Saturday, April 7, 2012

Let the registration fit the crime.

  Before all this began, I was like most people.  If I had heard the term: “registered sex offender”, I would have assumed that a child had been violated.  That is not the case.  People are being labeled RSO for crimes that in no way involved children, people who would never, in their worst nightmare, harm a child.  If a homeless person relieves himself and is witnessed, he must register as a sex offender.  If a man watching a woman do a pole dance so much as reaches out and touches her, he must register as a sex offender.  Even if a person’s offense did not involve another human being, he must register as a sex offender.  Everyone of those “streakers” of a few years back would be forced to register as a sex offender.
There is a man known to us who was accused of abusing his two children as a ploy in his wife’s divorce suit.  After she won her settlement and married her lawyer, his children recanted their testimony.  It made no difference.  He is still listed in the registry.  
As for the people on the registry who actually harmed another person, it is the same for them as for anyone who commits a crime: either they are sorry for what they did, or they are without remorse; either they want to rebuild their lives on better lines, or they want to continue doing harm to others and themselves.  There are ways to tell which are which.  Yet in the black and black world of the RSO, both groups are treated exactly the same.  Those who are trying to reform have every conceivable obstacle placed in their paths.  They are systematically driven back to the way of life that was the breeding ground for their original offense.  Why should they even try to fight their inner demons when the chorus of the world relentlessly drums into them that they are the demons?  
The other outcome is that they are driven to despair.  This gives sociologists and psychiatric associations an excellent opportunity to study the effects of oppression on the physical and mental health of a large group of subjects: registered sex offenders and their families.  They should at least be interested in the incidence of suicide.

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