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punish, reform or leave 'em alone

A Web site sponsored by the Tucson Police Department allows a person to submit his or herzip code to a database to find out who and where all the sex offenders in that zip code are. This seems like merely a logical and useful extension of the existing sex offender notification law to the highly-accessed electronic medium, but it presents a rather thorny problem. Sex offender notification laws admit to a disturbing fault in our philosophies of justice - punishment particularly. If the people on this Web site have already been punished enough, then we are wrong to continue to punish them. If they have not been punished enough, then they should still be in prison.

A typical problem pointed out with sex offender notification laws is that they are a gross invasion of privacy, which is true. If these people, since they are no longer in prison, do not pose a threat to society and have repaid their debts to society, then they are entitled to a full restoration of their rights. The implicit right to privacy should be no exception. Actually, no felon receives a full restoration of rights upon reentrance into society, and this still, is wrong. They are, after all, no longer criminals, but free citizens. Otherwise they should be incarcerated.

It is wrong, also, for people to be punished after the law has already deemed them to be sufficiently punished. We should keep these people in the penal system until we feel they have been properly dealt with and then leave them alone after they exit the system. How long after a person has left the penal system do we continue to brand him or her a criminal? If he or she is not a criminal, then we should not stigmatize him or her as one.

If we do continue to ostracize an ex-convict, then we how do we expect the person to reintegrate into society? If we don't allow the ex-convict to become a productive member of society, then there is little left for him or her but crime. Even assuming that the person is mentally disturbed and has no hope of reassimilating - such as in the case of a sex offender - begs a different approach than public humiliation. A person as ill as we assume a sex offender to be needs to be kept away from society, most beneficially in a psychiatric hospital.

Sex offender notification laws are tantamount to assuming that a now-innocent person has done something wrong and then punishing him or her for it, all without having to go through the burdensome steps of due process. We should work especially hard at preventing a criminal from being created. If, unfortunately, we fail there, we should punish, reform and then leave him alone.

Central to this issue is the already apparent question of whether our justice system punishes or reforms. We have asked that it do both, and it has failed at both. Recidivism is unacceptably high at all levels in the penal system, and this points to a failure to punish and to reform. If most ex-convicts become convicts again, then clearly something is wrong. A way to clear up this problem would be to decide what we want our justice system to do and then to focus on making it do that well.

Ideally, we would opt to have two systems, one that reforms and one that punishes. This would deal with many issues that plague our justice system. If the courts found someone to be incorrigible, then the person could be punished. The criminal could be kept away from society, not set free to make room for drug dealers or bad-check writers - people who could easily be sent through a reformatory system. If a person is thought to be curable, then he or she could be sent through a different system and actually reformed. In the case of sex offenders, this at least, would do away with the absurdity of having to admit publicly that we can neither punish our criminals nor cure our sick nor keep our innocent citizens safe.

Sex offender notification is an awkward reminder of how we have completely failed to cure sick people, punish bad people and keep innocent people safe. Do we really feel better knowing who and where the sex offenders around us are, or would we feel safer knowing they were permanently behind bars or working to cure their sicknesses?