From Grits for Breakfast:
Texas Voices, a group made up of families of people on Texas' sex offender registry and others who support reform of Texas sex offender statutes, has been quite active this session, and it's a good thing.
As Grits told their indefatigable leader Mary Sue Molnar when the organization began, every other criminal justice reform group and activist in the state, including me, will inevitably sell them out at the Legislature. When someone says of a proposal, "well, we can do that but we have to exclude sex offenders," reform advocates routinely will jump at the deal without a second thought. And in general, rightly so. One cannot succeed in legislative politics by making the perfect the enemy of the good.
And yet, what that means as a practical matter is that nobody will consistently, much less passionately stand up for the interests of people on the sex offender registry except their own family members. Not their lawyers, not the ACLU nor any other advocacy group, no legislator nor state official, and (if we're honest) not even this blog ... nobody. If Texas Voices didn't exist, a lot of bad, barely vetted bills would slide through the process without a whiff of opposition, not because they weren't recognized as bad but because those in a position to vet them made a political calculation that opposing them would harm other interests. I'm not particularly proud that that's true - it doesn't speak very well of the criminal justice reform movement in this state - but it's the way it is. ..Continued..
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