Naples Daily News – Fear Mongering
A story in today’s Naples Daily News titled, “How to prevent bad actors from slipping into your community under radar” written by some hack condominium attorney is a prime example of fear mongering.
The point of the story is to prevent persons required to register as sex offenders from moving into communities or how to kick them out once they are in. They write, “…Bingo, you now have a registered sex offender or convicted felon living in your community long-term. Once they are in, it can then be very difficult to get them removed from the community as long as there is no evidence they are breaking the community’s rules or regulations.”
Maybe the Naples Daily News could use an education on the fact that persons required to register have a lower rate of recidivism than any other criminal category? Or, that 95%+ of sexual assaults are convicted by someone not on the registry?
Perhaps we should educate them! If anyone cares to they can comment on their news story or email the paper at [email protected]
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In addition to what I just said:
Playing on people’s fears is much more likely to result in harm. The most logical and mature thing to do is to face and deal with reality. Shame on him for taking advantage of people’s vulnerabilities, for self serving purposes. He’s a lawyer looking for business, and he’s come up with a creative way to make more business by playing on people’s fears to encourage them to use his services. He and other lawyers would be the only ones benefiting from something like that.
Does anybody remember the 2004 movie “The Village”? This is what this reminds me of. The movie is about how families of victims of violence, who had met in a support group, created an exclusive community, separated from the rest of the real world, in order to keep themselves and their families safe. They created an elaborate plan to fool the children born into those families into believing something extremely ridiculous, to keep them from ever leaving that small community. The goal was to always keep them safe. They even had the local police in on their plan. They lived like this for many years, thinking they were safe from violent crime, until one of “their own” did exactly what they were living in fear of. He committed murder, killing one of their other own. The moral of the story was that they had gone to these extremes to keep themselves and their families safe from violence, and they actually had it in what was supposed to be their “safe” community.
As the saying goes, “What you fear most, you create.”
I Went ahead and E-mailed this moron:
To whom it may concern,
I am a former and retired Investigator for the State of Florida. I am very disappointed in your lack of knowledge as far as registered citizens are concerned. All your article does is create paranoia and misstates empirical evidence. You are obviously uninformed about individual’s who have perhaps make a single mistake in their lives and would like to move on, but because of individual’s with your mindset and misinformation can not. I would be glad to provide you with REAL and empirical evidence that refutes your ridiculous and poorly written Article. Everyone deserves a second chance in life and it’s individual’s like you that prevent that, that I am sorry for. Stay well.
Concerned Citizen.
sent to naples daily news:
And praytell, what is a bad actor?
Is it a young man who dated and perhaps later married a young 17 year old sweetheart? Is it someone who visited an adult dating service and was entrapped to go visit a young underage girl who was in fact a sheriff’s deputy waiting to arrest him? Was it a young man who believed a young woman who stated she was 18 when she was not?
Not all Sex Offenders [SO] are Jeff Einstein. He was an SO, certainly a bad actor as well. But most SO are not predators. They are individuals who perhaps made a mistake, if one considers being 19 and having sex with a younger girl friend a mistake. A mistake maybe; a crime, I tend to doubt it. These individuals were arrested, many of them with no victim, tried, convicted and served their time. They paid their debt to society, questionable as some of the debts may be.
Why are they being further punished with fear-mongering articles such as “How to prevent bad actors from slipping into your community under radar?” There is a name for this fear-mongering tactic, it is called ex post facto punishment and our constitution has declared it illegal.
I could understand the purpose of the article if it actually protected the community, but it does not fulfill that purpose. Why not? Because the community does not need protection from a vast majority of these people
Scholarly papers and peer-reviewed studies have shown several things about convicted SO. Primary findings indicate that recidivism rates among SO are in the 3-5% range. Only convicted murderers have a lower recidivism rate than SO. Courts are paying attention and have concluded that the registries are not effective in accomplishing what they set out to do. Michigan’s SO registry has been declared unconstitutional because of ex post facto considerations.
Most individuals who commit sex crimes against young children are not even registered, they are most often individuals who are known to the family and who use this acquaintance to the family to access the children. They are not the “bad actors” on some register, nor are they individuals lurking at a park waiting to pounce on a victim [the fabled stranger danger]. They are teachers, medical trainers for olympic athletes and other individuals we read about in the papers. The families actually bring the victims to them! They are generally first time offenders, not individuals conveniently pre-registered on some “bad actor” list.
Collateral victims of “bad actor” lists are family members of the convicted individuals. Because of “bad actor” lists, SO have difficulty finding a place to live, eg Miami-Dade. They are often unable to reside with their families. Scholarly Studies show that individuals who are reunited with family, have lower recidivism rates than those who are homeless. Individuals are suing states at this time because they cannot attend their children’s school functions because they are on a “bad actor” list. Often their “crimes” occurred decades prior, when they were 19 and being intimate with the woman who is now the mother of their children. The amazing thing is, decades later, they are still on the list!
We need less of fear-mongering and more facts about SO. They are not the “bad actors” we fear, they are individuals who have paid their debt to society and deserve the second chances we would desire for our own transgressions, whatever they may be.
There has been a lot of talk the last few days about the 60 minutes report about what Germany has accomplished because of there way of rehabilitating criminals in prison. Preparing them for civilian life. Connecticut has implemented a lot of the program. Kansas and Missouri are looking at it very seriously. On a discussion on radio they had a representative from Germany plus Mayors from a few City’s and a therapist that helped implement the program there. It all sounded ok until one of them made the comment ,”it would work very well on all except sex offenders “ . What is going on here?
Pose this question to them: You have two neighbors, one is a registered citizen, the other is not… which one is more likely to commit a sex offense?