Stop Sex Offenders
On Tuesday, November 10th of this year, a young girl by the name of Shaniya Davis was taken right from her home in Fayetteville, North Carolina. She was then taken thirty miles to a hotel where she was raped by a 29 year old man, and then deprived of oxygen until she lay dead in that same room. Later that day the rapist and murderer, Mario McNeill, just dumped the now deceased girl on the side of a rural road as if she were a piece of old trash. Shaniya Davis was just five years old when these atrocities occurred, and she will not be around to celebrate her sixth birthday.
The real problem here is that cases like this happen so often that it can often make you want to lose faith in humanity. It can make us all forget that the people in this world are inherently good, there are just some people out there that go out of their way to ruin the lives of honest, innocent people. Some of these rapists and murderers are targeting our nation’s youth and abusing them for as long as they can get away with it. When they finally do come face to face with the law, they serve their time and then they are right back out there, committing the same crimes and making neighborhoods unsafe for children to step outside. Is this really the way we want to continue on? More importantly, do the kids of the United States not deserve more?
In cases of repeat sex offenders, we as a people need to recognize that the current system is not working properly and then take responsibility for changing this broken system. When somebody commits a crime of a sexual nature for the first time, going to prison for any number of years is not going to magically make them productive members of society. According to reports, the chances of a sex offender coming out from behind bars and going back to their previous ways is anywhere from 52-80%, and those are no small numbers. As much as we would like to believe so, prison simply is not rehabilitating sex offenders in a significant way.
There are talks now all around the country about whether repeat sex offenders should be given the death penalty for their crimes. What we should be concentrating on is keeping these people from having a chance to repeat their offenses in the first place. Why should we wait until these people go out and harm even more children and ruin more lives when we can try to stop them before they even have a chance. Technology has advanced quite a bit in the last decade, and we may be able to keep tabs on past sex offenders in ways that were not possible in previous years. We should be aware of who these dangerous individuals are and we should know what they are doing, but we should also keep their safety in mind as well. For example, if it were mandatory for criminals to have their sex offender status stated on their license plates, they would be harassed and assaulted on a regular basis, and that is not the goal.
What could work, however, is some type of tracking device or GPS that would keep police alerted of their location. If a past sex offender comes within a few hundred feet of a school, playground, or anywhere else that children frequent where these criminals do not belong, authorities would be aware of the situation and able to respond to it immediately. The way that this can be done is by developing a way to place tracking devices or GPS units onto license plates or other necessary parts of a vehicle, or creating a special driver’s license that incorporates GPS technology. There are currently ankle bracelets that are worn by those that are under house arrest, perhaps an unobtrusive variant of that technology can be used. Keeping our children safe is a top priority, and we can have the assurance that convicted sex offenders will not be committing the same crimes, we just have to come together and call for action.
The sex offender registry, while it is a great idea, is just not doing enough to solve the problem. Every day that we hold off on making these simple measures a reality, there are more and more children that are being molested, raped, and even murdered at the hands of sexual deviants. We should be spreading the word that past sex offenders are not being surveilled in the proper way and that it is up to us to keep our citizens safe. If you agree with these sentiments, then please help us spread the word. The legislators should be hearing about what their constituents have to say about their unhappiness with the current system. Young children like Shaniya Davis should have a chance at living a normal life, and none of us want tragedies like these to occur again.
