And they say that no one ever gets unfairly hurt by the sex offender laws:
The death of William Elliott, 24, is reigniting the national debate over sex offender registries. His anguished mother said yesterday that he should not have been on the same list as criminals who preyed on children.
He had been convicted of having sex with a girlfriend who was two weeks shy of her 16th birthday, the mother said. ''My son was not a pedophile," said Shirley Turner. ''He shouldn't have been labeled that. . . . He just wanted to love that girl and make a family; that's all he wanted to do."
Without the registry, ''he'd still be alive today," Turner said. ''I'd still have him."
Anyone having any doubts now as to how badly broken the system really is? It treats a man who had sex with a girl who was nearly sixteen the same as a man who raped a small child. Oh sure, it didn't give them the exact same sentence, but it exposed both of them to society with a big "Sex Offender" tatoo on their foreheads as though the two were morally the same. There is something dispicable about a legal system that regards the former as being so dangerous that he has to carry around a crippling stigma that could potentially get him murdered.
I completely understand the outrage over acts against little kids, but a lot of sex crimes are very questionable as to whether or not they were in fact crimes. Do we really need more people to be convicted of sex crimes for taking a piss behind their big rig truck? There have even been cases of kids and teens getting charged with sex crimes because they accidentally kicked their sibling in the crotch. The system is out of control and must be fixed, but in order to do that, people would have to sit down and coldly, rationally propose reform. That... is just about the last thing that anyone can expect to happen on a subject like this.
Hello, Feministe readers. Question for those of you who have come here to see what kind of "fucking evil man" I am, to paraphrase one Feministe commenter. What good is it to talk about the obvious right to not get raped when you are defending the behavior which causes many young women to be able to be raped? In that confrontation between victim and rapist, this right exists on paper and it becomes a contest between "wills to power." Ever heard of the will to power? Look it up sometime, it might enlighten you about why it's incredibly stupid to argue about rights when you the only choice you have at the moment is fight or flight. I have a right to not get robbed or beaten to death in a bar fight, but you don't see me complaining about how "if evil men would stop getting homocidal over the slip of the tongue, people wouldn't be murdered." Evil people are evil. They don't need a reason to rape you other than they want to. If you want to exercise your right to expose yourself to evil people by doing things you know will increase your chances of getting in contact with evil people, fine. Just stop complaining about what they do to you because you brought it on yourselves by exposing yourselves to easily avoidable situations. No, you can't always avoid them, but you can't always avoid a bear or mountain lion while talking a walk through the woods. So, does it make sense to argue then that you should be able to walk through a big cat exhibit at the zoo without getting mauled? That's what you're suggesting you have a right to not expect when you get into a car with a strange man or go to a seedy bar in the wee hours of the morning. You're taking a walk through the tiger's cage and betting that he won't try to bite your head off.
This is one of the best examples I've seen of how "illegal" does not necessarily mean "wrong," and how a punishment-based justice system is so totally unsuited to many situations that come up in real life, either where people are punished for doing something that isn't wrong under the circumstances, or where the rich can avoid retribution because they can afford the right lawyer.
The school where I worked for a couple of years practiced a disciplinary methodology called Restorative Justice, which is not about Crime and Punishment, but instead about Hurt and Repair (roughly speaking). It was really interesting to watch it in action, and to try and practice it myself.
I don't know how it would work on a larger scale, since it involves people being, in the main, reasonable and willing to talk about sensitive things like feelings and their thoughts. But it's certainly an alternative to the current retribution-based system which, as this post demonstrates, clearly doesn't work in way too many cases.
Lucas,
The problem here is that many people don't want to see the truth that sex offenders are rarely the slobbering, sick little men that only come out at night that popular culture makes them out to be. The otherwise great guy you work with could be a "sex offender" because at 18 he banged a 14 year old girl he met at a concert, in class or hanging out. People rarely realize that they are ruining the lives in some cases of normal people who happen to have made a bad decision.
I just have this feeling that it'll only get worse until the system gets so out of control that thousands of rich white and asian teens get caught up in it. As long as it's just some punk kid, the moralists rarely care. They just shrug and say "weeeeellll the system has problems, but it's fundamentally right" when in fact it's not. Unlike a lot of them, I know I could soberly hand down a death sentence by firing squad to someone convicted of production of child pornography. I could even bring myself to participate in the firing squad.
Punishment-based systems are wrong, especially for a country that claims to have Judao-Christian values. I guess you could say that a Christian system would have a "Redemptive Justice" system instead.
Everything is broke in Amerika and it will not get any better, because the ignorance is increasing, not decreasing, thanks to the publik skools...not sure where this country is headed, but I have a feeling we won't want to be here 15-20 years from now...
tviper,
I don't know I'd go that far. I have this funny feeling that the next 15-20 years will see a resurgence of freedom toward the end of them as the system implodes. Heh, in 5-6 years, I plan to buy up at least $10,000 worth of gold (at current dollar value) to start a more permanent investment plan. Once the system is on the verge of collapse a la Sweden, things will have to change, and if they don't, there will be a civil war. The first 1776 was waged by a minority of the 1/3 of the population that wanted to be independent of Britain. If things were to reach that point, I think that the people could reclaim their government more easily than in 1776.
It is great that you have such optimism, but unfortunately, from my view in SoCal, we are in for complete hell over the time period mentioned...the ruling elite has too much power and contempt and the middle class is absolutely clueless as to what is going on...examples are endless, but as you discuss above, the moral depravity that is accelerating throughout this country is a good barometer of what beckons on the horizon...