[Note: Friends of Justice is a personal blog. I speak only for myself.]
In fact, it is not clear why mere possession of child pornography should ever be grounds for locking people in cages. The Supreme Court’s main rationale for upholding the ban on possession was that demand for this material encourages its production, which necessarily involves the abuse of children. But this argument has little relevance now that people who look at child pornography typically get it online for free. Furthermore, people who possess “sexually obscene images of children” — production of which need not entail abuse of any actual children — face the same heavy penalties. “They are not protecting a single child,” Boland says. “They are throwing people in prison for having dirty thoughts and looking at dirty pictures.”
