Controversy Builds Over Rapist's Release.
You know, people need to decide. Either you serve your time for a crime and get out -- and society takes its risks -- or the crime is considered too heinous and you simply never get out of jail or the mental hospital or wherever. I mean, on the one hand, I have relatively little problem with someone who commits repeated relatively minor crimes against property getting out of prison. (When I was growing up, our house was robbed eight times, so I do have some experience of being on the wrong end of property crimes.) Things, in that sense, count for less than people. On the other hand, I've also been at the wrong end of a gun, and I wouldn't mind anyone who repeatedly hurts or injures other people being sent to prison for life, if they continually demonstrate that they won't or can't stop. I mean, quite honestly, I have no problems whatsoever with a demonstrated serial rapist being held for life. You rape four women, one after having been punished and released, then it's at least understandable for society to say, "You know what? It doesn't matter if you wind up being cured. We gave you a chance, you blew it, and we aren't going to give you another one because the risks to us are too great. Your chance of committing direct personal harm to another is too great for us to let you go." That's understandable.
The conditions on this person's release, aside from being largely unenforceable, are extraordinarily onerous. For example, I don't understand why the Court feels that being denied contact with your wife when you're outside confinement is constitutional; surely this constitutes prima facie cruel and unusual punishment.) (He's married? Why would any woman stay married to a serial rapist?) He's forbidden to have contact with children -- I'd love to see them completely enforce that. He's supposed to stay off the internet, but do they plan to follow him into public libraries and watch each and every thing he does? (And what the hell does the internet have to do with someone whose last crime was committed in 1985, for heaven's sake?)
It's actually going to cost quite a bit more to have him outside prison than inside; $100,000-plus per year to monitor and treat one man is beyond ridiculous. And what happens if all of the "sexually dangerous" people in prison end up out of prison at the same time? California seriously intends to spend $32.5 million per year on these people? There are surely entire sections of the state budget without that much money in them.
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
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