Risk: The science and politics of fear

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Having warned of a threat, politicians must also come up with new ways to deal with it. In one month in 2006, the Louisiana state legislature passed 14 laws targeting sex offenders (an output one state governor justified on the grounds that 'every time you turn on the news, some kid is getting abducted, raped, and murdered').

But after giving first offenders an automatic 25-year minimum sentence; after passing laws that allow for offenders who have served their sentence to be imprisoned indefinitely if they are deemed dangerous; after ordering released offenders to register and making their names, faces, addresses, and places of employment available on the Internet; after barring offenders from many forms of work; after banning them from living within 1,000 feet of schools, parks, and so many other places that they are often rendered homeless and driven out of town; after requiring released offenders to wear satellite tracking devices for the rest of their lives - what's left?

It's a dilemma. ... In the 2006 gubernatorial race in Georgia, one candidate - the lieutenant-governor - called for a crackdown on Internet luring. That put his opponent - the governor - in a bind. He couldn't simply second the proposal. So the following day, the governor announced that if he were re-elected he would authorise juries to sentence child molesters to death.

source: From the book 'Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear' by Dan Gardner (p13); Quote from online book 'Notes from Another Country' not by Brian Rothery; www.inquisition21.com/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=22; 10 April 2009; Book Gardner: London: Virgin Books Ltd.; 2008