Program Uses GPS To Track Sex Offenders

43 sex offenders in Pennsylvania's Allegheny County are wearing GPS monitoring devices as part of a pilot program designed to keep track of their movements. If the offender moves into an "exclusion zone," police are called. “Exclusion zones for example [are] schools, daycares, playgrounds, facilities where children congregate for those sex offenders,” John Hudson, a security consultant, said. “We’ve identified in their red zones. If an offender with a device goes into one of the red zones, an exclusion zone, we’ll be notified immediately.”

Uhh..

[Antisyzygy]

I don't really understand why people like this aren't kept in prison. If they have a high chance of committing another crime, enough so this device is warranted, why would you not keep them in prison to protect people? Why not just give every criminal something like this and completely get rid of prison. If you are a violent offender and your blood pressure goes up along with your adrenaline, the cops are called. If you are a thief and you go to the store, a cop is called. It just seems ridiculous that they spend more time and money locking up nonviolent offenders when the only thing our prison system in the US is good at is isolating people from society.

Re:I retract my earlier statement

[Omnifarious]

We treat them differently because as a society we do not want to think about this sort of crime at all. We don't want to understand it. It's scary and frightening and we would prefer to class those who commit these sorts of crimes as monsters than trying to understand why and what might be broken that would cause these sorts of things to happen.

I also have a theory that every generation has a way of trying to class a group of males as totally unfit. Men and women are born in approximately equal numbers, but in fact we are somewhat polygynous in our actual behavior. This requires getting a large number of males either killed, or out of the dating pool.

That last theory I realize is highly speculative and somewhat trollish. :-)

Re:What "type" of sex offender?

[rjstanford]

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2007/09/11/us-sex-offender-laws-may-do-more-harm-good [hrw.org] is a good example of some decent commentary, FWIW. Its sad to me when the threat of someone taking away our right to large-capacity rifle magazines after a political shooting gets a national outcry, but the idea of lifelong movement tracking of people who may have committed victimless misdemeanors decades ago is silently accepted. Probably because anyone who comes out against it is afraid that they'll be branded with the "pro-child-molestor" label... and put on the list.

Not false.

[SuperBanana]

"Sex crime" includes everything from pissing on the side of a building in an alley, to being underage and having consensual sex. Possession of certain pornography counts. Etc.

The wikipedia article you link to, in fact, goes to great lengths to cover all the ridiculous things that make someone considered to be a "sex offender".

Let's also not forget that rape crimes have the highest false-accusal rate of any category of crime; an astounding number of "victims" later admit they filed complaints only for revenge for something else. In fact, the false accusal rate is greater by a factor of ten (I'm too lazy to dig up the FBI and Wikipedia links, sorry.)

So, no shit the recidivism rate is low...most of them are innocent in the first place.