Sorry for the multiple posts based on yahoo headlines, but the news is just crushing me this morning. I don't really recommend reading this article - what Duncan did to this family and these children is just beyond words.COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho - Convicted sex offender Joseph Edward Duncan bragged to his 8-year-old captive during more than six weeks on the run, telling her how he used a shotgun and hammer to kill her family after staking out their home for days, court documents show.
Aside from the gut reaction I have to this (horror), it seriously makes me think about what the appropriate response is from society to an individual like Duncan. This guy had already spent more than a decade in prison for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old boy at gunpoint. Then . . .
I'm NOT a death penalty advocate. I feel it's applied in a racially and socially biased manner in far too many cases. However, I'm at a loss with what to do with people like Duncan.Duncan was released on $15,000 bail earlier this year in Becker County, Minn., after being charged with molesting a 6-year-old boy. Police in Fargo, N.D., where Duncan lived, had been looking for him since he failed to check in with a probation agent there in May.
Let's just forget about rehabilitation. There's little argument that habitual sex offenders like this guy are not capable of being rehabilitated.
And the idea of releasing these people into society after a jail sentence and requiring them to register as a sex offender strikes me as wrong. We shouldn't be releasing people we don't think have at least a chance to become productive members of society, and publicizing that these people are sex offenders just about rules that possibility out. Yet we do it for our own protection because of the reason cited above - we have no faith that they can be rehabilitated. Forcing them to publicly register that they are a convicted sex offender also strikes me as being a cruel and unusual form of continuing punishment after they've served their sentence.
So what do we do with them? This seems like a recurring problem. How many times do we hear about the latest missing/murdered/raped child followed by a recitation of the perpetrator's long list of similar previous crimes and jail sentences. Something needs to be done that balances the interests of justice, fairness and safety. Any ideas?
-- Also, if anyone has statistics to show that this really isn't as much of a problem as the media makes it out to be, I'd be interested to see it. As a father of a toddler and an infant, stories like these scare the hell out of me. I imagine that these stories do get over-reported by the media, but I wonder to what extent.