Friday, July 01, 2005
Another Reason Why Sex Offender Registries Are A Bad Idea
Sure, sex offender registries seem like a good idea. Were I to be a parent, I would certainly like to know when someone who committed a sex offense moved into my neighborhood. But when cases like this get caught up in the dragnet, you have to wonder about how wise it is to brand with a scarlet letter all those charged with a certain crime. Rape, I'll give you. Child porn, yeah. Unlawful restraint of a minor? That could be anything. Why should someone like this be hit with the same stigma as a rapist?
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3 comments:
I have admittedly been torn about this issue. I can see arguments on both sides, mostly against the idea of registries but a few in favor.
Regardless, this particular case is ridiculous.
While I'm also torn on the issue of registries as a whole, this isn't really an argument against them; it's an argument against overly-broad definitions of a "sex offense".
Specifically, I can't understand the logic that restraint of a minor is a sex crime "'because of the proclivity of offenders who restrain children to also commit sex acts or other crimes against them.'"
It seems to follow the same fallacious "outlaw the correlary" logic that legislators love to apply to media. "Oh, peer-to-peer networks can be used to efficiently pirate songs? Well clearly it should also be a crime to operate a peer-to-peer network... and you say that circumventing the encryption of e-books could lead to people illegally redistributing those works? Then obviously it should be illegal to attempt to circumvent that encryption in the first place, even for research purposes, even if the company asked them to do it." (yes, in all fairness the SDMI competition nonsense never manifested itself as a real lawsuit against Felten, but the fact that the issue came up at all was a result of the shitwitted logic of the DMCA).
It's bad enough that the average person doesn't know the difference between correlation and causation... sadly, it appears our laws are being constructed and interpreted with the same error.
- pierce
The link to the news article is broken; the Sun Times only keeps their articles for a limited period of time. After that, there is an archive that requires paying.
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