How do we Deal with Sexual Offenders?
This news story, about a man whose sexual offender status is causing him and his family to be forceably moved, article prompted these thoughts on the state of the legal system’s ability to deal with sexual offenders.
If all the guy did was urinate in public and that’s a sex offense, there seems to be a big disconnect between fear and reality. A friend, who lives in Hawaii, says that in his home state, “urinating in public is called sexual assault in the 4th degree. As such you would be required to register as a sex offender. One guy challenged it and the Hawaii supreme court made them take down the online sex offender registry.” This is clearly a dangerous proposition and exposes the fragility of how we currently deal with this special class of offender.
If he truly is a child molester, the issue here is that we as society do not have a way to treat these offenders. Many of them will never be rehabilitated. Even the psychiatric community agrees to that. We don’t have the space to keep them in jail. So what do we do?
Do we put all the sex offenders in a single neighborhood where no one will ever go?
The law treats sexual offenders differently for a reason. Imagine if we did the same thing for another serious crime, say murder.
Force all the murderers to register their address. Then, make sure that they don”t live anywhere near a person who matches the physical description of the person they murdered. It doesn’t make any sense, right?
But, it does seem to make sense for sexual criminals, because the law, whether it explicitly acknowledges it or not, knows that the crime is different from other violent crimes. Therefore, our old methods of incarceration and full release don’t work.
In truth, sexual crimes are signs of mental illness. Most of these people have deep-seated psychological issues that neither prisons nor the civilian populations are equipped to deal with. Yet, we ignore that and simply create a cycle of prison and recidivism.
To a lesser extent, it’s very similar to those people caught in the cycle of drug use and jail time because of that use. We know that people who truly want to break that cycle have to move away from their old using places and using buddies. Do we force them to do so? No. So, it begs the question of forcing sexual predators to move. Both are likely to commit their crime again.
It’s a hard question with seemingly no answers. That’s why the law finds itself in the situation described above.