How far is too far in tracking sex offenders?

Georgia has enacted a law that’s stretching the limits of what civil liberties we as a society are willing to take away from those who have committed the most heinous of crimes short of murder – sexual abuse or assault.

A Georgia law going into effect [today] will require that all sex offenders not simply turn over their email addresses and screen names to authorities—which goes back to 2006—but all their passwords as well.

 

Georgia is one of 15 states requiring sex offenders to give their email addresses, screen names and "other internet handles" to authorities, and now the second (after Utah) to force them to give up their passwords as well, giving authorities unlimited, unfettered access to monitor their email and other internet activities.

State Senator Cecil Staton told MSNBC, "We limit where they can live, we make their information available on the Internet. To some degree, we do invade their privacy...But the feeling is, they have forfeited, to some degree, some privacy rights."

Sex offenders usually don’t get cured by their time in jail. In fact, there’s an almost 50/50 chance they will be arrested AGAIN for something within 36 months of incarceration:

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Within 3 years following their 1994 state prison release, 5.3 percent of sex offenders (men who had committed rape or sexual assault) were rearrested for another sex crime, the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) announced today. If all crimes are included, 43 percent of sex offenders were rearrested for various offenses.

Some think Georgia’s going too far. Personally, I’m all for chemical castration of anyone convicted of child sex abuse of anyone under the age of 13. And don’t get me started on the treatment of juvenile offenders and their precious civil liberties. They are in your children’s schools, and not only are you not being told, neither are the teachers. At least in Wicomico County, they're not.