In the video below, Director Eugene Jarecki is interviewed about his documentary film “The House I Live In”. As I watch the interview, I can’t help but think of the parallels between the war on drugs and the war on sex, where people who are labeled as “sex offenders” get put into an incredibly punitive system where they are set up to fail in order to fuel a system that is more concerned with making money than actually rehabilitating people or reducing crime rates.
Discrimination does and always will run rampant in any society. The only difference is that the politically and socially acceptable target of discrimination changes every generation or so. This generation, it’s those who have committed sex offenses. Previously, it was blacks. For a while, communists and Japanese. And so on.
It’ll take a while longer, but as the registry ruins more lives (of registrants and family members) it’ll die on its own. Society then will find a new group to discriminate against. Always has, always will.
I disagree big time. People are born black, born Jewish, born Japanese. The narrative will always be “they did this to themselves”
What a great interpretation of a corrupt concept. The system always cuts short the personal professional and life well lived concept for both populations. There are not enough healing services provided for the Dogma of mankind! As a healing community there is a new concept being presented as evidence based practices which is identified as responsive therapy “what happened to you” versus What is wrong with you. A collective platform is building strength, the challenge of shame based thinking is so difficult to challenge. Registrants need therapy processes for recovery and healing. Great recognition of the dichotomy of the walk of life set on these populations
@ kathy g FISHER:
The only fly in that ointment is that, despite popular opinion, the overwhelming majority of sex crime (particularly the one-time offenders, again despite popular opinion) occurs because of poor judgment or just plain stupidity, neither of which is a mental illness or deficiency that requires therapy to correct. In those cases, simply getting caught and penalized solves the problem. That’s why registrant sexual recidivism is (and always has been, again despite popular opinion) less than 5%, not some miraculous “treatment” forced on them as part of their parole/probation requirements.
In fact, most states require their prisons to provide “treatment” while incarcerated; some will even keep inmates past their release date if they don’t complete said program. Accordingly, why is more “treatment” required while on paper if a state approved program has already been completed?
Court ordered “treatment” programs are nearly as useless as the registry itself. Their sole purpose is to further burden registrants upon release and create opportunities to re-incarcerate the registrant. Their secondary purpose is to provide a living to friends and associates of judges and probation officers.
Sound cynical? Consider that the law presumes sanity when crimes are committed, courts establish sanity at trials or plea hearings, state-approved free “treatment” is already completed in prison, yet somehow registrants are crazy enough to need “treatment” when released. And what do you want to bet the court-ordered programs don’t comply with the state’s requirements to impose involuntary mental health treatment in any other type of case?
Not saying therapy doesn’t do some good for some people. Only that it isn’t therapeutically necessary in nearly all cases. And in the few that actually do need it, it’s certainly not provided by the court-ordered program.
Dustin, well said. While incarcerated I went through a state approved program and even received a piece of paper saying I had completed it, but when released it wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. I had to start all over. It was the KAIROS program while I was incarcerated that got me to accept my wife’s death, my failure with my daughter, and learn to forgive myself. All the counselling I received after release was nothing but ‘fluff’ and a required ‘check in the block’. My daughter and I get along fine now and I certainly have no desire to touch anyone inappropriately ever again. I have a productive life to live. My ‘hand is on the plow, and I’m not looking back’. I was released from probation eleven years early and in Florida that alone is a miracle. I do what I can to let others know that most sex offenses are not the end of the world and that those who choose to, can recover contrary to those who make a living off of ‘helping’ folks be permanent victims.
I would not really call it WAR on sex offenders. I would call by its real name The right to Hate sex offenders, I don’t see a registry where Drug related offences against children are place on it.
Actually I may see things a bit different as to the ‘war on drugs’ and the ‘war on sex offenders’. From what I’ve observed we might hope that the ‘war on sex offenders’ follows the route of the ‘war on drugs’. It appears that bureaucrats having done drugs in their past are now trying to legalize some drugs to compensate for their failures/violations. As the lifestyles of many bureaucrats start to come out into the open, maybe they will start looking at sex offenses in a different light and modify the long term penalties, as they may themselves find they are caught in the web they weaved meant for others but now may be involving them or their family members. It’s part of the thermodynamic effect. Get the ‘heat’ away so they won’t have to face it some day.