Safer Deals: The Parents — While Child Predators Walk, Marijuana Consumers Nailed

While Child Predators Walk, Marijuana Consumers Nailed

DENTON For those of you who retain faith in our justice system, it may shock you to learn that my hometown of Denton, Texas is home to dozens of predators convicted of sex crimes against children 13 and younger, all the way down to age four, who never served a single day in jail. Some of these rapists have been convicted of multiple offenses against multiple children. This same dynamic is occurring across our nation.

Sit with that a moment. The system that sentences prostitutes, vandalists, and marijuana consumers to jail might release a convicted child rapist right back into your neighborhood as if personal property and morality were more important than public safety, and pilferers and potheads were more threatening than perverted predators.

This disparity is not for lack of resources. The United States leads the world in incarceration rates. Thanks to Draconian penalties for consensual crimes (implemented in the name of “protecting the children”), we lock up more of our population than Iraq, China, Iran, and North Korea. Yet many of our judges go easy on child rapists.

Complacency in the face of evil is inexcusable. Children are being abducted, raped, videotaped for the perverse pleasure of predators, tortured, and murdered. Last year in Florida, a beautiful little girl named Jessica Lunsford was attacked by a previously convicted molester who was set free by the courts to enter her bedroom, abduct her, sexually assault her repeatedly, and bury her alive in her neighbor’s yard.

While Florida law enforcement officials failed to properly monitor and control the convicted predators in their communities, they had plenty of resources to set up reverse marijuana stings, dispatching officers to try and sell small bags of the outlawed herb to strangers on the street. It appears that inciting petty misdemeanors takes priority over preventing violent felonies. Jessica’s father Mark Lunsford, who has spent the past year traveling the country, tirelessly fighting for changes in the law, asked, “Where are our priorities as a nation? Where are our values? Sometimes it seems like we don’t value anything, least of all the children.”

As if public safety weren’t enough reason to prioritize violent crimes against children, there is also the question of justice. Our judicial system is partially based on a precept that punishment should fit the crime, so the victim’s perspective must be taken into account. Many sexual abuse survivors will contend with depression, anxiety, nightmares, insomnia, identity confusion, substance abuse, social and sexual alienation, self-mutilation, and suicidal tendencies. Child abuse is a crime against humanity, and it deserves more than a slap on the wrist.

Predators are like domestic terrorists in our own backyards, targeting the most vulnerable members of our society. The fact that our system is failing to protect children should make us sick at heart, angry in spirit, and most importantly, active. A national judicial scandal of this magnitude should cause massive political reverberations as people elect to replace the legislators, district attorneys and judges who lack the insight or the concern to prioritize public safety.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the national media to cover this issue. Pundits repeatedly reported that a Vermont judge sentenced an admitted child rapist (his victim was six years old, with assa