There’s Hope Even for Sex Offenders

4-9-2012 New Hampshire:

The war on sex offenders makes sense only within a large historical context. My generation grew up practicing air raid drills in classrooms where the teachers made us crawl under our desks in case the real thing took out Cleveland or Buffalo. Neighbors were stocking their bomb shelters with canned goods and ammunition. We lived through the Cuban Missile crisis unsure if hour by hour the human race would survive.

There was a doomsday pressure on everyone. Sen. Joseph McCarthy tapped into it to wield as much power as President Eisenhower for a brief time. His aggressive Senate hearings on Un-American activities blackballed dozens of alleged communists in labor unions and Hollywood. Even a Pulitzer Prize winner like Arthur Miller fell into temporary disgrace.

The Colonists hanged 20 accused witches in Salem in 1692 and crushed another under tons of stone. Consorting with the devil was a sexual offense in those days. The judges and juries were dealing with huge stress from failed crops and the fear of Indian raids.

Now we have reached the depth of a great recession that rivals the one 80 years ago for its high unemployment and social unrest. Joblessness on this scale contributed to the widespread inner city riots in the 1960s and 1970s. The same misery, but worse, fueled the rise of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin a generation earlier. People are scared that way now. They want vengeance and safety.

We have started the second decade of a war on terror that may never end and knows few traditional limits. We watch Iran and North Korea try to join the short list of nations with the unilateral power to trigger the war to end all wars. Every few months some anonymous stranger guns down a dozen strangers. We all feel that carnage in the intimacy of the quarter hourly internet news cycle as if it happened next door. We want to save ourselves from so many threats. We want to lash out at them. The quickest, easiest way to do that is symbolically.

So we register sex offenders as surrogate terrorists and post their personal information as if it were bin Laden’s bio on the Internet for everyone to see. Failure to report to police on a quarterly basis earns a sex offender a new felony charge. We ban them from living near schools, daycare centers and school bus stops with draconian penalties for violations. We civilly commit them when they finish their prison terms. We make sure those are long sentences by stacking charges in multiple consecutive bids. Each image of child on hard drive becomes a separate felony. We give sex offenders special license plates. The police notify the neighbors when a sex offender moves in nearby. The neighbors evict them, or force the landlords to do it for them, sometimes subtly, sometimes with raw violence.

Eight years ago Lawrence Trant stabbed a registered sex offender in Concord, NH, and tried to burn down two apartment buildings that housed seven sex offenders and an equal number of non-offenders. Police found a hit list in the assailant’s apartment he had gleaned from the sex offender public registry. The names of his intended victims were checked off in red.

..For the rest of this story: by Chris Dornin, Retired Statehouse reporter