My only comment for this year's gloomy shaming ritual is this: Sex offenders are the only population who I believe will not benefit from the cost argument. Their lobbying power is, well, nil, and the fact that these baseless operations go on year after year are an indication that the public wants to continue believing that they are all, uniformly, monsters to be monitored and controlled in the face of no evidence whatsoever. We can turn around several important punitive trend, but it'll be a long time before we reassess the devastation our excessive policies toward a population with extremely low recidivism rates has wreaked on released inmates and their families.
2 comments:
When you state that you believe sex offenders won't benefit from the cost argument, I wonder if you've considered that there is a DOUBLE cost argument to be made in this case? Not only are taxpayer dollars being wasted going after sex offenders (who have never been a threat to kids on Halloween), but resources are being diverted from things like traffic control (traffic accidents ARE a very real danger to kids out trick-or-treating). Point out that parents have easy access to maps of where sex offenders live and then ask why the emphasis is on uselessly looking tough instead of usefully being smart? Getting people questioning the eptitude of their elected officials is the fastest way to change the minds of those same officials.
Great comment, Joe. Of course, in the current climate to place responsibility on the parents is inconceivable.
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