Californians, guard your children
Bookworm on Nov 20 2008 at 9:11 pm | Filed under: Crime and punishment
One of the horrible things about pedophile sex offenders is that, unlike ordinary opportunistic, amoral offenders, they are driven by an overwhelming compulsion. They’re not the smelly old man living in the broken down house. They’re the pre-school teacher, the scout leader, the priest hosting youth groups, and the nice looking man who coincidentally moves into the condo next to the elementary school. In 2006, California voters tried to block that last pedophile behavior by voting for a law holding the convicted sex offenders may not live within 2,000 feet of a school or a park (that’s a little more than 1/3 of a mile or so).
California voters just lost on this one, although I hate to admit that there is a constitutional logic to the Court’s ruling. An appellate court determined that, as to those sex offenders who were convicted before the law’s passage, it’s unconstitutional to force them out of their homes as a result of the law’s passage:
A voter-approved law prohibiting sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school or a park amounts to additional punishment for the offenders’ original crimes, a state appeals court has ruled in a case that could affect thousands of parolees.The ruling Wednesday by the Fourth District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana was the first by a California court to find that the residency restrictions in Proposition 83, a November 2006 initiative, are not just public safety measures but would also punish ex-offenders by forcing them out of their homes.
Prop. 83, called Jessica’s Law by its sponsors, imposes “traditional banishment under another name,” the court said.
The ruling leaves the law in effect but could limit its application. The U.S. Constitution forbids laws that retroactively impose criminal penalties or increase punishment for past offenses.
A lawyer for four men who are challenging Prop. 83 before the state Supreme Court said Thursday that the ruling should prevent the state from imposing the residency restrictions on parolees who committed sex crimes before the ballot measure passed.
The attorney, Ernest Galvan, said the state now is applying the 2,000-foot buffer zone requirement to any former sex offender who has been paroled since Prop. 83 passed, even if the parolee committed a sex crime many years earlier and was serving a sentence for an unrelated crime. He said at least 2,000 parolees fall into that category, and the number is growing by hundreds each month.
“You can’t criminalize conduct after it’s already happened, can’t increase the punishment, because everyone’s entitled to notice of what’s criminal now,” Galvan said.
You can read the rest here.
Jessica’s law is a great idea because it separate’s compulsive actors from the objects of their twisted desires. However, the Court was right that America does not indulge in retroactive criminal penalties, and driving from their homes people who have served their time does fall into that category. It’s just another reminder to guard your children, keep them street smart, and watch out for single guys hanging around in parks.
By the way, if you want an insight into the mind of pedophiles — who are often charming people outside of their bizarre and dangerous compulsion — you should read Bob Hamer’s The Last Undercover: The True Story of an FBI Agent’s Dangerous Dance with Evil
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9 Responses to “Californians, guard your children”
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I don’t know what I finally think about this.
There’s a part of me that absolutely agrees with the pedophiles: we don’t indulge in retroactive punishment – especially after they’ve paid their “debt to society.”
If you’re going to put them in prison for a certain length of time – whatever it is – in order to expiate their crime, then when they come out they’re done. It’s expiated. Leave them alone.
If, on the other hand, you’re going to tell them where they may and may not live; and announce to the entire neighborhood that they’re criminals and were guilty of a specific type of crime; and follow them around with a microscope (and a microphone) for the rest of their lives, in essence never again letting them know a moment of peace – then why’d you let them out of prison? To torture them?
Answer: “Well, we had to let him out, he served his time.” Okay, then: he served his time, expiated his crime, paid his debt, got square with the house: then leave him the hell alone! “Well, owing to the nature of the crime he could still be a danger!” Okay then, obviously you shouldn’t have let him out. But since you did: get out of his face. This kind of full-time harassment (which is what it is) has to be itself illegal, or unconstitutional, or something.
The argument very quickly becomes circular. The point of prison is to punish, (rehabilitation would be nice but the adults in the room know that’s pretty much a fairy-tale), and exact retribution. Once it’s been exacted, aren’t you kind of obligated to get off the guy’s case?
And yet. I encountered a few of these guys in my shrink hospital interning days. There was a prison not far down the road for which we were the medical facility.
Bookworm is correct: This is not something over which they exercise control. This is, for want of a better phrase, a factory defect, and in my experience most of these guys are themselves not happy with who they are – even the creeps don’t actually enjoy being creeps. And, again as noted by Bookworm, they can be anybody. And – as everyone has heard to the point of boredom: psychiatry and psychology are not predictive. There’s no knowing if he will again, but it’s a compulsion: most of them will.
I tried to explain this once to Bill O’Reilly. He’s a big proponent of Jessica’s Law as a way of stopping pedophiles. Big gigantic fine and 25 years for the first offense, automatically and inevitably. That would make a difference, make ‘em think twice. I told him it wouldn’t. He could make the fine limitless and make it a mandatory 50 year sentence followed by mandatory execution: it won’t – can’t – deter people from doing stuff the doing of which they don’t control. When they’re in the moment, there’s no thought for anything else: problems and consequences resulting therefrom don’t register. No matter how Draconian the punishment, it isn’t even on the radar during the commission.
The sad reality is that there isn’t much of anything you can do – because there isn’t much of anything they can do. If they could they would: no matter how smug and snarky many of them appear on TV. (And the ones who don’t appear smug etc. are like Raymond Cooey: a pathetic little man, who knows that everyone on the planet regards him as being lower than whale***. They despise themselves not only for what they did, but also because they lack the ocurage for suicide.)
The point is they can’t control it, therefore the threat of punishment is meaningless. Punishing them the way we do – after they’ve served their time – demeans all of us and makes nonsense of the world-view that allegedly informs our constitution and laws.
Everyone’s goal is to stop them from doing it twice – which doesn’t save the kid they did it to the first time. But they mostly didn’t know they could ever do it until they did, and it’s not susceptible to prevention, so you can’t predict or stop the first time. All you can do is not let them have the second time.
I don’t know any other way: at first offense we recognize the intractable danger to society, and the mandatory sentence becomes life, not 25 years. You don’t get out. Ever. (Maybe we do a larger version of what the state of Washington is tentatively [sort of, almost, perhaps] doing: exile them to a safe place.) Or, if you prefer, you can choose to be (humanely, obviously) executed, as a way of removing yourself.
As far as I can see, those are the workable options. Total removal from society, one way or the other. It cannot be predicted whether you will again or not; and you can’t be fixed. (100% unfixable? Of course not: there are always a few who can be fixed. Trouble is, you only find out which ones they were forty years later, after they’ve passed without doing it again. It is indeed unpredictable,and no shrink on the planet will ever say, “this guy’s fine.”)
I don’t much like either of those choices. O’Reilly, it should be noted, didn’t either. But those are the only things that seem to work. If somebody figures out something else that works, I think the world’s waiting to hear it.
Greetings:
While protecting children or other vulnerables from danger is a legitimate social goal, this type of law sets my “mass hysteria” meter off.
I don’t see any scientific basis for these restrictions. One of my favorite management techniques is “staged implementation.” Has this been tried and found beneficial anywhere? Does pedophilic activity decrease in those areas? Or, is this somebody’s bright idea.
Several years ago, the town where I live had an issue with the opening of a gun shop. It was probably within two thousand feet of both a high school and a middle school in a small “strip mall”. Well, the usual suspects were, in no time, up in arms (if they will forgive the expression) about the danger to their children from the opening of such a diabolical emporium of impending disaster. The lack of even a scintilla of evidence of any child ever being injured at or near a gun shop did nothing to diminish their enthusiasm for restriction.
You see, they knew.
And they were wrong.
If they implement my educational program, Book, few child molestors will be alive after trying to grab a kid. This will solve the problem in the short term, if not the long one.
Ymar…
What happens if one Target Focussed Trained individual meets another? What prevents people with bad intentions from getting the training?
Tiresias,
Do the so called chemical castrations alter the pedophiles behavior in any meaningful way?
Would castration, in general, alter their behavior?
Do any drugs effectively suppress their behavior?
Or are there no viable alternatives?
Seems reasonable to treat these folks like we do/did the “typhoid marys”…
They may not intend any harm, but society has the right to protect itself from them, whether the danger they pose is purposeful or not.
Here are two websites for those who want to further investigate the issue.
http://criminaljustice.state.ny.us/nsor/som_mythsandfacts.htm gives a short introduction.
Click on : Myth: Community notification and sex offender registries make communities safer,Fact: Registries help identify where sex offenders live in order for the public to protect their families.
You find the following:
So much for the Registry keeping you safe.
For those who wish to further research this, the California Coalition On Sexual Offending has an extensive collection of studies on the issue.
Rock -
Unknown, at least to me. I think it’s been tried a few times in laboratory settings, but there’s never been anything like a full-scale clinical trial of it as a methodology to control sexual behavior. Inconclusive, I believe.
I would suspect it would not work. The major sexual organ in the human being is the organ located between the ears. I have read (years ago) that in the wake of physical castration there have been those who remained able to perform.
Drugs – yeah, of course: you can alter or suppress just about any behavior up with which a human can come (take that, Mr. Churchill!) if you dose him hard enough. You’re trying to control a fundamental drive, here, it’ll take a lot, and they’ll be powerful. You’ll be left with a pretty much stuporous and non-functioning human being.
Earl – the state of Washington sort of does this, I’m told – it occasionally pops up on the news. There’s an island in the Puget Sound that used to be a prison, which has been decommissioned as a prison I think, and has become home to a population of pedophiles. I don’t know enough about it, including the name of the island, the program, whether it’s for people who’ve served sentences and volunteered to go there or whether they’ve been sent – I don’t know much of anything, really; except I’ve heard something about it.
“Something” – obviously, does not qualify as “informative,” sorry! But I think Washington’s leaning in a pretty good direction with this idea. Sequestration of one form or another seems to be the best answer, and giving them a place to live (relatively) normal lives where there’s no one around to harm strikes me as a good idea, post-sentence.
Without evidence that these sorts of laws reduce recidivism, they are nothing more than additional punishments. I would object a lot less if they were narrowly tailored to people who are convicted of a legitimate child sexual felony, rather than any crime with a sexual element.
Another thing to do is to check out the areas left after these restrictions. I did a Google maps search for Schools, then for Parks in my town. After subtracting all the areas within 2000 feet, there is almost nothing left. We have a local case where an offender had to move because he was just within 1000 feet (our limit) of a nearly unused fieldhouse that was across the river from him.