[QUOTE="foxhound_fox"][QUOTE="Johnny_Rock"]Of course this would not be applied until after a trial.LJS9502_basic
Unfortunately, due to the mindset of many Americans being "guilty until proven innocent" that is a major problem. Also, there is another significant problem, people who deal in child sex abuse media (images and videos) tend to know a lot about computers, allowing them to easily break into an innocent person's network, and hide all their material their rather than on a personal computer. Which can lead to a very long sentence in the US (Americans despise child sex abuse images so much, they hand out a two year sentence for EACH image someone us caught in possession of). So an innocent person who doesn't have proper network security could end up in jail for the rest of their life, and have no way of proving their innocence. My biggest problem with the "war on child sex abuse" is that we aren't trying to help the mentally ill people doing these things... just lock them away. But then again, what is else new? Yeah that isn't how the justice system works. And frankly it doesn't matter what opinion Joe Public has if one is acquitted in court....one is acquitted in court. You cannot change the sexual interests of individuals. A pedophile will always be attracted to children. The question is....can they use self control? And for the sake of the children....if they have displayed that they cannot....then they should not be allowed near children anymore. Too much of a risk and the innocent should be protected before the guilty.This is a good point, but the thing is we've so gutted our mental health infrastructure and so bloated and homogeonized our prison system that there is no humane place to "put" these people to seperate them from society. Our laws which keep the courts from keeping people in prison for life are more precious than anything, and yes, I include children. Those children's futures could be very grim if we ignored our principles to lock away the mentally ill in prison.
We can't possibly continue the way we are, and expect success. We need to deal with addicts as ADDICTS, not criminals, and seperate them from people who indulge in drugs as part of a general pattern of criminality or the self-destructive actions of a sociopath. Those who are criminals, but not sociopathic should be placed in progressive prisons, educated, and reformed to be re-intigrated into society. Our system was meant to be about reform, not slaking the desire for revenge people have.
Sociopaths, as long as no viable treatment exists, should be kept seperately from others under the kind of strict controls they require. they're a constant risk to themselves and others, and removing them from a general population of criminals is only prudent. People who are drug addicts... need to be treated as such. If they committed crimes then they need to do the time for it, but in the context of also dealing with their addictions so that we're not running revolving doors, and packing prisons. If you have addicts who don't commit crimes beyond posession/use.. they shouldn't be in jail at all, but treatment. It's better for them, cheaper for society, and it's humane.
Finally, child molesters, violent sex offenders (i.e. rapists and the like), but not some twit who pisses in a park and gets on a list of sex offenders... need to be contained. It would generally seem that rapists and child molesters share a common trait, which is that they will continue their actions if not contained. IMO, they should be contained under the care of doctors, and released only on their orders as per 'mental defect' law. We'd need to be vigilant that it doesn't become an exercise in warehousing, but rather humane attempts to treat these people, reasearch their conditions and find ways to overcome them. In the meantime, as long as those treatments DON'T exist, they would be living in humane facilities in wich they are not allowed to harm each other, be harmed by mainstream criminals and gangs, and can be a subject of voluntary research into cures/treatments.
ALL of this would save us money in the long run, compared to warehousing people like wild animals in our prison system, which simply does NOT work. It's not soft on crime, just practical and it leavs the law intact so that if you commit crime you don't go to jail forever because it's deemed a "speical" crime. The mentally ill are recognized as such, criminals are recognized, addicts are recognized, and those who committ serial offenses, and sociopaths are too. We can either come to this eventually, or watch as our system collapses under its own weight; we already will look back on this period in the USA with shame... do we have to continue?
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