Woman outraged that sex offender neighbor not on public database

[sofa king]

17. I don't want to sound like a dick, but...

... I think that knowledge would be much more likely to cause harm than to help.

I don't think it is wise or fair to provide that information to the parent. I think most parents would act disproportionately and irrationally to such information--to the detriment of their own children and to the sex offender.

If the recidivism examples given by other posters above are true--apparently less than one percent?!--then we already have a rather firm Constitutional duty to leave sex offenders alone after they have served their debt to society.

The fact that they continue to be punished perpetually by being added to sex offender lists speaks more to the illusion of freedom and the rule of law in our society than it does to anything else.

I would also like to point out that if we're going to be making offender lists, why in the hell don't we have an automobile thief list, and other lists of offenders guilty of crimes that are commonly repeated by those convicted like mugging, burglary, and weapons trafficking (yes, weapons trafficking has a 70% recidivism rate, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics) ?

Car thieves have a recidivism rate of around seventy-percent. Wouldn't you like to know that you have a car thief living next door to your '69 COPO Camaro? Because that guy is nearly two orders of magnitude more likely to steal your car than a convicted sex offender is likely to harm your children.

The reason most people don't want that is because they can successfully separate their emotional reaction from their rational thoughts on the subject. Parents--maybe especially the good parents--probably cannot do that about sex offenders.