View source for The new disappeared - Sex offenders, civil confinement and the resurrection of evil

One of the first acts of New York's newly-elected "liberal" governor, Eliot Spitzer, was to secure passage of the nation's most far-reaching civil confinement law. With its passage, New York joined nineteen other states that permit the continued imprisonment of sex offenders after they have completed their prison sentence. These inmates are defined as suffering a mental disorder and, thus, posing the threat of committing new crimes upon release. Civil confinement permits the state to transform a criminal sentence with a specified duration into an indeterminate life sentence. Convicted sex offenders are joining a growing list of what can only be called "the new disappeared." Latin American dictatorships (under CIA and U.S. military supervision) pioneered "disappearance" as a government practice to deal with radical opposition during the tumultuous '70s and '80s. Today, both U.S. federal and state governments are instituting a less barbaric, but no less effective, means to ensure the disappearance of a variety of unacceptable citizens. In effect, once a person is convicted, sentenced and imprisoned, he or she can be disappeared from civil society for life. [...]<br>
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The new disappeared also includes those swept up in the CIA practice of "extraordinary rendition" or identified as "enemy combatants" and imprisoned in the American gulag, Guantánamo; those, like Sami Al-Arian, the Palestinian educator, and Josh Wolf, the indie video journalist (recently released), being held for an indeterminate sentence for contempt of a grand jury subpoena to testify under a questionable (if illegal) order; those, like Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier, the former Black Panther journalist and American Indian Movement activist, respectively, serving a life sentence or are on death row with no likelihood of release; those given extraordinarily punitive prison sentences reaching to 100 and 200 and even 900 years; and the nearly 6 million ex-felons and those awaiting trial who have been disenfranchised from civil society. America is practicing disappearance with a bureaucrat's smirk. [...]<br>
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Although the current Christian conservative, get-tough climate can make the fixation on sex offenders appear as a joke, such offenders are really not a laughing matter. According to CSOM, sex offenders commit many crimes for 16 years prior to finally getting caught. At yearend 2005, approximately 2.3 million people were imprisoned by federal and state authorities throughout the country. At yearend 2003 (the last available data), sex offenders accounted for approximately 12 percent (61,300 rapists [most of them aren't rapist...] and 87,500 other sex assaults) of the 1.3 million of those incarcerated in state prisons; the federal system does not separate out sex offenders. [...]<br>
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Today's evil is symbolized by the terrorist and the sex offender. These "evil doers" have become highly politicized, each serving to instill fear whether of international or local threats. [...]<br>
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In Pennsylvania, Gregory Benner, who had in 1994 pleaded guilty to sexually abusing an underage girl, was recently arrested for possessing more than 115,000 pornographic images of minors; he was charged for 2,237 of them and each image representing an individual criminal count; local officials believe he could be sentenced to more than 900 years. This trend is in line with last year's Supreme Court decision to decline to review the 200 year sentence that Arizona handed down to Morton Berger; the state imposed separate, consecutive 10 year sentences for each of the twenty pornographic images of minors in Berger's possession. [...] It is a politically-dug black hole that more and more Americans are being disappeared into.<br>
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<i>source: Article 'The New Disappeared - Sex Offenders, Civil Confinement and the Resurrection of Evil' by David Rosen; www.counterpunch.org/rosen05102007.html; Counterpunch; 10 May 2007</i>

[[Category:David Rosen]]
[[Category:USA]]
[[Category:Eliot Spitzer]]
[[Category:Civil commitment‏‎]]
[[Category:CIA]]
[[Category:Sami Al-Arian]]
[[Category:Josh Wolf]]
[[Category:Mumia Abu-Jamal]]
[[Category:Leonard Peltier]]
[[Category:Gregory Benner]]
[[Category:Prison]]
[[Category:Gevangenis]]
[[Category:Child pornography]]
[[Category:Kinderporno]]
[[Category:Morton Berger]]