Sex Offenders
Getting Tough on Perverts
By Daniel Muniz

Below is the vivid insight from someone who worked with criminals that were released into a halfway house:

I worked at a halfway house here in Dallas in the late 90's. When I first started the bulk of the residents were your everyday common drug dealers, robbers and murderers. In '98 the place just started filling up with sex offenders. It was disgusting listening to them brag to one another about what they had done; like it was something to be proud of.

When TDC (Texas Department of Corrections) released one of the worst child predators in Texas to our facility, we all went out of our way to catch him on any violation. Needless to say he made it a week before one of the resident advisors walked into his room and he was doing a solo act while his roommate was in there with him. 30 minutes later he was in cuffs and on his way back to TDC where he still sits today. There was no amount of soap in my house that could wash me clean every night; just being around those people left me feeling physically, spiritually, and psychologically unclean.

These comments are chilling and rather disturbing but for the most part a lot of people probably wouldn’t be all that surprised. After all, child molesters and rapists are lowlife degenerates who have a perverted appetite for sexual conquest. And sadly, the prospect of serving a long sentence in prison has absolutely no value as any kind of deterrence because they are willing to commit another heinous crime the first chance they get.

However, the filling up of our correctional institutions with sex offenders is actually a fairly recent phenomenon.

Sex crimes have often been referred to as an unspeakable crime and with good reason. There is an unimaginable physical and emotional humiliation attached to it. As a result, this vile offense has quite a disproportionate percentage of the “dark number” which is the crimes that go unreported to the authorities. There are just a huge number of victims who choose not to come forward especially if they are children.

And only because of the advent of intense public awareness about sex crimes that prosecutions have dramatically risen. In fact, there has always been speculation that the number of child molesters may not have increased at all in that it has always remained a steady constant. It is only because of the prosecution and sentencing of these scumbags that the public is only now aware of the magnitude and depth of this scourge.

Unfortunately, the hug-a-thug advocate organizations and their sympathizers have always stymied and thwarted the crusade for tougher laws for sex predators.

They do not object to the fact that sexual assault is a vicious crime. They just don’t see it as being as pervasive of a problem. In fact, these sympathizers feel that the scope of this crime is narrowly limited because most child molesters only rape immediate family members and relatives. Accordingly, they feel that these lowlife degenerates do not represent a big enough threat to society so they do not a need such extreme measures to monitor and stigmatize them for life.

And then toss in the revocations of civil liberties such as being placed on a sex offender’s registry and the hug-a-thug advocates become outraged because they see it as a violation of a criminal’s constitutional rights.

However, it all boils down to perspective.

Yes, child rapists typically molest family members and relatives. Only the bolder ones go out of their way to seek out their next victims but that doesn’t mean that a child molester isn’t dangerous. If by some fate of circumstance they are presented with an opportunity, there is a strong likelihood that they will seize it. And that is the fundamental difference between the people who want these dirt bags locked up and the key thrown away as opposed to the people who think that they are relatively harmless after they have served their time.

The hug-a-thug advocates also resent the fact that the statutes geared towards sex predators are by no means perfect. For example, although some states do have “Romeo and Juliet” clauses in their laws, a lot of states don’t. That means an adult who has consensual sex with a minor but is only a year or two in difference in age may get locked up and unfairly branded as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

However, the harsh reality is that no law is perfect but that is the delusion that civil libertarians cling to.

They would much rather have one hundred guilty people walk free instead of locking up an innocent man.

The plain truth is that we don’t live in Utopia and we will never attain that kind of perfection in our justice system. But in the temporal world we live in, society still has to do the best job it can even if it means that a few people are going to slip through the cracks and get screwed by the system.

Yes, it is unfortunate and reprehensible but that is the price that we all have to pay in order to live in our imperfect civilization. Even so, it is still a far better place to live in instead of the anarchic Mad Max/Road Warrior paradise that civil libertarians and hug-a-thug advocates dream of.

Sex offenders are dangerous to our local community and those who believe otherwise are only fooling themselves. These vermin need to be behind bars for a very long time and if they are ever released, then they need to be closely monitored and have plenty of intrusive restrictions placed on them.

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