If you can't live with the label, don't do the crime in the first place.
God bless you and those who give the proper and very much appreciated heads up always!!!
Holly
It's not as simple as "don't do the crime" because a lot of times people are not aware its a crime and many times their punishment is increased AFTER the fact which is, of course, illegal. Did you know that in Louisiana its legal for two 17yo kids to have sex, but if they film it or take pics of the act that's production of child porn which is punishable by 25 years in federal prison? So in Louisiana the saying is "****, but don't film." You think a 17yo horndog kid who is legally ******* his gf will think its illegal to take pics of her naked? I mean logic would say if he could **** her he could film her. But no. Our laws are THAT fucked up.
What about illegal retroactive laws? In Louisiana, for decades, an offense such as pornography involving juveniles was a 10 year registration. One day, for no reason at all other than Bobby Jindal passed the law, that jumped to 25 years and was retroactive. Meaning if you pled guilty and agreed to 10 years registration and had 1 day left, you now have 15 more years. You didn't reoffend, you didn't do anything wrong. They went BACK and illegally added more punishment to your crime. It ended up in the supreme court. You could easily make the claim that you agreed to 10 years and since you can't go back and re-plea not guilty they can't go back and re-sentence you to more time on the registry.
The label is bad enough, but that doesn't give cops free reign to do what they want. The constitution applies to everyone, even sex offenders.
If society really cared about kids they'd keep an eye on relatives and not sex offenders. Stranger danger is so rare its considered a myth. The true dangers to kids are cars and swimming pools. Can you show me 5 instances in the last 5 years where a child was molested by a sex offender on halloween? It doesn't exist. The number of kids that were abducted and harmed by true strangers last year I believe was under 100, in a country of 65 million children. More kids died by choking than were harmed by strangers.
90% of all new cases against kids are by people NOT on the registry and sex offenders have a reoffense rate of 5% which is the lowest reoffense rate of any type of crime except murder. By comparison, drug offenders have a reoffense rate of 67%. Oh yea, and murderers, when and if they do get out, don't have to register their addresses on a public registry and are welcome to live right next to a school or park. No problem there.
But you'd never know that by media coverage. Sex offenders are a politicans baby, they know that being "tough on sex offenders" gets them votes. But nobody is smart enough to question what exactly they're accomplishing by doing this. Making it more difficult for sex offenders to reenter society makes them MORE likely to reoffend. Do politicans really want more child victims? Does society?
And the fact that the same label is applied to a child rapist and someone who was 18 who had sex with his 16yo gf in high school renders the registry useless. And if you actually look at the registry, they make the "age of victim" prominent on the page and "date of offense" very small and usually something you have to dig to find. So a guy who was 18 who took nude pics of his 15yo gf keeps getting older and older, and 20 years later he's 40 and it shows his victim was 15 which makes him look like a child molester. But if you dig and look you'd see his offense was 22 years ago. But who is going to spend that much time digging for info when "age of victim" is the first thing they see?
I did a paper on this for a communications class in college. I learned just how fucked up our system is.
