I don’t normally cross-post between the Orlando metblog and my personal one. But I’ve been very moved to write a compelling article about this entire situation and to be honest, it came out better than I thought it would.

So… I’ve put it here for consideration.

I cannot help but be moved by the recent events involving the missing 9 year old girl from Florida - Jessica Lunsford. I am a mother of a young girl and I guess it just brings into sharp relief a problem which plagues our society. Sexual offenders.

So I sit here pondering what that MEANS exactly to be a sex offender. And as a society, is the best we can do about these vile human beings (I hesitate to even call them that) is to make them REGISTER?? I mean we have Martha Stewart wandering around with a ankle bracelet, but this guy illegally leaves the state and ends up in GEORGIA??

I’m all for privacy and for civil rights. But if we can have a white collar criminal such as Martha on an ankle bracelet… a person like her who is the LEAST likely re-offender out there… if SHE can be on an ankle bracelet where they monitor every visit to the bathroom, THEN WHY ‘O WHY can’t we have these monsters who use sex as a weapon on something even remotely similar?!?!

This is a rhetorical question I realize, and I do know the answer. It’s the answer to a 1000 questions not unlike this one (poverty, starvation, AIDS epidemic in Africa…). It comes down to the almighty buck.

Ok… so can I do more than rant about this? I don’t know. I wish I had a better answer for this. I wish I had the power or the means to suggest some kind of permanent surveilance for people of this propensity. It saddens me to think of what this family is going through because it’s more important to discover that methane exists on Mars instead of protecting our future.

Children make up 30% of our population… but they are 100% of our future. We cannot afford to take life for granted in this way. We cannot afford to put our society at constant risk from these deviants.

And for those that wail about the costs of putting ankle bracelets on every violent or sexual offender, I offer this following food for thought. How much will it cost to monitor these predators via ankle bracelet vs. what it will NOW cost us to prosecute, imprison, handle 10 years worth of appeals and finally (hopefully!) execute this man. I’ve read that it costs states millions of dollars annually to handle prisoners on death row…. millions of dollars annually. That sure would buy a lot of bracelets and equipment and manpower.

So here’s the question for the ages… is an ounce of prevention better than a pound of cure? Sure seems like we are a society all about the cure, and very little about the prevention.

Related posts:

1. Florida now to monitor sex offenders via GPS!
2. This is beyond disturbing
3. WXXL Employee Arrested In Internet Sex Sting
4. Simply Tragic
5. Jones High School