-foot buffer
zone around a bus stop, say, would keep a determined pedophile at bay. If
children feel secure enough to drop their wariness of strangers, that would be a
dangerous outcome. And of course, no buffer against a faceless predator will be
any help to the overwhelming majority of child victims -- those secretly abused
by stepfathers, uncles and other people they know. The problem with residency restrictions is that they fulfill an emotional
need but not a rational one. It©s in everyone©s interest for registered sex
offenders to lead stable lives, near the watchful eyes of family and law
enforcement and regular psychiatric treatment. Exile by zoning threatens to
create just the opposite phenomenon -- a subpopulation of unhinged nomads off
their meds with no fixed address and no one keeping tabs on them. This may
satisfy many a town's thirst for retributive justice, but as a sensible law
enforcement policy designed to make children safer, it smacks of thoughtlessness
and failure. 
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contained in the above essay is provided without profit by the
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editor, author, Webmaster, writer, publisher, news service, etc. that
objects to being part of this listing may request that future works be
excluded. We will also attempt to delete the above and previous entries from the
same source. Our postal address is: PO Box 128, Watertown, NY, 13601, USA. In order to stay within the traditional 500 word limit for
quoting copyright material, we deleted a sentence that noted that legislatures
have often increased the responsibilities of law enforcement agencies without
increasing their budgets to meet the costs of that enforcement. 
Last update: 2015-DEC-02 Source: The New York Times, 2006-DEC-30


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