Megan Dishonored. My state, New Jersey, which gave the name "Megan's Law" to statutes that require local governments to notify the community of the presence of sex offenders in their midst, makes a mockery of Megan's Law thru administrative laxity and incompetence.
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I recently discovered that, before they are released, convicted sex offenders are required to report where they will live. But no effort whatsoever is made to ensure that they are really going there. They can give a completely phony address — a vacant lot, the house of a stranger — and nobody checks it before they are released! 'We don't have the staffing' is the excuse. So the State of New Jersey just releases convicted sex offenders into society without verifying that the address they are required to report really is their address.
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Does your state do the same?
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If we are really concerned about registering sex offenders, shouldn't we require that a public employee accompany a sex offender to the residence he claims, to confirm that he really lives there?
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How many sex offenders are released in any given time period? How many person-hours could it possibly take to do that?
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If we need to hire a few more people per state to do that and to make periodic checks of addresses, let's do it. Increase the income tax rate on the rich by 1/5 of 1% as a dedicated tax and we'll have plenty of money with which to check addresses of released offenders. And not just to track released sex offenders, but to keep tabs on all kinds of parolees, many of whom just stop reporting as required and move without giving a forwarding address. Let's hire investigators to keep track of dangerous people — or keep them in prison — whatever we need to do so we know where they are.
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The rich can pay for either solution. They've got all the money in the world, and should be glad to have society indebted to them for covering the cost of something people in general want, but don't want taxes on them raised for. If we are thankful to the rich, maybe we won't be so angry at them. That's a win-win situation.
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(Caveat: This country is too negative about sex, despite entertainment media's obsession with it, and some things that are criminalized (such as "statutory rape", which is actually consensual sex) should not be criminalized. Moreover, making penalties for sexual conduct too severe can produce the unintended, horrendous consequence of sexual abusers killing their victim to hide the crime. But there are indeed a lot of people whose whereabouts need to be known to police, and to neighbors.)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,960.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:16 PM