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Howloween and California Proposition 35 (Libertarian Rant)
13 years ago
Im going to Howloween in Burnaby, BC, Canada. See some of you there!
Onward. Unedited stream of consciousness rant ahead. Warning: Contains libertarianism.
I feel the need to state right here at the beginning that I believe that sex offenders should be punished as they deserve, I just don't like tacking on more punishment as time goes on.
Our libertarian friend Ken from Popehat summarizes the issue with Prop 35 pretty well:
http://www.popehat.com/2012/11/08/c.....-common-sense/
Basically, it will require all sex offenders to do the following:
"(4)A list of any and all Internet identifiers established or used by the person.
(5) A list of any and all Internet service providers used by the person."
And do all this within 24 hours of any such changes.
I have two issues with this:
1. Is this not ex post facto lawmaking? I know that the whole sex offender registry thing is based on regulatory law and status offenses, but really, when will it end?
2. This is a logistical nightmare, I dont know about everyone here, but I have a few hundred identities online, everything from that login for Adorama to my bank login to LiveJournal. Do they mean IP addresses? Does this mean you have to report your IP addresses? Just how are the police going to deal with this? How is the state going to deal with this?
It just seems like a good deal of do-good legislation that is not going to do any good. It might very well bury the police in updates to where the registries will not be updated in time and updates will get lost. It will encourage sex offenders to lie, omit stuff and generally shy away from these requirements. We will catch some of them, they will get locked up. And well, whats going on now.
The EFF and the ACLU have filed suit to block, and have been granted an injunction to block this requirement on First Amendment grounds. Basically, having to tell the government all of your secret and not secret identities and possibly every time you comment on anything anywhere on the internet, may be an infringement of the First Amendment. As much as some people want to think, the First Amendment does apply to sex offenders, and thusly they get all of the protections of it. For this I support them (Im a member of both), and I think everyone should support them.
This has the potential to force the subject of the ever growing requirements and restrictions imposed on sex offenders. Mind you sex offenders includes people who got convicted of: having sex with their boy/girlfriend when they were teens, streaking, urinating in public (think drunk in an alley), taking nude pictures of themselves when they were under 18 (yes, you can be convicted of producing child porn of yourself), hey, even receiving those nudes is illegal and people go to jail for it... So this category is not all bad people even if we don't count people who screwed up somehow and got nailed with the worse offenses.
I just don't see how this is improving the situation for everyone, we have made it so that sex offenders cant live in apartments, houses or anything in any place where children might be (mind you, a significant portion of these people were convicted of crimes that didn't even involve children). To the point where in Florida there is a colony of sex offenders who can only live under a freeway bridge, and in ... I think it was Georgia, they have to live in some state wildland park...
This is not fixing the problem, if anything its making it worse, we are actively rejecting these people from society and making their chances of recidivism higher. Personally, I wouldn't mind if society wanted to punish these people for life... but I very strongly believe that this should be imposed from the onset, you send these people to prison for life. Thats what needs to be done. Thats the only way people will realize just how crazy this is, once you start sending 16 and 17 year olds to prison for life for going to bed with their teenage sweethearts, people will notice and suddenly the whole thing will be different.
And don't get me started on how we're adding things like spousal abuse and all that to the sex offender registries.
So, yeah, thats how it is.
Edit to add: I think my biggest problem with this whole thing is the way we are lead to categorically think about this issue. Most people have never really been friends with a sex offender, and don't realize that these people can be human too, and sometimes they really got screwed. Thats kinda why I don't like how we are going back and adding punishment to their crimes...
Also, yeah, categorical thinking has always worked out for us...
Write me angry comments!
Onward. Unedited stream of consciousness rant ahead. Warning: Contains libertarianism.
I feel the need to state right here at the beginning that I believe that sex offenders should be punished as they deserve, I just don't like tacking on more punishment as time goes on.
Our libertarian friend Ken from Popehat summarizes the issue with Prop 35 pretty well:
http://www.popehat.com/2012/11/08/c.....-common-sense/
Basically, it will require all sex offenders to do the following:
"(4)A list of any and all Internet identifiers established or used by the person.
(5) A list of any and all Internet service providers used by the person."
And do all this within 24 hours of any such changes.
I have two issues with this:
1. Is this not ex post facto lawmaking? I know that the whole sex offender registry thing is based on regulatory law and status offenses, but really, when will it end?
2. This is a logistical nightmare, I dont know about everyone here, but I have a few hundred identities online, everything from that login for Adorama to my bank login to LiveJournal. Do they mean IP addresses? Does this mean you have to report your IP addresses? Just how are the police going to deal with this? How is the state going to deal with this?
It just seems like a good deal of do-good legislation that is not going to do any good. It might very well bury the police in updates to where the registries will not be updated in time and updates will get lost. It will encourage sex offenders to lie, omit stuff and generally shy away from these requirements. We will catch some of them, they will get locked up. And well, whats going on now.
The EFF and the ACLU have filed suit to block, and have been granted an injunction to block this requirement on First Amendment grounds. Basically, having to tell the government all of your secret and not secret identities and possibly every time you comment on anything anywhere on the internet, may be an infringement of the First Amendment. As much as some people want to think, the First Amendment does apply to sex offenders, and thusly they get all of the protections of it. For this I support them (Im a member of both), and I think everyone should support them.
This has the potential to force the subject of the ever growing requirements and restrictions imposed on sex offenders. Mind you sex offenders includes people who got convicted of: having sex with their boy/girlfriend when they were teens, streaking, urinating in public (think drunk in an alley), taking nude pictures of themselves when they were under 18 (yes, you can be convicted of producing child porn of yourself), hey, even receiving those nudes is illegal and people go to jail for it... So this category is not all bad people even if we don't count people who screwed up somehow and got nailed with the worse offenses.
I just don't see how this is improving the situation for everyone, we have made it so that sex offenders cant live in apartments, houses or anything in any place where children might be (mind you, a significant portion of these people were convicted of crimes that didn't even involve children). To the point where in Florida there is a colony of sex offenders who can only live under a freeway bridge, and in ... I think it was Georgia, they have to live in some state wildland park...
This is not fixing the problem, if anything its making it worse, we are actively rejecting these people from society and making their chances of recidivism higher. Personally, I wouldn't mind if society wanted to punish these people for life... but I very strongly believe that this should be imposed from the onset, you send these people to prison for life. Thats what needs to be done. Thats the only way people will realize just how crazy this is, once you start sending 16 and 17 year olds to prison for life for going to bed with their teenage sweethearts, people will notice and suddenly the whole thing will be different.
And don't get me started on how we're adding things like spousal abuse and all that to the sex offender registries.
So, yeah, thats how it is.
Edit to add: I think my biggest problem with this whole thing is the way we are lead to categorically think about this issue. Most people have never really been friends with a sex offender, and don't realize that these people can be human too, and sometimes they really got screwed. Thats kinda why I don't like how we are going back and adding punishment to their crimes...
Also, yeah, categorical thinking has always worked out for us...
Write me angry comments!
although the fact that my next-door neighbor is a halfway house (they're about 99% nice guys) and there's now at least 5 sex offenders living within half a mile of my house probably explains why we don't ever get trick-or-treaters.
Selfish fucking kids end up completely fucking otherwise honest kids for life with laws like this.
The types of crimes that can get one listed as a sex offender which warrant the degree of tracking and reporting that comes with being on the list as it current exists needs to be reduced to only the most severe people.
There is almost no justifiable reason why crimes of ignorance and non-aggressive (such as nudity or urination in public) should cause the kind of hardship it does on people... especially when you consider the a whole heaping hell of a lot of these cases end up being bullshit plea deals that are made due to it being nearly impossible for a defendant to actually defend themselves because if they try then they end up getting publicized and judged as guilty by the public on the nature of the charges alone - guilty or not.
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And god forbid that you try to take down any of the bricks that lawmakers have put in place for this whole system, because then you're subject to everybody judging you as `somebody who is intentionally trying to harm children` even if it has nothing to do with the kids in the first place.