DoubtingThomas wrote:Res Ipsa wrote:Because there are multiple considerations at play in these cases. Breach of trust is one of them. The constitutional freedom of speech is another. Criminalizing racist speech almost certainly is prohibited under the Constitution.
I think uou are missing the point. So if a teacher psychologically harms a student by insulting him how would that not be a breach of trust? Is a breach of trust only when it involves sex? Even thought 17 years old is above the legal age.
Res Ipsa wrote:It looks like an interesting collection of essays. I'll have to give it a read. I don't think that one has to believe that sex is an abomination to conclude that teachers who ____ students should do some prison time.
I wonder if other countries arrest teachers who have sex with students that are old enough to legally consent. Please read the book, you will find it very interesting.
I don't think anyone should be homeless for the rest of his life.
Many sex offenders end up homeless. The teachers will likely be added to sex offenders.
Hey DT,
I read the material you linked. It's actually not a book -- it's the introduction to a collection of essays. I might pick up a copy -- sounds interesting.
I'm not sure I buy the thesis of the book, given that the introduction starts by listing all the ways sexual freedom has expanded over the past few decades. Rather than an overall war on sex, I came away from the introduction feeling like it was more of a number of discrete circumstances in which the way society deals with sex has become increasingly dysfunctional. For example, if the introduction is correct and the main effect of human trafficking laws has been to punish sex workers, then that's a problem we should deal with. Similarly, the whole notion of labeling teenagers who sext pictures to each other as sex offenders is, in my opinion, insane. At this point, having read only the introduction, I'm not buying into the framing.
The introduction is very good at picking out extreme examples of what appears to be injustice and highlighting them. Are they representative? I don't know. I hope the articles themselves would shed some light on that.
Climbing up to 60,000 feet on this issue, I strongly believe that the rate we throw people into prison is crazy. I think the place to start with that is non-violent drug crimes. I heard a republican congress critter talk about prison reform to move more toward rehabilitation, which I hope is a good sign that the pendulum is swinging back from an extreme emphasis on punishment.
Maybe reform is needed in the area of sentencing for sex crimes. I'm aware that there are cases that seem very unjust on their facts, but a I've explained, that's a very difficult problem to deal with in our system. Handing back to judges a little more discretion in sentencing would, I think, help reduce the occurrence of those extremes. Otherwise, pardons and commutation of sentences are all we have.
I don't know what the statistics are on how often people convicted of sex crimes become homeless. Elimination of or reforms to sex offender registries would likely help reduce whatever rate that is. It may be more effective to reduce the problem by addressing homelessness in general rather than one category of homeless folks. I don't have a good enough grasp of the facts to figure that out.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951