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iPhone App Tracks Sex Offenders
The Narrative Fallacy writes "All 50 states in the US require the 50,000 people convicted of sexual offenses to sign a register so that their whereabouts can be tracked and monitored. The Telegraph reports that now users of the iPhone Offender Locator application can search for sex offenders living nearby a friend or colleague whose address is stored in their Apple iPhone address book, or they can type in a street address to generate a list of convicted sex offenders in the local area. 'Offender Locator gives everyone the ability to find out if registered sex offenders live in their area,' says the application developer, ThinAir Wireless, on its iTunes page. 'Knowledge equals safety. They know where you and your family are...now it's time to turn the tables so that you know where they live and can make better decisions about where to allow your kids to play.' Offender Locator uses the iPhone's built-in GPS to pinpoint the user's location, and then provide a map listing sex offenders in the local area. Tapping on one of the 'pins' dropped on to the map brings up a photograph of the offender, as well as their address, date of birth and list of convictions."
You consider 'dangerous' as a binary: Either you are and you should be locked up, or you are not and you should have all the rights that everyone else has. The real world is just not that simple...
Agreed, he over simplified "dangerous" into a binary attribute, and it isn't that simple. However...
an in-between form (you are not in prisson but you get watched very carefully) may allow offenders to return to freedom at least in some sense, while the higher probability of this person to commit a crime again is also addressed.
The "watched very closely" thing can be worse than jail. A buddy of mine is guilty of having sex with a 16 year old when he was 18 (and a senior in high school), and spent time in prison for it. Now that he is out, he is being "watched very closely", just in case he decides to have sex with any girls only two years younger than him (???).
However, that isn't the bad part. The bad part is that when he moved, he was forced to go door to door and tell people he was a sex offender. In under a year, he has had his house vandalized three times (people throw rocks through his windows or spray paint stuff like "RAPIST" on the front of his house). He is harassed on a fairly regular basis, despite his trying to explain the circumstances of his conviction. People in the neighborhood stare and point at him like he's a lesser form of life -- I'm honestly surprised no idiot redneck has tried to play superhero and run him over in the street.
I'm starting to turn red as I'm get angrier and angrier, sitting here thinking about how fucking stupid people can be. When we allow arbitrary laws to label people as "sex offenders" under an utterly ridiculous set of rules, and then encourage people to outcast those "sex offenders" with little iPhone apps like this, we lose our humanity. We no longer rely on common sense to define our morals -- we let laws and toys do it for us. It's nothing short of absurd.
Oh, and should you ever have a daughter, they come without the right developement tools so they may very well end up a little different than you hoped them to be.
I hope with every fiber of my existence that my daughter is never harmed by some depraved rapist. However, with that same energy I also hope that the existing laws will be reformed dramatically (and soon) so that my son will never be labeled an outcast because he drank too much and peed on a tree.