BehindBlueI's
Grandmaster
- Oct 3, 2012
- 26,608
- 113
No one's taking it that far and you know it.
It sure seems like a lot of misinformation is spread, all with the "lesson" being the sex offender registry is useless because its chocked full of people who just innocently ended up there. I happen to agree its useless (or at least a poor alternative to a proven method of preventing recidivism), but not for those reasons. When I lived in the Middle East they killed sex offenders who preyed on children. It seemed to work, as young children were free to run around in public without fear or without their parents being worried. It freaked me out the first time I saw a bunch of unsupervised 8-10 year olds shopping on their own, but my buddies explained the whole "behead child molesters" thing, and it suddenly made a lot of sense.
The attack here seems to be that low level crimes or "Romeo and Juliet" situations land you on the registry, thus the registry is useless because you can't tell who was a "real" sex offender and who just got "caught up in the system". At least in Indiana, that is not the case. If you are on the registry, you were convicted of a crime against a child (a real child, not a 16 year old) or assaulted someone for sexual gratification. Pretending the registry is full of drunks who peed in an alley and 17 year olds who had sex with their 15 year old girlfriend but got "outed" by an upset daddy is a false narrative that leads to a controversy that isn't really there. We end up debating the meaningless instead of the reality.