Does that mean that you advocate setting up a registry for people who have done other things that are potentially dangerous to their neighbors, such as backyard target practice? I kind of doubt that, so why the double standard? People who have murdered are not just potentially dangerous, they have been proven to be directly dangerous in at least one instance. We don’t have a registry of murderers. Why not?
Not hard to spot a meth dealer, frankly. Just follow the trail…
But I don’t agree with either registry.
The way I see it, a sex offender is one criminal, a meth dealer has a much greater chance of being with many seedy types, if not out right criminals, all at once. Although I don’t really thing that either type of registry should exist. Either you are a dangerous criminal and should be in jail, or you are a free citzen that should be able to come and go as you chose. I see not need for a middle ground.
As a side note, as a chemist, I live in constant astonishment that more meth labs don’t obliterate themselves on a daily basis.
one has to wonder about the neccesity of the registry entirely…
If its a list of active “Meth Labs” and or dealers, then it seems these people should be behind bars… same with “sex offenders”…active/predatory is the key difference.
If the people on the registry are such offenders that the general public needs to know about who they are and where they live, it seems that their jail time was not enough, and that they should remain incarcerated.
These lists give folks the idea that those on them are “still” bad enough that there presence needs to be known to everyone… if thats the case, then they need to be in jail, not freely roaming the streets.
Secondly, and this goes strictly to the “sex offender” list… being put on the list should be decided as part of the penalty phase of any conviction, not just as a rubber stamp to all…and appealable.
The issue is that some crimes have extremely high recidivism rates, and this includes sex offenders and drug manufacturers/dealers.
The theory behind public outing of former offenders is similar to the Open Source Software philosophy of “many eyes means shallow bugs” i.e. if a community knows about a sex offender, they can protect themselves and the offender is unable to go back to old behaviours because they are being observed.
Of course, what it really means is that the community ostracises the former offender, and they are driven out and go underground in a new community with a chip on their shoulder and an increased likelyhood of offending in time.
There are no easy answers, and I am not really sure that there are any good answers to this problem. A punished criminal has paid their debt to society - they should be free and unencumbered to restart their life. But if they have a history of reoffending or are in a high risk group, then society should be able to restrict their freedoms in the interest fo public safety. How that is done is a hard question to answer.
Si