My fetish: The Economist

Illustration by Noma Barr for The Economist.

First, I must please ask all of you to never *ever* tell The Economist about goatse.

Next, when you get a chance, do not miss their incredible article Sex laws: Unjust and ineffective (thanks, KuraFire). Before giving you a snip and letting the piece unwind itself and leave you with your jaw in your lap, let me just say that I have an Economist fetish. I’ve had it for years. Whenever I fly, and sometimes when I don’t, I pick up a copy. And I completely devour it from cover to cover, even if there are items I already know about, and I can’t put it down once I’ve picked it up. Also, I’ll add that Sex laws digs deep into a story I picked up in the Chronicle back in January (Kids Charged for Child Porn: When Teens Make Their Own Porn, Who’s Being Exploited?), and it’s a cornerstone in my year-in-the-researching SF Chronicle column this week. Snip:

America has pioneered the harsh punishment of sex offenders. Does it work?

(…) Every American state keeps a register of sex offenders. California has had one since 1947, but most states started theirs in the 1990s. Many people assume that anyone listed on a sex-offender registry must be a rapist or a child molester. But most states spread the net much more widely. A report by Sarah Tofte of Human Rights Watch, a pressure group, found that at least five states required men to register if they were caught visiting prostitutes. At least 13 required it for urinating in public (in two of which, only if a child was present). No fewer than 29 states required registration for teenagers who had consensual sex with another teenager. And 32 states registered flashers and streakers.

Because so many offences require registration, the number of registered sex offenders in America has exploded. As of December last year, there were 674,000 of them, according to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. If they were all crammed into a single state, it would be more populous than Wyoming, Vermont or North Dakota. As a share of its population, America registers more than four times as many people as Britain, which is unusually harsh on sex offenders. America’s registers keep swelling, not least because in 17 states, registration is for life.

Georgia has more than 17,000 registered sex offenders. Some are highly dangerous. But many are not. And it is fiendishly hard for anyone browsing the registry to tell the one from the other. The Georgia Sex Offender Registration Review Board, an official body, assessed a sample of offenders on the registry last year and concluded that 65% of them posed little threat. Another 30% were potentially threatening, and 5% were clearly dangerous. The board recommended that the first group be allowed to live and work wherever they liked. The second group could reasonably be barred from living or working in certain places, said the board, and the third group should be subject to tight restrictions and a lifetime of monitoring. A very small number “just over 100” are classified as “predators”, which means they have a compulsion to commit sex offences. When not in jail, predators must wear ankle bracelets that track where they are.

Despite the board’s findings, non-violent offenders remain listed and subject to a giant cobweb of controls. One rule, championed by Georgia’s House majority leader, banned them from living within 1,000 feet of a school bus stop. This proved unworkable. Thomas Brown, the sheriff of DeKalb county near Atlanta, mapped the bus stops in his patch and realised that he would have to evict all 490 of the sex offenders living there. Other than the bottom of a lake or the middle of a forest, there was hardly anywhere in Georgia for them to live legally. (…read more, economist.com)