"...now private citizens are increasingly taking matters into their own hands. In addition to the constant barrage of insults and threats directed at Mr Uitenbogaard in Hengelo, another member of Martijn was driven from his home in the northern province of Friesland. And a writer who merely supported Martijn’s right to free speech has also had the windows of his house smashed and ‘Paedophile’ painted on his front door in red letters."
Showing posts with label Hysteria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hysteria. Show all posts
Everything is Now “Potential” Child Porn By Dr. Marty Klein
This is the decade of destroying children to protect them. It’s the decade of arresting teens for emailing sexy photos of themselves, turning them into Registered Sex Offenders. It’s the decade of arresting teens for having sex with each other, turning them into Registered Sex Offenders. It’s the decade of arresting and expelling 6-year-olds for “inappropriately hugging” classmates, turning them into “at-risk juveniles.” It’s a disgusting Moral Panic. The Fear of Child Porn has gotten completely out of hand. The bizarre behaviors of Sheriff’s Departments, state legislatures, school districts, and “morality” groups are not about protecting kids. They’re about responding to Panic. This is about adults, not about kids. It’s about frightened people reassuring themselves that they’re safe; that they’re doing everything they can to make a changing world less confusing; that they’re “erring on the side of caution” (as if there are no negative aspects to that); and that we specifically aren’t letting the niceties of the Constitution or common sense stop us.
We know it’s a Panic, because laws that were designed to protect kids are now being used to destroy them, along with some of the basics of our adult system of government. And most people don’t even feel bad about it.
Proposed law would bar sex offenders from veterans cemeteries
Apparently, this Missouri Legislator is referring to DEAD sex offenders, although I'm surprised that she doesn't also wish to exclude living sex offenders from visiting the cemeteries.
Sure, and while we're at it, lets bar any veterans who were guilty of war crimes during their stint in the armed services from being buried in "hallowed ground", too. If they massacred children in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, let's keep them out of the Veteran's Cemeteries, too.
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- A Missouri lawmaker has introduced new legislation in Congress that would prevent sex offenders from being buried in national cemeteries.
The "Hallowed Grounds Act," introduced by Republican Rep. Vicky Hartzler, would prohibit an individual who is classified as a Tier III sex offender under the Sex Offender Registration Act from being buried at a veterans or national cemetery. A Tier III sex offender is one whose offenses against a child might include the crimes of aggravated sexual abuse or abusive sexual contact.
"While veterans guilty of capital crimes have justly been denied burial in our national cemeteries, veterans guilty of sexual abuse of children are still entitled to these honors," Hartzler said. "Allowing these offenders to rest in fields of honor is an insult to America's military heroes. Furthermore, it is an outrage to the victims and their families."
http://www.semissourian.com/story/1739345.html?response=no
Mom Strangles Daughter To Save Her From Pedophiles
Crazy, though she undoubted is, clearly the zeitgeist of our times which identifies pedophiles as one of the gravest threats facing mankind has infiltrated the troubled mind of this mother and influenced her terrible decision to sacrifice her daughter. Mental instability is coming to be seen as existing on a continuum, with the very slight craziness of most people at one end and the incoherently raving on the other. Pedophile hysteria, much like religion, has infiltrated the minds of the population and can be seen to be making nearly everyone at least a little bit 'unhinged'.
Mom strangled daughter to 'save' her from pedophiles
Crazy, though she undoubted is, clearly the zeitgeist of our times which identifies pedophiles as one of the gravest threats facing mankind has infiltrated the troubled mind of this mother and influenced her terrible decision to sacrifice her daughter.
Mental instability is coming to be seen as existing on a continuum, with the very slight craziness of most people at one end and the incoherently raving on the other.
Pedophile hysteria, much like religion, has infiltrated the minds of the population and can be seen to be making nearly everyone at least a little bit 'unhinged'.
Fear Tactics Used To Bring States Into Adam Walsh Act Compliance
"Virginia, Maryland and the District are struggling to comply with a five-year-old federal mandate to create a national sex offender registry and critics say their failure could cause them to attract violent sex criminals to the region."
Because the threat of losing 10% of their federal funding has not been sufficient incentive to compel the vast majority of states to enact the draconian A.W.A., its proponents are now using the specter of hordes of dangerous sex offenders relocating to their (already inhospitable) states to avoid the even-more horrendous A.W.A. states in order to advance their nightmarish laws.
Ratcheting up hysteria and fear is all these people know how to do. Tragically, they have been quite successful so far.
Fear Tactics Used To Bring States Into Adam Walsh Act Compliance
"Virginia, Maryland and the District are struggling to comply with a five-year-old federal mandate to create a national sex offender registry and critics say their failure could cause them to attract violent sex criminals to the region."
Because the threat of losing 10% of their federal funding isn't enough to compel the vast majority of states to enact the draconian A.W.A., its proponents are now using the specter of hordes of dangerous sex offenders relocating to their (already inhospitable) states to avoid the even-more horrendous A.W.A. states.
Ratcheting up hysteria and fear is all these people know how to do. Tragically, they have been quite successful so far.
‘No age of consent law’: Gay Irish Presidential candidate digs in deeper
Editor: David Norris clearly establishes here his courage while relinquishing any possibility of becoming Ireland's next President.
Predictable are the comments pouring in as a reaction to his statements. What is obvious from reading through some of these is that much of the public wants him to be punished, criminally if possible, for voicing his heartfelt, if socially radioactive, opinions.
David Norris has failed the moral litmus test of our times, engineered as it was, by the unlikely cabal of religious fascists in league with angry female supremacists some thirty years ago but which has long since become mainstream. His renunciation of all that is pure and divine in the eyes of the mob which we euphemistically refer to as "society" will cost him dearly. He is courageous, indeed!
DUBLIN, June 9, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Homosexualist Irish presidential hopeful David Norris is fighting to maintain his candidacy amidst even more revelations that he supports “classical pedophilia” and opposes any law specifying an age of consent for sex.
Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011
As always, fear and hysteria are the primary tools used to strip citizens of essential liberties and privacy.
Our lawmaker's arguments are persuasive to those ignorant of essential facts and unable to rationally assess risk and danger in its absence. Tragically, this appears to be most everyone in our country today.
The media, having long since thrown off their traditional responsibility of providing their public with hard information gained through principled investigation independent of government manipulation, are simply unavailable to question the veracity of politically-sourced allegations and fabricated statistics. Indeed, the media now serve mainly as conduits of propaganda, both government and organizational, for its distribution to a similarly unquestioning public.
Both the media and politicians discovered long ago that the way to get the public's attention was to discuss the sex lives of others and that the way to enrage them was to explosively combine the topic of sex with the topic of children.
And the results are all around us: more government, less freedom, more misinformation, more fear and a wildly unbalanced, unhappy and distrustful society.
http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,228708/printable.html
6 Year Old Boy Charged With Sexual Assault In Madison Wisconsin
Who on Earth believes that this is a healthy and appropriate response to two small children, literally, playing "doctor"? Well, apart from the Taliban, apparently the prosecutor, Madison Wisconsin District Attorney, Lisa Riniker, does.
Several questions immediately spring to mind:
Is Grant County so flush with taxpayer money that the police and district attorney have uncovered and prosecuted all other, more serious, crimes in their community and are now free to pursue six-year-olds?
Also, let's assume for the moment that Lisa Riniker is sincere in her stated aim of getting the six-year-old boy the "help" he needs (although from past knowledge of prosecutors, sincerity is not one of their stronger traits). What will that "help"consist of? And "what" will he be "helped" with? His sexual curiosity?
Will that "help" actually end up hurting him?
How will this intervention of "help" affect his future emotional well-being?
There were two children involved in playing doctor, both a little girl and a little boy. How was it that the boy was singled-out for prosecution?
It should be manifestly clear that the anti-sex crusade begun decades ago has mutated and expanded to claim ever more victims, including the very children it professes to be "saving".
"Inappropriate" behavior has now become "criminalized" behavior with need of "qualified" taxpayer-funded "intervention" and categorization, if not outright imprisonment and permanently degraded citizenship.
Some of us said, more than a quarter of a century ago, that this was the path along which we were being taken by a bizarre and hateful alliance of right-wing, religious fundamentalists and bitter, power-hungry, female supremacists who had, as their common interest, the hatred of human sexuality.
And, sure enough, it is now easy to see the progression that this movement has taken, with a gradual erosion of rights extending to ever-greater numbers of victims.
One final question: where will this end?
the story: http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/crime_and_courts/article_c13c6a62-72b8-11e0-8659-001cc4c03286.html
Eek! A Male! Treating all men as potential predators doesn't make our kids safer.
By LENORE SKENAZY
Last week, the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, Timothy Murray, noticed smoke coming out of a minivan in his hometown of Worcester. He raced over and pulled out two small children, moments before the van's tire exploded into flames. At which point, according to the AP account, the kids' grandmother, who had been driving, nearly punched our hero in the face.
Why?
Mr. Murray said she told him she thought he might be a kidnapper.
And so it goes these days, when almost any man who has anything to do with a child can find himself suspected of being a creep. I call it "Worst-First" thinking: Gripped by pedophile panic, we jump to the very worst, even least likely, conclusion first. Then we congratulate ourselves for being so vigilant.
Consider the Iowa daycare center where Nichole Adkins works. The one male aide employed there, she told me in an interview, is not allowed to change diapers. "In fact," Ms. Adkins said, "he has been asked to leave the classroom when diapering was happening."
Now, a guy turned on by diaper changes has got to be even rarer than a guy turned on by Sponge Bob. But "Worst-First" thinking means suspecting the motives of any man who chooses to work around kids.
Maybe the daycare center felt it had to be extra cautious, to avoid lawsuits. But regular folk are suspicious, too. Last February, a woman followed a man around at a store berating him for clutching a pile of girls' panties. "I can't believe this! You're disgusting. This is a public place, you pervert!" she said—until the guy, who posted about the episode on a website, fished out his ID. He was a clerk restocking the underwear department.
Given the level of distrust, is it any wonder that, as the London Telegraph reported last month, the British Musicians' Union warned its members they are no longer to touch a child's fingers, even to position them correctly on the keys? Or that a public pool in Sydney, Australia last fall prohibited boys from changing in the same locker room as the men? (According to the Daily Telegraph in Sydney, the men demanded this, fearing false accusations.)
What's really ironic about all this emphasis on perverts is that it's making us think like them. Remember the story that broke right before Christmas? The FBI warned law-enforcement agencies that the new Video Barbie could be used to make kiddie porn. The warning was not intended for the public but it leaked out. TV news celebrated the joy of the season by telling parents that any man nice enough to play dolls with their daughters could really be videotaping "under their little skirts!" as one Fox News reporter said.
This queasy climate is making men think twice about things they used to do unselfconsciously. A friend of mine, Eric Kozak, was working for a while as a courier. Driving around an unfamiliar neighborhood, he says, "I got lost. I saw a couple kids by the side of the road and rolled down my window to ask, 'Where is such-and-such road?' They ran off screaming."
Another dad told me about taking his three-year-old to play football in the local park, where he'd help organize the slightly older kids into a game. Over time, one of the kids started to look up to him. "He wanted to stand close to me, wanted approval, Dad stuff, I guess. And because of this whole 'stranger danger' mentality, I could sense this sort of wary disapproval from the few other parents at the playground. So I just stopped going."
And that's not the worst. In England in 2006, BBC News reported the story of a bricklayer who spotted a toddler at the side of the road. As he later testified at a hearing, he didn't stop to help for fear he'd be accused of trying to abduct her. You know: A man driving around with a little girl in his car? She ended up at a pond and drowned.
We think we're protecting our kids by treating all men as potential predators. But that's not a society that's safe. Just sick.
Ms. Skenazy is a public speaker and author of the blog and book, "Free-Range Kids" (Wiley, 2010).
'Stranger Danger' and the Decline of Halloween
Wall Street Journal
No child has ever been killed by poisoned candy. Ever.
By LENORE SKENAZY
Halloween is the day when America market-tests parental paranoia. If a new fear flies on Halloween, it's probably going to catch on the rest of the year, too.
Take "stranger danger," the classic Halloween horror. Even when I was a kid, back in the "Bewitched" and "Brady Bunch" costume era, parents were already worried about neighbors poisoning candy. Sure, the folks down the street might smile and wave the rest of the year, but apparently they were just biding their time before stuffing us silly with strychnine-laced Smarties.
That was a wacky idea, but we bought it. We still buy it, even though Joel Best, a sociologist at the University of Delaware, has researched the topic and spends every October telling the press that there has never been a single case of any child being killed by a stranger's Halloween candy. (Oh, yes, he concedes, there was once a Texas boy poisoned by a Pixie Stix. But his dad did it for the insurance money. He was executed.)
This Halloween, costumes based on "Jersey Shore" stars Snooki, DJ Pauly D and The Situation are flying off the shelves. WSJ's Elizabeth Holmes reports.Anyway, you'd think that word would get out: poisoned candy not happening. But instead, most Halloween articles to this day tell parents to feed children a big meal before they go trick-or-treating, so they won't be tempted to eat any candy before bringing it home for inspection. As if being full has ever stopped any kid from eating free candy!
So stranger danger is still going strong, and it's even spread beyond Halloween to the rest of the year. Now parents consider their neighbors potential killers all year round. That's why they don't let their kids play on the lawn, or wait alone for the school bus: "You never know!" The psycho-next-door fear went viral.
Then along came new fears. Parents are warned annually not to let their children wear costumes that are too tight—those could seriously restrict breathing! But not too loose either—kids could trip! Fall! Die!
Treating parents like idiots who couldn't possibly notice that their kid is turning blue or falling on his face might seem like a losing proposition, but it caught on too.
Halloween taught marketers that parents are willing to be warned about anything, no matter how preposterous, and then they're willing to be sold whatever solutions the market can come up with. Face paint so no mask will obscure a child's vision. Purell, so no child touches a germ. And the biggest boondoggle of all: an adult-supervised party, so no child encounters anything exciting, er, "dangerous."
Think of how Halloween used to be the one day of the year when gaggles of kids took to the streets by themselves—at night even. Big fun! Low cost! But once the party moved inside, to keep kids safe from the nonexistent poisoners, in came all the nonsense. The battery-operated caskets. The hired witch. The Costco veggie trays and plastic everything else. Halloween went from hobo holiday to $6 billion extravaganza.
And it blazed the way for adult-supervised everything else. Let kids make their own fun? Not anymore! Let's sign our toddlers up for "movement" classes! Let's bring on the extracurricular activities, travel soccer and manicure parties for the older kids. Once Halloween got outsourced to adults, no kids-only activity was safe. Goodbye sandlot, hello batting coach!
And now comes the latest Halloween terror: Across the country, cities and states are passing waves of laws preventing registered sex offenders from leaving their homes—or sometimes even turning on their lights—on Halloween.
The reason? Same old same old: safety. As a panel of "experts" on the "Today" show warned viewers recently: Don't let your children trick-or-treat without you "any earlier than [age] 13, because people put on masks, they put on disguises, and there are still people who do bad things."
Perhaps there are. But Elizabeth Letourneau, an associate professor at the Medical University of South Carolina, studied crime statistics from 30 states and found, "There is zero evidence to support the idea that Halloween is a dangerous date for children in terms of child molestation."
In fact, she says, "We almost called this paper, 'Halloween: The Safest Day of the Year,' because it was just so incredibly rare to see anything happen on that day."
Why is it so safe? Because despite our mounting fears and apoplectic media, it is still the day that many of us, of all ages, go outside. We knock on doors. We meet each other. And all that giving and taking and trick-or-treating is building the very thing that keeps us safe: community.
We can kill off Halloween, or we can accept that it isn't dangerous and give it back to the kids. Then maybe we can start giving them back the rest of their childhoods, too.
Ms. Skenazy is the author of "Free-Range Kids" (Jossey-Bass, 2010). She blogs at www.freerangekids.com.
Worst-Case Thinking
"Our society no longer has the ability to calculate probabilities. Risk assessment is devalued. " http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/05/12/... Security conference: Precautionary principle: Iceland volcano affects organ donations: Areas where we tend to overestimate the threat: New particle accelerator may annihilate the planet: Movie plot threats: Rumsfeld quote: Making fun of the TSA: The TSA keeps a first-grader off airplanes: Frank Furedi on worst-case-thinking: How we are easily terrorized: Christmas Day underwear bomber: Times Square SUV bomber:
by Bruce Schneier
At a security conference recently, the moderator asked the panel of distinguished cybersecurity leaders what their nightmare scenario was. The answers were the predictable array of large-scale attacks: against our communications infrastructure, against the power grid, against the financial system, in combination with a physical attack.
I didn't get to give my answer until the afternoon, which was: "My nightmare scenario is that people keep talking about their nightmare scenarios."
There's a certain blindness that comes from worst-case thinking. An extension of the precautionary principle, it involves imagining the worst possible outcome and then acting as if it were a certainty. It substitutes imagination for thinking, speculation for risk analysis and fear for reason. It fosters powerlessness and vulnerability and magnifies social paralysis. And it makes us more vulnerable to the effects of terrorism.
Worst-case thinking means generally bad decision making for several reasons. First, it's only half of the cost-benefit equation. Every decision has costs and benefits, risks and rewards. By speculating about what can possibly go wrong, and then acting as if that is likely to happen, worst-case thinking focuses only on the extreme but improbable risks and does a poor job at assessing outcomes.
Second, it's based on flawed logic. It begs the question by assuming that a proponent of an action must prove that the nightmare scenario is impossible.
Third, it can be used to support any position or its opposite. If we build a nuclear power plant, it could melt down. If we don't build it, we will run short of power and society will collapse into anarchy. If we allow flights near Iceland's volcanic ash, planes will crash and people will die. If we don't, organs won't arrive in time for transplant operations and people will die. If we don't invade Iraq, Saddam Hussein might use the nuclear weapons he might have. If we do, we might destabilize the Middle East, leading to widespread violence and death.
Of course, not all fears are equal. Those that we tend to exaggerate are more easily justified by worst-case thinking. So terrorism fears trump privacy fears, and almost everything else; technology is hard to understand and therefore scary; nuclear weapons are worse than conventional weapons; our children need to be protected at all costs; and annihilating the planet is bad. Basically, any fear that would make a good movie plot is amenable to worst-case thinking.
Fourth and finally, worst-case thinking validates ignorance. Instead of focusing on what we know, it focuses on what we don't know -- and what we can imagine.
Remember Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's quote? "Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know." And this: "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Ignorance isn't a cause for doubt; when you can fill that ignorance with imagination, it can be a call to action.
Even worse, it can lead to hasty and dangerous acts. You can't wait for a smoking gun, so you act as if the gun is about to go off. Rather than making us safer, worst-case thinking has the potential to cause dangerous escalation.
The new undercurrent in this is that our society no longer has the ability to calculate probabilities. Risk assessment is devalued. Probabilistic thinking is repudiated in favor of "possibilistic thinking": Since we can't know what's likely to go wrong, let's speculate about what can possibly go wrong.
Worst-case thinking leads to bad decisions, bad systems design, and bad security. And we all have direct experience with its effects: airline security and the TSA, which we make fun of when we're not appalled that they're harassing 93-year-old women or keeping first graders off airplanes. You can't be too careful!
Actually, you can. You can refuse to fly because of the possibility of plane crashes. You can lock your children in the house because of the possibility of child predators. You can eschew all contact with people because of the possibility of hurt. Steven Hawking wants to avoid trying to communicate with aliens because they might be hostile; does he want to turn off all the planet's television broadcasts because they're radiating into space? It isn't hard to parody worst-case thinking, and at its extreme it's a psychological condition.
Frank Furedi, a sociology professor at the University of Kent, writes: "Worst-case thinking encourages society to adopt fear as one of the dominant principles around which the public, the government and institutions should organize their life. It institutionalizes insecurity and fosters a mood of confusion and powerlessness. Through popularizing the belief that worst cases are normal, it incites people to feel defenseless and vulnerable to a wide range of future threats."
Even worse, it plays directly into the hands of terrorists, creating a population that is easily terrorized -- even by failed terrorist attacks like the Christmas Day underwear bomber and the Times Square SUV bomber.
When someone is proposing a change, the onus should be on them to justify it over the status quo. But worst case thinking is a way of looking at the world that exaggerates the rare and unusual and gives the rare much more credence than it deserves.
It isn't really a principle; it's a cheap trick to justify what you already believe. It lets lazy or biased people make what seem to be cogent arguments without understanding the whole issue. And when people don't need to refute counterarguments, there's no point in listening to them.
This essay was originally published on CNN.com, although they stripped out all the links.
http://www.ewi.info/dallas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
http://www.cbsnews.com/...
http://www.schneier.com/essay-170.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9905448-7.html
http://www.schneier.com/essay-087.html
http://www.defenselink.mil/Transcripts/...
Possibilistic thinking:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/...
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/05/...
The TSA harasses a 93-year-old women:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHxy5GattLY
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/...
Steven Hawking on communicating with aliens:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36769422/
http://www.frankfuredi.com/index.php/site/article/326/
http://www.frankfuredi.com/index.php/site/article/386/
http://www.schneier.com/essay-124.html
http://www.schneier.com/essay-304.html
http://www.schneier.com/essay-315.html
Calif. bills target sex offenders online
Editor: This is entirely about demagogues like George Runner exacting more revenge against sex offenders. To make their lives impossible into perpetuity is his sole aim. To marginalize sex offenders who have already served their sentences to the point of social slavery is what makes Senator George Runner tick. And, despite the fact that he is a Christian fundamentalist with a deep and abiding hatred for sexual freedom in general, he will, no doubt, receive lots of support across the political and theological spectrum for his continued expansion of governmental intrusion into every nook and cranny of everyone's - not just sex offender's - lives.
That the law is hardly enforceable on first reading is also not the point. The point of this law will be to criminalize acts committed by registered sex offenders that would never be criminal if exercised as a right by anyone else. By so doing, it further instills terror in people who, despite not committing new crimes and attempting to put their lives back together and contribute to society, must break absurd laws such as the one he is proposing in order to work and function in that very society, knowing that at any time they come under scrutiny by the police (a constant threat for the R.S.O.) their "crime" of not registering an email address will land them back in prison.
When are we going to stop taking the lead from the zealots amongst us, whether they are the most extreme sex-hating gender feminists or the religious sex-hating fanatics? The common denominator between them is authoritarianism and a contempt for the individual and, of course, a hatred of other people's sex lives. By dominating our national conversation, we allow them to set an agenda for all of us. When would you ever wish to have these people dictate your personal lives and priorities, demanding each and every email address you use?
Sex offenders would be required to share Internet identifiers.
Posted at 10:55 PM on Friday, Apr. 02, 2010
SACRAMENTO -- New York passed a law a couple of years ago requiring sex offenders to report e-mail addresses to the state's offender registry.
The result: At least 4,336 registered sex offenders were purged from social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace thanks to the new data, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo recently announced.
Several California lawmakers want to follow New York's lead.
Newly introduced bills would require sex offenders to share online identifiers -- such as e-mail accounts and instant-message aliases -- while at the same time prohibiting offenders on parole from using social networking sites.
"These social networks become a real trolling place for predators," said Sen. George Runner, R-Lancaster, author of one of the bills. "I think we should create as many speed bumps as possible to keep them off those social networks."
But the bills are far from foolproof. Supporters concede that offenders could switch e-mail addresses and not tell the authorities. But if they are caught, they run the risk of going back to prison -- and "that's a pretty big risk," Runner said.
In Fresno, an estimated 10% to 15% of sexual assault cases involve victims who were first contacted online, according to the Fresno Police Department. About 1,600 sex offenders live in Fresno.
Lt. David Newton, head of Fresno's criminal investigations bureau, supports the bills, but said they aren't ironclad. "We don't necessarily believe this may prevent many sexual assaults from occurring," he said. But "this is going to provide another arrow in our quiver."
He said the ban on social sites use by offenders will allow investigators to levy additional charges against predators.
Opponents fear the bills would lead to overzealous prosecutions and needlessly send more people to already crowded prisons.
Sex offenders already must register for life, including those who commit less-serious crimes such as indecent exposure, said Ignacio Hernandez, a lobbyist for California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, which represents criminal defense lawyers.
"All this would do is prohibit people from using these social networking sites for lawful, positive, productive purposes -- and that really makes no sense," he said.
A similar bill failed last legislative session, as concerns arose about the costs of collecting the new information and imprisoning offenders who violate the new rules.
A report last year suggests children face no greater danger online than they do in real life. Rather, the biggest risks on the Web are harassment and bullying among children -- not adults targeting kids, said a report by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, created by 49 state attorneys to study the threats children face online.
"The image presented by the media of an older male deceiving and preying on a young child does not paint an accurate picture of the nature of the majority of sexual solicitations and Internet-initiated off-line encounters," reported the task force, which included academics and representatives of Internet businesses and nonprofits.
However, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who helped create the task force, criticized the report, saying it relied on inadequate research and downplayed the threat of online predators.
Current law requires sexual offenders to register their home addresses with local authorities every time they move. Under the bills, new e-mail accounts would have to be registered days after they are created.
The bills are SB 1204 by Runner, AB 1850 by Assembly Member Cathleen Galgiani, D-Livingston, and AB 2208 by Assembly Member Norma Torres, D-Pomona.
The registry information is sent to the state and portions are displayed publicly at the Megan's Law Web site. Social networking sites such as Facebook already run checks against offender information. Having e-mail addresses would improve the process, said Chris Kelly, a state attorney general candidate and the former privacy officer and head of global public policy for Facebook.
Kelly, a Democrat, said Facebook already has strong protections in place, including a "real name culture" that weeds out users employing fake monikers. The site also flags suspicious users whose friend requests are rejected at a high rate or who overuse the search function.
"None of these systems are foolproof, but they go far beyond what most people assume has gone on," he said.
The state legislation comes after Congress in 2006 passed a law, known as the Adam Walsh Act, setting minimum standards for sex offender registries, including collecting Internet identifiers. States that don't comply by July 2011 risk losing some federal grants -- about $3 million in California.
California's Sex Offender Management Board has recommended the state not implement the federal law, partly because the costs of making the changes would exceed the grant loss.
The reporter can be reached at eschultz@fresnobee.com or (916) 326-5541.
Why humanists shouldn’t join in this Catholic-bashing
"The reaction to the paedophile priest scandal is as guilty of scaremongering, illiberalism and elitism as the Catholic Church has ever been."
Brendan O’Neill
With all the newspaper headlines about predatory paedophiles in smocks, terrified altar boys and cover-ups by officials at the Vatican, it is hard to think of anything worse right now than a sexually abusive priest. Yet today’s reaction to those allegations of sexual abuse is also deeply problematic. For it is a reaction informed more by prejudice and illiberalism than by anything resembling a principled secularism, and one which also threatens to harm individuals, families, society and liberty.
When considering the problem of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests, it is important to distinguish between the incidents themselves, some of which were of course horrific, and the way in which those incidents are understood in today’s political and cultural climate. The acts of sexual abuse themselves were no doubt a product of various problematic factors: the Catholic Church’s culture of celibacy, its strange views on sex, the fact that in some institutions priests were given ultimate authority over young boys and girls. But the way in which those acts are understood today – as supremely damaging to individuals and the inevitable consequence of people ‘deciding it is a good thing to abandon any commitment to fact and instead act on faith’ – is powerfully informed by two problematic contemporary trends: the backward cult of victimhood and the dominant ‘new atheist’ prejudice against any institution with strong beliefs.
With all the current claims about Pope Benedict XVI himself being involved in a cover-up of child abuse by an American priest and a German priest, and newspaper reports using terms like ‘stuff of nightmares’, the ‘stench of evil’, and ‘systematic rape and torture’, anyone who tries to inject a bit of perspective into this debate is unlikely to be thanked. But perspective is what we need. Someone has to point out that for all the problems with the Catholic Church’s doctrines and style of organisation – and I experienced some of those problems, having been raised a Catholic before becoming an atheist at 17 – the fact is that sexual abuse by priests is a relatively rare phenomenon.
Even in Ireland, whose image as a craic-loving nation has been replaced by the far-worse idea that it was actually a nation of priest rape, incidents of sexual abuse by priests were fairly rare. The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, which was launched by the Irish government in 1999 and delivered its report last year, intensively invited Irish-born people around the world to report on incidents of abuse in Irish religious-educational reform schools, where the majority of clerical abuse is said to have occurred, between the period 1914 to 1999. For that 85-year period, 253 claims of sexual abuse were made by males and 128 by females. It is important – surely? – to note that these are claims of sexual abuse rather than proven incidents, since the vast majority of them did not go to trial.
The number of sexual abuse claims in these institutions fell for the more recent period: for males, there were 88 claims from the pre-1960s, 119 from 1960 to 1969, 37 from 1970 to 1979, and nine from 1980 to 1989. The alleged sexual-abuse incidents ranged in seriousness from boys being ‘questioned and interrogated about their sexual activity’ to being raped: there were 68 claims of anal rape in reform institutions for boys from 1914 to 1999. Not all of the sexual abuse was carried out by priests. Around 65 per cent of the claims pertain to religious workers, and 35 per cent to lay staff, care workers, and fellow pupils.
Of course, one incident of child sexual abuse by a priest is one too many. But given the findings of Ireland’s investigation into abuse in religious-educational institutions, is there really a justification for talking about a ‘clinging and systematic evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel’? As Ireland is redefined as a country in recovery from child sexual abuse, and the ‘scandal of child rape’ spreads further through Europe into Germany and Italy, it might be unfashionable to say the following but it is true nonetheless: very, very small numbers of children in the care or teaching of the Catholic Church in Europe in recent decades were sexually abused, but very, very many of them actually received a decent standard of education.
The discussion of a relatively rare phenomenon as a ‘great evil’ of our age shows that child abuse in Catholic churches has been turned into a morality tale – about the dangers of belief and of hierarchical institutions and the need for more state and other forms of intervention into religious institutions and even religious families. The first contemporary trend that has turned incidences of sexual abuse into a powerful symbol of evil is the cult of the victim, where today individuals are invited not only to reveal every misfortune that has befallen them – which of course is a sensible thing to do if you have been raped – but also to define themselves by those misfortunes, to look upon themselves as the end-products of having being emotionally, physically or sexually abused. This is why very public revelations of Catholic abuse started in America and Ireland before more recently spreading to other parts of Western Europe: because the politics of victimhood, the cult of revelation and redefinition of the self as survivor, is more pronounced and developed in America and Ireland than it is in continental Europe.
In Ireland, for example, the state has explicitly invited its citizens to redefine themselves as victims of authority rather than as active agents capable of moving on and making choices. The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse discusses at length the ‘debilitating’ impact that abuse can have on individuals, to the extent that many of Ireland’s social problems – including unemployment, poverty, drug abuse and heavy drinking – are now discussed as the products of Ireland’s earlier era of abuse rather than as failings of the contemporary social system.
This, I believe, is why claims of sexual abuse in Ireland’s religious-educational institutions were so much higher for the period of 1960 to 1969 (nearly half of all claims of sexual abuse against boys during the period of 1914 to 1989 were made for that decade). It is not because priests suddenly became more abusive in the 1960s than they had been in the far harsher Ireland of the 1940s and 50s, but because the people who attended the institutions during that period were in many ways the main targets of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse. They would have been in their mid-40s to mid-50s when the commission began in 1999 and many of them had suffered long-term unemployment, health problems, and other disappointments. Reporting their misfortunes to the commission offered them the chance, not only of getting financial compensation, but also of validating their difficult life experiences as a consequence of their having been abused. In a grotesquely convenient marriage, the state redefined social problems as consequences of Catholic abuse and the individual redefined himself as a sufferer from low self-esteem who did not bear full responsibility for the course of his adult life. In such a climate, not only are incidents of abuse by priests more likely to surface, but they are also more likely to be heavily politicised, turned from undoubtedly distressing and possibly criminal acts into modern-day examples of evil capable of distorting society itself. Thus did the contemporary cult of victimhood ensure that Catholic abuse was blown out of proportion.
The second contemporary trend that has elevated something quite rare into a social disaster is the rise of the ‘new atheism’. Now the dominant liberal outlook of our age – in particular in the media outlets that have most keenly focused on the Catholic abuse scandals: the New York Times, the Irish Times, and the UK Guardian – the new atheism differs from the atheism of earlier free-thinking humanists in that its main aim is not to enlighten, but to scaremonger about the impact of religion on society. For these thinkers and opinion-formers, the drip-drip of revelations of abuse in Catholic institutions offers an opportunity to demonise the religious as backward and people who possess strong beliefs as suspect.
Many contemporary opinion-formers are not concerned with getting to the truth of how widespread Catholic sexual abuse was, or what were the specific circumstances in which it occurred; rather they want to milk incidents of abuse and make them into an indictment of religion itself. They frequently flit between discussing priests who abuse children and the profound stupidity of people who believe in God. One commentator wildly refers to the Vatican’s ‘international criminal conspiracy to protect child-rapists’ and says most ordinary Catholics turn a blind eye to this because ‘people behave in bizarre ways when they decide it is a good thing to abandon any commitment to fact and instead act on faith’.
Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, unwittingly reveals what draws the new atheists towards the Catholic-abuse story: their belief that religion is itself a form of abuse. ‘Odious as the physical abuse of children by priests undoubtedly is, I suspect that it may do them less lasting damage than the mental abuse of bringing them up Catholic in the first place’, he argues. He admits that physical abuse by priests is rare, but only to flag up what he sees as a more serious form of abuse: ‘Only a minority of priests abuse the bodies of the children in their care. But how many priests abuse their minds?’ In this spectacularly crude critique of religion, no moral distinction is made between being educated by a priest and raped by one – indeed, the former is considered worse than the latter, since as one Observer columnist recently darkly warned: ‘We have no idea what children are being taught in those classrooms…’
If ‘bringing a child up Catholic’ is itself abuse, there can only be one solution: external authorities must protect children not only from religious institutions but from their own religious parents, too. One new atheist has proposed an age of consent for joining a religion: 14. In an Oxford Amnesty Lecture popular amongst new atheists, a liberal academic argued that children ‘have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people’s bad ideas’, and parents ‘have no god-given licence to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose’. Here, a simplistic leap is made from protecting children from paedophile priests to protecting them from their own parents, since in the new-atheist view strong beliefs and freedom of religion – which, yes, includes the freedom of parents to bring up their children as they see fit – are the real problem. They exaggerate the extent of Catholic sexual abuse in order to strengthen their prejudicial arguments.
Whatever you think of the Catholic Church, you should be concerned about today’s abuse-obsession. Events of the (sometimes distant) past which nobody can change are being used to justify dangerous trends in the present. A new kind of society is being solidified on the back of exposing abusive priests, one in which scaremongering supersedes facts, where people redefine themselves as permanently damaged victims, where freedom of thought is problematised, and where parents are considered suspect for not adhering to the superior values of the atheistic elite. Seriously, radical humanists should fight back against this.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Visit his personal website here.
Ed: I would like to point out that, amongst the "Horsemen of the Apocalypse" (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and Dennett) Dawkins (and perhaps Dennett) has exercised great restraint in not equating pedophilia with religious clericalism unlike Hitchens and Harris who have practically presented the priest scandals as "Exhibit A" in their arguments against religion.
In "The God Delusion" he questioned the prevailing sacrosanct belief which holds that great trauma is necessarily visited upon any child or adolescent who experiences sexual contact with an adult. He has questioned society's preoccupation with the subject and suggested that it is a form of hysteria.
I give tremendous credit to him for that since it has become extraordinarily easy to join the legions of torch-carrying hysterics in condemning the Catholic Church. His position also requires a great deal of courage in this day.
I also think that he has some very good points about the forced inculcation of religion into children. I'm not sure, however, that he has advocated a governmental or legal response to these perceived "abuses". I would hope not as I think that would be a real travesty.
I agree with you, however, that the atheist movement would be making a grievous error in actively vilifying beliefs and cultures and using the abuse scandals as a facile means to do so.
And I am chagrined when anyone, including Catholic priests, are caught in the maelstrom of the witch hunt in which we find ourselves today.
Like Dawkins, I do believe that religion can be destructive and anachronistic in many ways which are harmful. But expressing this as a matter of opinion is quite different from enforcing it as public policy. This, I believe, would be manifestly evil.
-David Kennerly
Experts say the public has 'unrealistic expectations' about preventing sex crimes
"You're more likely to get struck by lightning," he said, than to get raped and murdered by a stranger.
The arrest of a southwest Riverside County sex offender in the death of a 17-year-old San Diego County girl last week has stirred public anger over authorities' failure to prevent a known child molester from harming another teen.
In particular, the crime has raised questions about the effectiveness of the Megan's Law Web site, which is supposed to prevent sex crimes by helping police keep track of known offenders and making parents more aware of potential threats in their neighborhoods.
Outraged comments have filled Internet discussion boards -- including the Facebook page created by Chelsea King's family during last week's massive search for the Poway High School senior, whose body was found Tuesday.
But academics and law enforcement officials say the public has unrealistic expectations about the ability of tools like Megan's Law to prevent sex crimes -- especially the rare cases such as Chelsea's involving lethal attacks by strangers.
"There's no way to create a zero-risk universe for this," said Franklin Zimring, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law. "That's not merely hard, that's impossible."
What's more, there is no evidence to suggest that Megan's Law even reduces the incidence of sex crimes, said Richard Tewksbury, a professor of justice administration at the University of Louisville in Kentucky who has studied the effects of sex offender registries.
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3,400 SEX OFFENDERS
John Albert Gardner III, 30, is the man suspected of raping and murdering King. He also is charged with attempted rape in a December attack on a woman jogging in the same park where King disappeared and was convicted nearly 10 years ago of molesting a 13-year-old girl at his mother's home in Rancho Bernardo. The conviction landed his name, photograph and home address on the Megan's Law online listing of registered sex offenders.
Megan's Law, named for a 7-year-old New Jersey girl killed by a sex offender who moved to her neighborhood, was enacted in California in 1996 to give the public access to information about such offenders. The state Megan's Law Web site was launched in 2004. More than 63,000 sex offenders are listed on the site, which receives millions of hits each year.
Sex offenders are required to update their registrations at least annually, within five days of their birthday. Upon release from jail or prison, or moving to a new address, sex offenders must register at the local police agency.
As far as Riverside County authorities know, Gardner had met all the registration requirements when he reported to the Lake Elsinore sheriff's station in January to notify officials of his new address in the nearby community of Lakeland Village. Escondido police, too, say Gardner appears to have checked in regularly until he moved in January.
Since Gardner's arrest Feb. 28, news reports have revealed that in 2000, San Diego County prosecutors allowed Gardner to plead guilty to lesser charges in the attack on the 13-year-old, even though one of the psychiatrists who interviewed him said he posed a continuing threat to underage girls. Gardner served five years of a six-year prison sentence. He was released in September 2005 and completed his parole in September 2008.
Police now fear Gardner might have been involved in the disappearance of Escondido 14-year-old Amber Dubois in February 2009 and perhaps an attempted kidnapping of a 16-year-old Lake Elsinore girl in October.
Escondido police announced Sunday that skeletal remains found in a remote area of the Pala Indian Reservation on Saturday had been positively identified as those of Dubois, who had disappeared while walking to school.
Riverside County authorities said they had no reason to be more suspicious of Gardner than any of the other registered sex offenders in the area. When Gardner registered in Lake Elsinore, authorities checked his background for red flags and found none.
There are more than 3,400 registered sex offenders in Riverside County and another 2,700 in San Diego County, all of whom law enforcement view as having the potential to commit another sex crime, said Ron Garcia, director of a multi-agency Riverside County task force that targets sex offenders.
Until last week, authorities had no idea Gardner posed a heightened threat.
"How were we supposed to know that -- that this guy is a ticking time bomb?" Garcia asked.
NO PERFECT REMEDIES
Zimring said that after an extreme case like King's, "there is a tendency to say, 'What were we doing wrong?' "
Legislators and voters enact "expensive and extreme" measures such as Megan's Law or Jessica's Law, which limits where sex offenders can live and mandates monitoring of sex offenders with global-positioning system ankle bracelets such as the one Gardner wore while on parole.
"How does that prevent this crime?" Zimring asked. "You know where he is, but you don't know where the victim is or who the victim will be."
Others suggest locking up the dangerous sex offenders for life.
"That would be fine," Zimring said, "if we had a good way of predicting."
Tewksbury said the focus on cases such as Chelsea King's reinforces the misconception that sex offenders tend to target children they don't know and are more likely to be repeat offenders. In fact, more than 70 percent of children molested are victimized by close friends or relatives, he said. And most sex offenders do not re-offend.
"The majority are really not that dangerous to the public," Tewksbury said, but figuring out the small percentage who are is difficult.
Treatment programs and extremely close monitoring would be helpful in determining which sex offenders might commit more crimes, but it would be prohibitively expensive given the large number of people on sex offender registries, he said.
California already has strict laws targeting sex offenders and a network of county task forces that focus exclusively on sex offenders.
Garcia said the Riverside County task force he directs is one of the more aggressive task forces in the state and has 36 full-time team members drawn from local law enforcement agencies, including the Sheriff's Department, district attorney's office and county probation. Much of their time is spent making sure sex offenders comply with registration requirements. In 2009, the task force performed 4,600 compliance checks, Garcia said.
The Chelsea King case is not the first to raise concerns about sex offender monitoring.
For years until his arrest in August, registered sex offender Phillip Garrido managed to conceal from authorities the fact that Jaycee Dugard was being held captive in his Northern California backyard, along with the two children he had fathered with her. He is accused of kidnapping Dugard in 1991 when she was 11 years old.
Statistically speaking, it might make more sense to spend limited resources not on sex offender registries, but on public safety problems that are more preventable and affect greater numbers of people, such as highway safety, Zimring said.
"You're more likely to get struck by lightning," he said, than to get raped and murdered by a stranger.
"That doesn't make us any less horrified when this kind of worst case happens," Zimring said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Protect the Children From Grandstanding D.A.'s
Ed: If Kamala Harris took her mandate as San Francisco D.A. more seriously by, amongst other things, prosecuting actual murderers more effectively, she might have greater credibility in her other pursuits. In this matter, however, she is jumping on the "Bogeyman Bandwagon", essentially appealing to the ignorance of the California electorate, by championing a cause for which there is virtually NO demonstrated, ACTUAL, threat. If you were to pour over crime and child well being statistics, as I do, you would see that realistic dangers to children do not come into their computers when they are least suspecting.
They come from myriad, albeit substantially more pedestrian, sources, such as traffic accidents, head injuries from sports, emotional and physcial abuse having nothing to do with sex, prescriptions for Ritalin and other behavior-modifiers, armed gangsters down the street, no health coverage, etc., etc. Political opportunists such as Kamala Harris are beginning to be taken less seriously by a more informed electorate. Finally. We need to stop salivating on command when they begin to shout "save the children from these predators". And we need to do what we have to do to hasten them along their paths to political oblivion and not elect them to Attorney General of California, which is Kamala's ambition.
Opinion: Protect children from online predators
By Kamala D. Harris and Norma Torres
In 1994, Megan Kanka's parents thought their 7-year-old daughter was safe. After all, they were raising her in a quiet New Jersey town.
Her parents, Richard and Maureen, could have never predicted that on July 29, 1994, the neighbor living across the street — who was, without their knowledge, a registered sex offender — would lure Megan Kanka into his home, where he would sexually assault and murder her.
In the wake of this horrific crime, it became clear that the laws were not strong enough to protect our children from registered sex offenders. In 1996, Megan's Law was enacted, requiring every state in the country to notify the public when sex offenders are residing in their area.
The time has come again for us to band together. We must protect our kids from registered sex offenders trying to "friend" them online. That is why we joined forces to introduce the Child Cyber Safety Act of 2010. This legislation would make it a crime for registered sex offenders in California to use a social networking Internet site. Period. If they do, they go back to jail.
Social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo are incredibly popular. Since 2007, the number of users has doubled. Social networking sites provide a new venue for sex offenders to establish relationships with children they will later assault.
Children no longer just play in their front yard, local playground or schoolyard?. Today's kids play online. And sex offenders know it.
In November 2009, 12-year-old Jane Doe's parents thought she was safe. Instead, their daughter met a 33-year-old man on MySpace who lured their child to an Anaheim hotel and sexually assaulted her. That same year, the parents of 14-year-old John Doe of Pomona did not realize that their son was in danger online. Instead, their son met a 47-year-old man online who later pleaded guilty to sodomizing him.
And the parents of more than 80 victims in Riverside from ages 11 to 17 did not know that a 32-year-old man was using a social networking site to manipulate their children into sending him nude photographs of themselves.
As the law is currently written, the defendants in these cases, if convicted, will be required to register as sex offenders in California. However, once they've served their sentences, there is nothing stopping them from jumping right back online and using social networking sites to locate new victims.
The man who murdered 7-year-old Megan Kanka in 1994 was similarly situated. Having served time for attacking a 5-year-old child and attempting to sexually assault a 7-year-old, nothing stopped this registered sex offender from living in anonymity, able to troll his neighborhood for child victims.
We are not interested in waiting until the next child is victimized. The Child Cyber Safety Act would make registered sex offenders trolling social networking sites a crime.
Other states such as New York and Connecticut have employed efforts to require sex offenders to register e-mail addresses with the state or notify the social networking sites of their status so those profiles can be purged. However, according to the National Criminal Intelligence Service, Internet pedophiles are becoming increasingly adept at employing counter -intelligence techniques to protect themselves. They register fake names, create multiple e-mail addresses and use technology in other ways to conceal their identity.
In California, the birthplace of the personal computer, we must stay ahead of the online predator. Let's pass the Child Cyber Safety Act to keep registered sex offenders from contacting our kids online.
KAMALA D. HARRIS is San Francisco"s district attorney and a candidate for state attorney general. NORMA TORRES (D-Paloma) represents the 61st District in the Assembly. They wrote this article for this newspaper.
"Pawlenty" of Demagoguery In Minnesota
Ed: Despite the budget crisis facing all state governments, there seems to be unlimited funds for confining sex offenders who have served the entirety of their prison terms, despite being both unconstitutional and ineffective. Ironically, many of the politicians pandering to their most hysterical constituents privately acknowledge the absurdity of their own dreadful laws.
In all the rancor, turmoil and posturing on Gov. Tim Pawlenty's proposed budget gutting, and the DFL's eye-popping bonding bill, one item stands out as a sign of the political times.
It is the single largest item in the bonding bill. It is controversial by nature, considered suspect by many legal scholars and criminal behaviorists, and it will likely secure the infrastructure of a permanent and exponentially more expensive government function into perpetuity. Yet it will likely be approved without rigorous debate because politicians never want to see campaign ads saying they are soft on perverts.
Pawlenty wants an $89 million expansion of the facility for sex offenders at Moose Lake, which holds predators we think will re-offend. Public officials might air doubts about civil commitments privately, but they also know it is impossible to offer a nuanced response to a "soft-on-sex-offender" tag.
"This is a tried-and-true political position," said Eric Janus, president and dean of William Mitchell College of Law and author of "Failure to Protect: America's Sexual Predator Laws and the Rise of the Preventive State."
"It's giving in to a broken and misguided system," said Janus. "Nobody likes sex offenders, including myself. The prevention of sex offenders is a clear good. But what we need to do is figure out how best to use our resources to do that."
The Minnesota Sex Offender Program began in an attempt to keep our worst offenders locked up. The Constitution doesn't allow us to punish people for what they might do, so the Legislature created a new class, a "sexually dangerous person," whom we can now commit, potentially forever. They are essentially inmates, disguised as "patients."
Janus has been one of those willing to call a timeout on the project because he believes it veers in dangerous directions. Minnesota has the largest percentage of sexual offenders per capita in such facilities in the nation. More than 30 states have decided there are better and more cost-effective ways to handle violent offenders, he said, but they don't play well in a sound bite.
"Beyond politics, is it good policy? I think not," Janus said. "I don't think we've looked at enough of the knowledge that is already o ut there. Our entire focus is on repeat offenders, but that is a small part of the problem."
According to a Star Tribune investigation last year, the MSOP dealt with fewer than 3 percent of Minnesota's 20,000 predatory offenders but consumed more than half of what the state spends to control and track them. The MSOP's budget is more than seven times the amount the state spends to monitor the 3,500 sex offenders on probation.
So far, there is only one way to ever leave the program: Die.
Brian McClung, deputy chief of staff for Pawlenty, said "these people have committed the most heinous crimes possible. I've seen letters written by them that would make your blood boil."
The new facility is actually projected to lower the cost of "patient" treatment from $328 to $250 per day, McClung said, and Pawlenty's i dea to double prison sentences would steer more offenders to longer and cheaper prison stays.
As a law professor, Janus is keenly concerned about civil rights. But he also knows few people care about civil rights for criminals. People do, however, care about money.
"This is the politically popular approach, but it's wasting money," he said.
Janus thinks more should be spent on prevention, police work to close cases, research as well as less costly supervision.
Rep. Julie Bunn, DFL-Lake Elmo, wants to keep the most dangerous predators locked up, like everybody else. But she's been asking, "Is this model the best value for the money? Is civil commitment even the right mode?"
Until we decide that, however, Bunn said legislators may have to vote to keep offenders off the streets, even if that means funding a massively expensive facility.
Janus understands the dilemma. But he says a slice of that $89 million is for an "assisted living" unit. Janus interviewed a 77-year-old committed man, now disabled, who molested teens 25 years ago by inviting them into his garage for beer. Janus believes the man could be put into less secure, less costly confinement without much risk.
"Why are we paying $100,000 a year to keep disabled people behind razor wire?" he asks.
Janus noted DFLers "creamed" Pawlenty after newly released rapist Alfonso Rodriguez killed Dru Sjodin in 2003, and "he doesn't want that to happen again."
So, now whenever opponents complain that cuts to local government aid are causing cities to layoff police officers, Pawlenty can point to his $89 million monument to safety, whether it's effective or not. And DFLers can trade Pawlenty's dream jail for their own pet projects, and likewise avoid criticisms that they are lax on sex offenders.
"The chances are, this thing will just keep growing until we have the political courage to admit it isn't working," Janus said.
KKK Plans Anti-Sex Offender & Illigal Immigrant Rally In Georgia
Ed: See! The K.K.K. isn't so bad, after all! They're just concerned like everyone else. In fact, I would say that they're right in-step with the rest of America.
A Ku Klux Klan rally is planned for Nahunta, a small southeast Georgia city in Brantley County, for this Saturday from noon until 2 pm. The Knight Riders of the KKK said the rally will focus on illegal immigration and sex offenders. The major of the city has urged people to `go about their business`.
City clerk Angela Wirth told the Associated Press that the Klan organization`s grand dragon says he`s expecting a turnout of about 100.
Wirth says that until now there has never been a Klan rally in the city, which is about 275 miles from Atlanta.
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