The Rapist Justice

I was raised with the same knowledge about our world that you were. It was warm in the summer, and cold in december. Every year in spring I get one less hour of sleep, and every year in fall, I can drink for one more hour at the bar. If my cat gets stuck in a tree, someone will help me get her down, and if I do something against the law, I'll pay for it. We are taught from day one that every crime has a punishment, and the worse the crime, the deeper the shit you'll be in. You never need to be taught which crimes are worse than others, thats something that for whatever reason we all seem to be able to agree on with relative consistency. Steal a chocolate bar, you won't be allowed in the store anymore. Walk off with $5,000 worth of crap from wal-mart and you might end up picking up trash for the government. Hit your little brother for turning off the tv, dad might hit you. Hit that clever prick at the bar for turning on your girlfriend, and he might hit you with an assault charge. Drive fast and you pay. Drive drunk and you have to stay home for six months. Lose control of yourself one day, and shoot three people in a mall, and your going to jail for a long time. Sexually assault a child 70 times over a six month period along with committing multiple assaults on five other children over the course of a few years?

Hows 6 years sound? We'll get you out on parole in 4, and within 6 years of your conviction you can be back on the streets in Edmonton, luring ten year old girls into your van with promises of ice cream and kittens.

When something like this happens, people are outraged. We want to know how in god names did this happen? How can we have a convicted sex offender on the streets in our neighborhood without us knowing? Right? But why aren't we asking the questions we should be asking? Why oh why is there a convicted sex offender walking around on the streets!? Im not a scientist, or a psychologist but I've heard it told to me dozens of times, sex offenders almost always re-offend. Its almost a dead lock that Rusty McDick, who spent his early twenties fecking up little girls and boys lives, will go right back to his sick and horrible hobbies once given a long enough leash.

I think about the pain of being hurt by someone you trust, or how awful it feels to be powerless to help yourself. Its impossible for me to understand the destruction and pain someone feels from the fallout of sexual abuse, but when I hear about these crimes I remember these feelings, and imagine them magnified dozens of times and it completely fills me with rage. Our justice system is in place to protect us from ourselves. It is built to make sure that stronger people can't hurt weaker people, and evil people can't inflict pain on innocent people. There is nothing more defenseless and innocent than a child. A child can be lured by pictures of kittens and ice cream into a strange mans van, and immediately her life can be changed for the worse. Forever.

You read about it happening all the time. Sex offender gets out of jail. Sex offender re-offends. Sex offender goes back to jail. Another little girl or boy gets to grow up with the memory of being raped by Family Friend A, or Pastor B, or whoever else. Why doesn't the punishment fit the crime? Why are we so slow to re-act to this horrible trend? If I shoot somebody in the street tomorrow I go to jail for life, and some innocent person's life is over. If I sexually assault 6 children, one of them 70 god damn fucking times, I go to jail for four fucking years, and then I can get back to business, assaulting more kids over the weekend. Its time for people to realize whats going on. The problem isn't that you weren't made aware of this sicko's presence in your community. The problem is he was allowed back into ANY community ANYWHERE. You sexually assault ANYBODY, and you should be spending the rest of your life in jail, and based on what I know about prisons that shouldn't be a very long life. Its time for society to stop protecting people at the expense of being able to protect ourselves. 

Its time for the justice system to revamp the way they deal with sex offenders. It's time they were dealt with the way experts in the field have been saying they should be dealt with for years. If they cannot be reabilitated, then they cannot ever be released back into society. What we have right now is a classic case of people in power not wanting to shut the door too far for fear of being unfair to one person, but by not punishing sex offenders appropriately, we are constantly punishing more and more innocent victims of the horrible disgusting crime. If someone commits a crime, we should err on the side of over punishing them, and why not? They are the god damn rapist, not us! Why the hell should we be worried about sending them away for too long, when the damage they have done to their victims is LIFELONG.