Keeping children safe
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- November
- 21
Here’s an interesting court decision in light of residency restrictions imposed on sex offenders in this area.
Georgia’s top court overturned a state law on Wednesday that banned sex offenders from living with 1,000 feet of schools, churches, school-bus stops, parks, gyms, swimming pools and other areas where children gather, according to the Associated Press.
Lawmakers had argued that the law was needed to protect children.
Civil rights groups had countered that the law was so restrictive it would force some offenders to live in their cars or set up tents in the woods, and ultimately would undermine efforts to keep track of offenders.
Some of those same arguments have come up here.
In its ruling, the Georgia Supreme Court said that even sex offenders who comply “face the possibility of being repeatedly uprooted and forced to abandon homes.”
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 4:58 pm by Noreen O'Donnell.
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I’m not sure that sex offenders are any less dangerous if they don’t live within 1000 feet of a school. After all, they can presumably travel pretty easily to get where they want to go. I don’t know anybody who stays within 1000 feet of their house on a regular basis.
I think that if a person is deemed to be this dangerous, he/she should be kept behind bars for a longer period of time. I really wonder how effective all these nuisance type laws are. I don’t think they’re going to restrain a person who really intends to do harm to children.
I had wondered myself about the denial of civil rights as a “safety measure”.
Didn’t we just hear that mantra from Ashcroft & Gonzales?
Better, I think to create a lifelong therapeutic (institutional) setting, and keep these types in eternal therapy. Wasn’t that the norm, before 1965, and “Cuckoo’s Nest”? Insane Asylums are not bad things, at least for the rest of us!