scary weird

Well. I have complex feelings about this online sex offender database. On the one hand: it was already available information but you had to go down to the sheriff's office to see it. So why not put it online? On the other hand. Privacy. Scary big brother. Lynching. Is rehab possible when this is how it is.

Why am I looking? Photos of guys and their crimes. Hello, dude. You live 2 blocks away. Now I know your face. 3 counts of oral c0pulation with a minor under 14. What does it mean? Who are you? How did it happen and how were you caught? Does it matter that I can't help filing your face away in my memory, JUST IN CASE? Just in case what? If I see you in the grocery store, will I recognize you? Would I have smiled at you on the street before, and now I won't? What if you are the nice guy who fixed my bike on the corner of El Cam and James? Are you doing your best? I want to think so but I don't believe it.

It seems dirty and unfair, all of it.

Information wants to be free. Right? But it's also wrong and two wrongs don't make a right. Right? One oppression or injustice doesn't necessarily trump another one. If I disapprove, why am I looking? Will there be vigilantes now? Should there be? Why not just tattoo "rapist" on their foreheads? Ineradicable like the death penalty with some rate of failure of the system and innocents unjustly convicted.

I saw some movie preview recently that looked to be about some guy who got out of prison and did something awful implied to be rape or rape of children and just the preview's implications and jerking around of the viewer's sympathies for the inarticulateness of the ex-con (ex-rapist? can you be an ex-rapist or do you stay a rapist all your life? ex-murderer? Maybe I don't really believe in redemption and rehab.) Anyway just the preview pissed me off and made me feel nauseous. I turned to Rook at some point and put my face in his shoulder and my fingers in my ears.

The database is being hit hard today. I know I'll look at it again.

*** a few minutes ago it occurred to me that it is probably easy to make a script to slurp the data out of there and stick it in a whole new giant database. and then use it for whatever purpose you want. the most benign use i can think of for this would be to invite people involved in each case to tell their stories in public as a sort of victim/survivor empowerment tool. It would quickly become a very scary thing. Obviously there would be much worse uses but I don't think I need to say them here.

Comments

[Jo]

I'm conflicted too. I mean, it's supposed to be preventative, I suppose, but what action is prescribed after viewing your area's blurry and odd photos? I couldn't help but think "oh there aren't that many in San Carlot but more here" and then to look at the races of the people involved and generalize about my family's safety. Which is not necessarily served by the racism I have. Argh.

I wonder how many are incest?

[Jakob]

Everything's good, I'm very much against the theory of REHAB... can you EVER trust them again?? that's why I would like to see have somewhere to find these people, or to see if they are in my neighborhood, I want to make sure I don't put my kid in a school where there's a full apartment complex of Sex Offenders...

Thanks
Jakob

[badgerbag]

But those are just the ones that were prosecuted and convicted, which happens more often if you're poor, which in this country means likely to not be white. I know an awful lot of people who have been raped by middle class white people who never got into the legal system at all. Which means your safe neighborhood is probably plenty full of Offenders whose pictures aren't in the database. I bet the map of where ex-con rapists live would superimpose pretty neatly over something that just looks at who's poor; that they'd have some correlation... So the point of the db then becomes to say "in this zip code there are cheap apartments" which we already knew.

Should there be a special neighborhood where ex-convicts live...? maybe a little electric collar that keeps them away from schools? Hell, why not just keep them in prison forever.

That was sarcastic.
But it is interesting that as a convicted criminal of a certain type your "right to privacy" is taken away. why not make all crimes public information? why just rape? why not shoplifting or parking tickets? and why not murder?