The moral situation around sex-offences does seem to lead to some weird and unpleasant situations. This reminds me of the Julia Tuttle Causeway "colony", a group of sex offenders who were released but forced to live under a highway because they were legally not allowed within a certain radius of any school and this was the only spot in the state that would allow them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Tuttle_Causeway_sex_offe...
Isn't it odd that you can murder someone, do 20 years, and have paid your debt to society, while a sex offense follows you around for the rest of your life. The punishment does not fit the crime in some cases.
People often murder because of who the victim is, but they sexually attack because of what the person is.
There are contradictions both ways, however.
For example, a rapist attacks a man they met at a club, generally that's because they're looking for a body to use sexually. There are lots of people with those bodies. When they leave prison they can still find many bodies to use sexually; the chance of recidivism is relatively high.
A woman kills her partner after years of abuse, when she leaves prison that person no longer exists and she's unlikely to ever be in a similar situation. The chance of recidivism is relatively low.
TLDR You can't murder the same person again; you can assault another person who fits a general profile.
If you want to hear some stories like this, take a Greyhound bus out of a prison town. On release day, the prisoners get/acquire a bus ticket back to wherever they need to be. So you'll see a group of people wearing the same drab, ill-fitting clothing, carrying their only life possessions in a shoebox. You get talking to these people and it's pretty clear that while many would like to escape the system, they don't know how. The stories are nearly universal - terrible home life as children, lack of support network, poverty, drugs, limited education or training. And, with a record, you are spot on that it is hard for them to find meaningful work.
The lack of a support network is absolutely a killer. I've been trying to help a friend who's a recovering drug addict with a felony record and with very little family support, and it's brutally hard.
The title is misleading. There’s 9-ish residents that live on McNeil, and they all work for the prison. Buddy of mine used to date the wardens daughter. Had to ride the prison ferry to their dope-ass house that was on sex offender island
Was this before 2011 because the article states: "Along the way, the bus passes an overgrown baseball field and boarded-up houses, remnants of the prison employees and their families who called the island home until the prison closed in 2011"
The article itself claims "McNeil Island, nestled in Puget Sound, is unpopulated except for the 214 people who live at the special commitment center, a facility for former prison inmates."
> New York State was the most expensive, with an average cost of $60,000 per prison inmate. [New York City] paid $167,731 to feed, house and guard each inmate last year, according to a study the Independent Budget Office released this week.
The governor proposed free community college for inmates, citing drastic reductions in recidivism rates - it would've paid for itself many times over - but voters flipped out.
Food, shelter, plumbing, facilities upkeep, medical/psychological care, and very high security costs? That really isn't a surprising figure. Prison are incredibly expensive. It's a great argument for minimizing prison populations to only people that pose immediate threats to others and focusing as much as possible on reducing recidivism.
I clicked the link to the story, and read the article's title which is, "On Washington's McNeil Island, the only residents are 214 dangerous sex offenders"
It is kinda surprising, for only 200 people, that they don't shut it down and ship them to the state prison in Walla Walla, where violent offenders (death row, before the governor halted that) go.
Seems sort of bizarre that the review hearings are done in front of a jury, rather then some sort of panel of people with relevant expertise. The person has already been found guilty, so there isn't really any judgement call to make as far as the facts are concerned.
The cynic in me thinks this is done just because no-one wants to take the responsibility of releasing these people, since if even one goes on to commit a sensational crime, the person who made the call to release them will get pilloried by the public (and probably, by their own conscience). So the jury provides a way to pass on the responsibility for the call.
> A phallometric study indicated that men who are more homophobic show greater penile arousal to stimuli depicting gay sex than do less homophobic men.
An interesting tidbit if there's any real scientific value to this device.
They also note that the physical arousal may be entirely due to anxiety; and that the used definition of homophobia seems not to be accurate (ie not a phobia).
FWIW there's a very important distinction between physical arousal and sexual attraction - ignoring that can be a source of great shame for some men (those who are abused/assaulted for example).
I used to hate riding on the bus (because I'd get bullied), but I also commonly got erections on the bus (the vibrations); so was I really bus-sexual ...
An important point. I'm sure many young males might be classified scholar-sexual under similar classification methods due to similarly innocuous erections during class.
One of the more practical challenges as an EMS provider nearby is that it is relatively "isolated", requiring ferry or boat transport for sick patients as there is no hospital on the island. This requires staffing challenges for escorting etc, and the logistics of transport.
On more than one occasion, delays in getting to definitive emergency care have resulted in liability for the State, including heart attack victims who took to long to get to the hospital.
Totally not on-topic but the attorney's name -- Kelly Canary -- is unusual enough that I googled it. Is she the former lead singer of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickless ?
> People may have heard of Kelly Canary because of her work Seattle grunge–era bands such as Dickless and Earth, but she now spends her days more often in front of a jury instead of a crowd of concert goers. From bartender at the Cha Cha to staff attorney for the Innocence Project here in Washington, she has led an unconventional life.
Incidentally, for those not familiar with early Earth, she is a guest on their debut EP, Extra-Capsular Extraction, along with a friend of the band you might have heard of named Kurt Cobain.
Yep. Some time ago I did some research on which was the most remote place on Earth, to travel just for the checkmark of "yeah I've done it". Pitcairn Island was one of the top contenders, noped it out of the list after learning about the stuff that happens there.
