[Note: Friends of Justice is a personal blog. I speak only for myself.]
‘In 1996, when Jackson wrote her critique, she was one of the few who foresaw that a new web of laws banishing sex offenders from society would create a banished class of nearly one million, forced to regularly register with police and have their personal information publicly posted for decades and often life. That’s something for which she should get credit, not scorn.
‘These post-release consequences have been upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court on the erroneous grounds that sex offenders have a “frightening and high” recidivism rate. In 2015, legal scholar Ira Ellman found the court relied on a comment from a treatment provider in Psychology Today as their sole source for this assertion. Notwithstanding these shallow underpinnings, those branded “sex offenders” — including all those Jackson sentenced to supposedly too little prison time — are subject to a lifetime of endless regulations and public shaming that makes it nearly impossible to get jobs, find housing or support their families and re-integrate into society. These consequences never end, and are not considered punishment but merely administrative, civil regulations to protect the public because of the myth of high recidivism.’
Please read the entire article by NCRJ Director Dr. Emily Horowitz in The New York Daily News.
Since I read the May 1990 Harpers’ on Kelly Michaels, I’ve grown increasingly angry at the cowardice and bullying of the press and the supposed progressives in reporting the ritual-abuse cases, and their failure to admit to their share in spreading the panic. As with the Comet Pizza scare–when only a few people pointed out the parallels with the Satanic-abusers’-tunnels hysteria of McMartin–I don’t see any columnists saying “What if it weren’t Judge Brown, but a frightened, underpaid daycare worker–or parent–or bus driver?” I’m glad Dr. Horowitz was able to get printed.
Deluded lawmakers prove themselves again and again to be a far more dangerous group of people – and far more in need of constant societal monitoring – than sex crime ex-offenders. The fact that ex-embezzlers, ex-murderers and ex-armed robbers are exempted from such scrutiny speaks volumes about those lawmakers and their true priority, getting reelected,and gives the lie to their stated “protecting children” or “protecting the innocent” motives.