Is There Help For Sex Offenders?

On March 26, 1999, six year old Opal Jo Jennings was abducted outside her grandparent’s home in Saginaw, Texas. The man responsible for Opal’s abduction and subsequent rape and murder was later revealed to be thirty year old Richard Lee Franks, a convicted child molester. Franks’ good behavior allowed him to be set on parole for a 1991 child molestation charge- a release that proved catastrophic to an innocent little girl and her family. In the same area, convicted killer and sexual predator Wesley Miller has been released several times over the past two decades under mandatory supervision. Each time being sent back to correctional facilities for refusal to attend treatment and was even convicted of stalking a Wichita Falls woman. Both men were release on good behavior and just required for monthly parole check-ins, nothing more. Is good behavior enough to send someone capable of such atrocities back into society? According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, sex offenders are four times more likely than non-sex offenders to be rearrested for a sexual crime. As a member of the Judiciary system presiding over Tarrant County, you should survey necessary precautions to prevent the release of sex offenders who quite frankly are not ready to be assimilated back into the general population. Prior to release, sex offenders should be required to transition from prison life to the real world through various psychiatric programs and supervised living facilities (which are less severe than that of prison) that exam their ability to return to society without incident.

Despite good behavior some sex offenders may exhibit, this one standard is not merely enough to allow offenders back onto the streets and into the lives of potential vic...

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...ial norms and laws - it is to help save someone’s mom, someone’s daughter, someone’s sister.

Regardless of price, opposition, or even ill feelings toward sex offenders, the program provides one certainty – change. By invoking the change, the chances of reoffending are decreased to zero. With the program in place sex offenders are drawn away from their desire to taint the innocence of those around them. The unsuspecting are spared from emotional and physical damages. Let’s not allow for the mistakes of the past that cost so many innocent lives from costing lives in the here, the now, the present. Voltaire once said “history consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions.” Why not let the program be an accumulated imaginative invention? Why not let the program help the lives of offenders and indirectly change the lives of those potentially at risk?