Are you out of your mind, or are you an idiot? The DoJ study had an over all re-offense of 3.5% to 5% , NOT 51% as was stated above. Add on top of that IF an offender is allowed to attend therapy, it takes another 4% of the population left in the 3.5 to 5% population out of the equation. You people and the numbers that you pull out of thin air are incredible. Sex Offenders are completely capable of rehabilitation. Just as someone on DUI is as well.

The continued draconain practice of public shaming and humiliation has got to stop. up to 96% of offenders will never re-offend again! You people treat all sexual offenders as if they are PREDATORS… Which they are not. Many are on the registry for age issues (19 to 16, etc) or for peeing in public, having sex in public (even being seen through a windows on accident), sending THEIR OWN picture to a boyfriend or girlfriend while they were underage. You act as if sex offenders are all hiding in bushes when in reality, 90% of all sexual offenders KNEW their victim. Dad, MOM, uncle Earl, Aunt Clare, The brother, the sister, the nice man at the school, Mr Jenkins the Grocer… only 10% of sex crimes are committed by total strangers.

What needs happen is thoughtful legislation dealing with the most Vile of the true Predators. The ones that hunt down and really HARM others. Not the guy that picks up the really cute 19 year old at the bar, only to ind out in a month she was there on her sister’s ID.. Her Older sisters ID. (that is a true scenario, there is no defense of guilt for that situation either).

If you want to protect your children go out and do the REAL research, not what O’Reily or Greta or Nancy Grace tells you. Check the Abel report, or the Department of Justice reports. Stop believing the garbage that your Legislators tell you to pander you for votes, go out and get the true information.

Count me in on the switch-throwing.

I’m not unhappy to say my molester is permanently incarcerated and confined to a wheelchair the rest of his miserable, pain-ridden life.

IMO nobody wants to believe the friendly neighbor really raped a toddler so he tells them it was because him and his buddies were out parting and mooned somebody…well of course, that makes more sense, he is such a nice guy! Poor guy now is a sex offender, just isn’t fair. am i right?

Dismiss the victim. How does this make victims feel? Like they don’t matter. This is the problem with our society right now. The victims are not getting the help they need and deserve. And we are crying poor sex offenders? They chose their action, their victim did not.

Then we have the child molesters. IMO they should NEVER see the light of day. How dare they take the innocent from a child, a toddler, a baby. How dare they! And until Jessica’s Law most were only getting a slap on the wrist. What kind of justice for that child is that? How does it make the child feel knowing the person who did these horrible things to them is still walking the streets?

Look at so many websites like youtube is crawling with pedophiles just look at the video The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children put out and then look at the sick comments.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXIp3NuUh-Y

These people only see children as sex toys. Child molesters should never be allowed around children ever again. Allowing this type of sex offender around children is like taking an alcoholic to a wine testing.

No, there aren’t. Self-defence is not murder. If you are abused in such a way that it’s impossible to walk away instead of killing, that would be self-defence. I think that the number of those cases is incredibly slight. I also see no reason to apologise for women who kill when they could have walked away; I sympathise greatly and I think they should have a reduced tariff, but that doesn’t make it any less wrong.

and because murder can be accidental.

No, it can’t. That’s manslaughter.

If a man kills his wife because he is an abusive son of a bitch, he is worse than a rapist. If a woman kills her husband because he is an abusive son of a bitch, she is a victim trying to escape. Both are murderers. Therefore you can’t actually classify the category “murderers” as worse than rapists because there are legitimate reasons to murder and because murder can be accidental. Also, you can murder someone instantly, in seconds, which makes any defense of “crime of passion” hold more water with me than rape, an act which inevitably takes at least a few minutes.

There is never a legitimate reason to rape anyone. If there was, I might think differently about it. (For instance, in Star Trek Vulcans in mating season must have sex or they’ll die. One *could* make a case for rape being less reprehensible than murder if you’ll die unless you commit it. However, in real life, we humans are *never* in that situation.) I can cheerfully classify all rapists as scum because not one single one of them had a good reason or even an understandable bad reason for what they did. If you’re arguing with a person and you shove them down the stairs and they break their neck, you’re a murderer. And you’re not a good person, or you wouldn’t have shoved, but most humans can commit sudden acts of impulsive violence without thinking through what the end result might be. A single shove is more understandable from a “I was angry and got carried away and did something impulsive, violent and stupid and didn’t have time to think out the consequences of my acts” than pinning down a struggling person and forcing intercourse on them for several minutes.

There are certainly murderers who I think are worse than rapists. There’s a guy I read about who killed two of his baby children, in two different relationships, for life insurance money — they only pinned the first murder on him after he committed the second, because the unexplainable suffocation death of a baby looks just like SIDS. He’s worse than a rapist. A person who murders a spouse because they want to be free to start a new life, in a world where divorce is pretty easy, is pretty fucking reprehensible. Someone who participates in the beating death of a gay man, or a black man, or any other hate crime death, is worse than a rapist. The woman who denied her friend’s 2-year-old, who she was babysitting for a month because the mother was sick, water for a week to punish him for wetting the bed and thus ended up killing him… she was worse than a rapist.

But a woman who premeditates the murder of her abusive husband because she knows abusers chase down and kill victims who escape them? A man who gets drunk and hits a pedestrian? A person who believes that a neighbor molested his child and so kills the neighbor? A person who shoves another person in the heat of anger, and that person falls and breaks their neck? Those people are not necessarily good people, but they’re not as bad as rapists.

About 80-90% of people who were raped, however, think rapists are worst, in my experience.

It is, of course, harder to sample the opinions of murder victims.

As for fake videos, if one has the resources to be able to make something look like a real murder or serious assault on video when it wasn’t, then there’s generally some kind of record or way to track that down, hence the BBFC exception. But personally, and I think I might be an exception here, I think that downloading a video that looks like child porn or a snuff film without any idea whether or not it’s real is just as bad as downloading one that you’re sure is. So I think if someone is found with videos that look like child porn (as in, actual children, not “she looks like she might be 17″) or where the people look like they were seriously injured or may have died, and that person can’t provide reasonable evidence that it is reasonable to believe they were faked (for example, if they bought it from a website that says it was faked, then the cops should investigate the website, and hold them, not the customers, accountable) then I think they should be charged and convicted as if they were real.

I don’t know about your quicksand fetish videos, either. But I do think that if you’re getting it from reputable people who ensure the safety of their porn stars then the law shouldn’t affect you.

The law might not be wroded the best, but it all depends on how the courts interpret it. Sometimes the more nitpicky, carefully worded laws get interpreted terribly when a case comes up that the authors of the law never thought of (like that guy getting 10 years for a blowjob from a girl 2 years younger than him because the lawmakers didn’t think of that when writing a law against sodomizing kids) while the courts can have more freedom with vaguer laws to only apply them to situations that the lawmakes originally intended. I know that’s not much comfort, but we won’t really know until some cases are decided.

Well… obviously they deserve basic human rights while incarcerated, but it’s a little hard to argue that they deserve liberty. If they deserved liberty, they wouldn’t be incarcerated.

I only included liberties to reflect the original quote. Poetic license and all that. However, I think there’s not a lot of difference between rights and liberties, if any. Liberty isn’t a monolith. We have many different liberties. Some people have more than others. Incarcerated people obviously don’t have as many as the rest of us, whether for good or ill.

Part of the government’s job is to deprive people of certain liberties (screaming “FIRE!” in a theater, being the quintessential example). Where I start to question things is when certain classes of people (prisoners in this example) start to lose freedoms categorized as universal and inalienable (by my standards, dammit!)

I wanted to call out a minor issue in an otherwise excellent article, because I saw traces of verminification there. I’m not accusing you, particularly, of doing so, but I thought it was easy to read what you wrote and interpret it that way, and thought I should speak up to try and keep that from happening.