Wednesday, February 15, 2012

family sentence

Is prison the best way to punish someone for looking at illegal images? That takes the father away from the family and exposes the whole family to speculation about the extent of our involvement with porn. Isolating him from society seems like a perfect way to encourage him to re-offend. Social isolation is what sent him to porn in the first place.

When you learn that someone is into child porn, if your first reaction is, "That's sick," congratulations. Yes, it IS sick. There is something wrong with someone who can look at those images and find any reason to return to them. Do sick people belong in prison?

Do we send them to prison because they looked at illegal images or do we send them to prison because we fear what they might do?

Without their father, what happens to children in these families? I suspect that the children are more vulnerable to sexual pressure from others. Perhaps from assuming that the children know more than they do about sex, or from assuming that children who have a dad in prison, bad characters may think these children are fair game. I don't know. In all my research, I have found nothing about this. That there is no research on this is not comforting.

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