women against registry

Found this organization today. 

Women Against Registry gives a voice to the hundreds of thousands of innocent women and children who are being wrongly and unfairly punished because we have a family member who has been convicted of a sexual offense.  

We intend to provide clear and convincing evidence that America's excessive, unconscionable sexual offense registries are tearing our nation's families apart, making our communities less safe, violating our constitution, and wasting our tax dollars. 

Great goals! I love the focus on the other people who are injured by the sex offender registry laws.

where to go for help with an addiction to child porn?

Think about the position of someone addicted to child porn. He can't be online without that itch to see what's out there, to see if he can track down illegal images. He knows he could be caught; he almost certainly knows that he is wrong to look at them. He knows what people would say if they knew what he did with his time online.

The guilt and shame of his secret activities must be painful. I do not believe that most men (usually men, though not always) enjoy the guilt and shame, nor do they enjoy being in the grip of an addiction so abhorred. 

Alcoholics and drug addicts can go to AA or to treatment programs. In fact, once they decide to get treatment, family and friends are usually behind them, encouraging them to change their lives in a positive way! Not so for a child porn addict.

Where would a child porn addict go for help? The habit is not only shameful, it is illegal. He is a criminal. Going for help could result in his getting turned in to law enforcement by the minister, the counselor, the friend next door. We all know that crimes against children are to be reported immediately; we know that if we don't do that, we can be in trouble ourselves. Just ask the Catholic church how it went for them when they did not turn in priests accused of sexual abuse of children. 

I have asked several counselors whether a child porn addict could go for help for his addiction without getting turned in. Every single one of them answered that it was doubtful.

I wouldn't wish any kind of addiction on anyone but at least the druggies and drunks can go for help without worry that they will end up in prison for their addiction.

Because possessing and/or downloading child porn is illegal, it is difficult to get help to break the addiction. Until it is possible for child porn addicts to get help without the risk of being turned in, we will be imprisoning people who would have stopped long ago if only they could have found help.

protect the children

I know nothing about this case except for what is in the Huffington Post article. A man possessed child porn images and was sentenced to 111 years in prison, a sentence that was reduced to four years plus 12 years probation. The part that caught my eye:

While under probation, [this man] will not be able to visit any child under 18 without supervision, except with his three underage children...

This man has three underage children. Those children will not only have to grow up without their dad, they will have to endure whatever strange comments and judgments come to them about their father and about their family. All because he had pictures sick, criminal adults took of children. Pictures. He isn't accused of touching any children sexually. He had pictures. Pictures he should not have had, and he knew that. Pictures that would make nearly everyone else sick to look at, but only pictures nonetheless.


I know someone thinks they saved this man's children from whatever dastardly deeds he had in store--or perhaps someone thinks that man surely did more than the cops were able to prove. Too bad. In this country, we put people in prison for crimes we can prove they committed, not for those we fear they might commit. Or do we?


Laws against child porn are on the books to protect the children. Who is protecting this man's children? Law enforcement? Hardly. 

trustworthy? No.

Do you know that after law enforcement serves a search warrant, they aren't required to let you know whether they are going to press charges or not? We have been waiting for months and months, at first assuming that they would bring charges, and now wondering if they simply didn't find what they were looking for. It has been over nine months and we've heard nothing.

Our attorney tells us that there is no statute of limitations for this crime, so the prosecution could bring charges at any time...forever. They can simply hold our computers forever, with no need to tell us anything. So, they have our financial records, our family photos, and anything else we stored on computer. I have no confidence that they will keep track of our computers or our files; I have no confidence that they will treat the information found on the computers in a secure manner.

But it's law enforcement! They have rules to follow! I should trust them to treat our digital belongings with every care!

Remember this: The one thing I know for sure about these ICE agents is that they invaded my home with drawn guns. Everything else is just guessing.

send this book to your legislators!

Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow is an important book; more people should read it. At first, I was a bit put off by her assertion that mass incarceration is a method of keeping black people under control (as the Jim Crow laws were used) but there is much more to the book than that.

The facts are indisputable: the War on Drugs has affected black men disproportionately. While drug use is fairly evenly distributed across races, black men have borne the bigger burden of searches, prosecution and imprisonment. The War on Drugs has been a pointless exercise. Has it diminished the number of illegal drug users? Nope. Has it stopped drug-related crime? Nope. Prohibition has taught us nothing, evidently.

Her remedies include decriminalizing drugs and making drug treatment programs more easily available. I agree. She is eager to lay part of that on the government--the government should provide drug treatment programs--but I would rather leave that to the private sector. Putting the government in charge of these programs is a sure path to corruption. Not exactly the best environment for addicts who are hoping to live a better life.

Without the huge number of drug convictions populating our prisons, what will happen to the huge number of people who depend on prisons for their livelihood? Prison guards and administrators, investors in private prisons, law enforcement agencies (among others) will fight to keep their position, arguing against decriminalization. It is likely that another source of criminals will be found to keep these people employed and to keep the federal money flowing to law enforcement agencies.

Any idea which criminals are an easy pick and likely to fill the breach?

entrapment?

Law enforcement agencies operate websites with the intention of luring people who want access to illegal images. 

Since [this man] had “previously demonstrated an interest in obtaining child pornographic materials online,” he was tabbed to receive an unsolicited e-mail from an agent touting the undercover FBI web site. 

The website was designed to appeal to this particular interest, and to encourage someone to click the links.


How is this not entrapment? If the man had no way to find the website without an invitation from the FBI, then the FBI is the reason he tried to download child porn.

does a town of 23,000 need a tank for its police force?

This is how the Department of Homeland Security spends money.

Since the 1990s, the Pentagon has made military equipment available to local police departments for free or at steep discounts. This, along with drug war-related policies, has spurred a trend toward a more militarized domestic police force in America. Law enforcement and elected officials have argued for years that better-armed, high-powered police departments are needed to fight the war on drugs.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the war on terror has accelerated the trend toward militarization. Homeland Security hands out anti-terrorism grants to cities and towns, many specifically to buy military-grade equipment from companies like Lenco. In December, the Center for Investigative Reporting reported that Homeland Security grants totalled $34 billion, and went to such unlikely terrorism targets as Fargo, N.D.; Fon du Lac, Wisc.; and Canyon County, Idaho. The report noted that because of the grants, defense contractors that long served the Pentagon exclusively have increasingly turned looked to police departments, hoping to tap a "homeland security market" expected to reach $19 billion by 2014.

I suppose it is possible that a small town like Keene NH (or Fargo or any other town) could be the target of terrorists and when that happens, it would be nice if the town had a tank and a store of bazooka and flame throwers to stop the terrorists. In the meantime, though, they have this Bearcat sitting there. Unused equipment bought with taxpayer money is not a happy discovery. Much better to use the equipment when possible.

This situation--Bearcat needing to be used--will inevitably lead to local police forces using too much force.

Hurray for the protesters in Keene, putting a stop to the purchase.