The horror of the sex offender registry

 

My previous post on smoke detectors reminded me of a much more serious issue: the travesty of justice that is the sex offender registry. This is an issue that is once again driven by anecdote. A spectacularly rare and horrible crime occurs: a boy is kidnapped, raped and murdered. The perpetrator lived next door and had a previous sex offense. "Why was I not told that a sex offender was living next door?" bellows the father. Legislators listen, likely urged on by constituents who are gripped by the news story. The sex offender registry is created.

The short answer to the father's question, if you were thinking statistically, is that 999,999 sex offenders never abduct or rape their neighbors. But sex offenders are the scum of the earth; who could sympathize with them? The registry is a law, and once passed, it applies to everyone. Who is a sex offender? Surely not just those who brutally rape children. Lesser touching or indecent exposure offenders will qualify. It is also those who rape adults, because are you going to tell me that rape of an adult woman isn't as serious a crime as the rape of a child? What about those who access child pornography? Well, they're disgusting pedophiles, so no punishment is too harsh. By the time we're done, the registry contains 14-year-olds who touched their younger sister in a way they shouldn't have. It contains 19-year-olds who had sex with their 13-year-old girlfriends. It contains in some places those caught urinating in public.

The next question is what we do with the registry information. We make it public, so ordinary citizens can check on where the sex offenders are living. Surely there are some nearby, and modern Google-like tools make it easier than ever to find them. One thing this can result in is harassment -- protesters or rocks through the window. People rarely check on exactly what the crime was. In other jurisdictions there are legal restrictions, like the inability to live within 400 yards of a school or playground, which in some places means there is virtually no place in a metropolitan area for a sex offender to live. Surely the sex offender can't get a job. Ten years on the registry are 10 years of a ruined life. In some states registry is for life.

Do you feel safer? If so, it's an illusion. In fact, the vast majority of sex offenses are committed by people with no prior record. The recidivism rate for sex offenses is something like 2%, compared to something like 60% for auto theft.

The rational approach would certainly include asking if we are meting out punishments for crimes roughly in proportion to the harm they cause. There is no registry for murderers, or for those who do armed robbery. None for drunk drivers, or those who beat people to within an inch of their lives. Last I knew, the recommended federal penalty for taking a picture of a 17-year-old boy's erect penis was twice as long as if you tried to kill him.

The fact is, in our society we don't lock up everyone for life who has committed a crime. We set them free after a reasonable period, and give them a second chance. That means that there will always be many people with criminal records living near you. Most of them never bother us. And it's a chance we take as part of a free society. Those with sex crimes should be treated no differently.

Suppose a legislator supports getting rid of the registry. You can be sure that in the next election cycle, the opponent will claim that the legislator is a friend of pedophiles. It is a difficult problems to solve.

Smoke Detector Headaches

 Here is a puzzle for you. What do you do if it's 3am, your smoke detectors go off, and after verifying that there is no smoke or fire anywhere, it just keeps sounding. You're on a wired system so that if any of your 3 goes off, or any of the 6 downstairs, then ALL of them sound. The way the walls are in your place, resonance increases the volume. Some of these are 12 feet up in the air, and you have no stepladder and besides that have a balance problem that would mean you can't get safely to the ones that are only 9 feet up. What do you do?

Somehow I don't think a call to 911 would be appreciated, unless maybe I could innocently claim I didn't know if there was a fire or not. Do I just put a pillow over your head and wait out the night -- maybe 5 hours? Expecting landlord service at 3am seems a bit much.

In fact, I got out of my problem because of a hale young couple that lives on the first floor. The alarm was loud enough to wake them up too, though it wasn't in their unit. And the man came up with his stepladder and disconnected all 9 of them. Piece of cake.

It is not one of the world's top 30 problems, but I am thoroughly convinced that our regulations and standards about smoke detectors have gone way too far.

Not that many people died in fires to begin with. It's great that the smoke detectors can save them -- though only some of them. You put one smoke detector in each apartment-size unit, and it will do 95% of the job that needs to be done.

Someone somewhere was so deaf or so drunk that they didn't wake up to the sounds of a very loud alarm, so it must be made ear-splittingly loud. Somewhere there was a fire in one unit, but those nearby were similarly deaf or drunk and missed it, so the solution was to wire all of them together.

Just today as the landlord was installing replacements, I read the warning, "must be tested weekly". Really? This issue is so vital that the best the industry can do is a product that requires a weekly testing? You've got to be kidding! Or perhaps it is just ass-covering and no one will test them weekly. Whatever.

I have a hunch this is an example of "policy by extraordinary anecdote". Something makes the news -- in part because it's very rare -- and so something must be done about it. There was a fire, and six children died. Terrible, terrible tragedy. To fix a recurrence of this problem, you create problems for another 999 people who don't make the news but live with the headaches. Or perhaps it's 999,999.

There's also the tendency for specialists to view the world through the lens of their own experience. I have a friend who was an Emergency Room doctor for many years, and he recognizes that in his gut he feels like driving cars is an extremely dangerous thing to do. So now on this issue we consult the experts on fire protection -- firefighters and their bosses. Salient in their minds are what happens in fires -- tragedies, or near-tragedies that were barely averted. For every fire, there are hundreds or thousands of people who never have life-threatening fires but instead deal with the alarm going off if they burn the toast. They are nowhere on the radar screen of the people who set smoke detector policies.

Presumably there is also now an industry of the producers of smoke detector equipment, and they have an interest in regulations that let them sell more of their product.

I told my landlady that I would be delighted if she procrastinated in installing new detectors, and even if she never got around to it, but no... new ones were installed today. And part of me is on edge waiting for the next time they go off, perhaps because the people downstairs burn their toast.