Unintended Consequences...

Last fall, California's voters – by a 70% majority – passed “Jessica's Law”. This law makes it illegal for sex offenders to live within 2,000 feet of a school or park. The basic idea is very simple and hard to argue with: keep the sick creeps away from the kids.

Previously a court ruled that the law could only be applied to offenders released after the ballot measure was passed last November. A review of the records of these recently-released offenders shows that about 2,100 of them are living in areas that violate the law. California's cities and towns tend to have large numbers of parks and schools that are widely distributed, and in many communities Jessica's law effectively bars these sex offenders from living in the community at all, as there is no place more than 2,000 feet from a school or park.

And this leads to the unintended consequence: for lack of any other legal place to live, these sex offenders will be forced to move to rural areas. When you consider the large number of these sex offenders (and that's depressing enough all by itself!), it becomes obvious that having them all moving into the rural areas is a real issue – those areas will quickly have a very high proportion of sex offenders in the population. This is a special concern because sex offenders are particularly likely to repeat their offenses; rehabilitated sex offenders are rare stories.

We live in just such a rural area; there is no park or school within 2,000 feet of us. While we don't have any children, we don't much like the idea of these sex offenders – with their known propensity to re-offend – living in our neighborhood. We also don't much like the idea of them living near kids in the city.

I think the real problem is that we let these people roam amongst the public at all. In my opinion, we are far too willing, as a society, to risk our children's safety in order to allow a sex offender to go free. I would much rather see us treat child molesters as seriously ill mental health patients, and incarcerate them in appropriate facilities until and if we can be certain they are “cured” – even if that means they are incarcerated for life.