Changing the Atmosphere

Patt Morrison is one of the few reasons I occasionally read the LA Times. Her columns are always California directed, but they also resonate with national and even world issues. Yesterday's column was no different. Her subject is Prop 83, a ballot measure which is rather draconian in its proposed treatment of sex offenders. It requires that such felons live at least 2,000 from a school and that they wear GPS bracelets so that law enforcement knows where they are every minute of the day.

I USED TO THINK something was wrong with Iowa. So many Iowans left the Hawkeye State to come here. Maybe it was all that corn. Maybe it was the early presidential caucuses.

Now Iowans must think there's something wrong with us. They warned us — Iowa's lawmen, prosecutors, even a victims' rights group. Don't pass Proposition 83, they said. It's a mug's game. You think it protects people from registered sex offenders, but it doesn't. It'll backfire on you.

We still went for 83. Went for it? We practically got engaged to it. It got more votes than Arnold Schwarzenegger.

But even 5 million votes can't change the fact that Proposition 83 kind of sucks. Just as Iowa told us. Iowa knows, because it passed a similar law, and now it wishes it hadn't.

...The good parts of 83 aren't original, they're already law: Certain sex offenders can't legally hang out near parks or schools, and high-risk parolees have to wear GPS devices. As for the original parts — such as not living within 2,000 feet of a school or park and wearing GPS monitors for life — they're not good. Proposition 83 is so awkwardly written that a court must decide whether it applies just to newly paroled sex offenders or retroactively to all 85,000 of California's registered sex offenders. Proposition 83 could force them to sell their homes, perhaps leave their jobs.

Iowans thought more restrictions would make them safer. But unintended consequences have forced offenders into the countryside, into truck stops, cornfields — or completely "off our radar," as one lawman said. Some safety.

That's one of the problems of legislation by initiative: the laws are not carefully crafted, and they are filled with emotional buzz words in order to get voters' attention, and those same buzz words are then left to the judiciary to figure out. That's bad enough, but there is a more serious problem, one that we as a nation are facing on this and other important issues.

That's Iowa's problem. Here's mine: California's popular, front-running gubernatorial candidate should have had the guts to point all this out. Five million Californians might still have voted for 83, but they would have done so knowing more about its consequences. He didn't.

In Iowa, prosecutors have asked for fixes in the sex offender law. Nothing doing. Iowa state Sen. Larry McKibben told my colleague Jenifer Warren, "We live in a nasty political environment, and I certainly wouldn't have wanted to take a vote on something that somebody could turn into a direct-mail piece saying I was going soft on sex offenders."

Assemblyman Mark Leno of San Francisco has gotten a taste of this. The Democrat has consistently suggested alternatives, such as focusing on tougher penalties for the most dangerous sex offenders. For that, he was labeled "a danger to society" and, in a GOP press release, a "friend of molesters."

And there's the rub. As a society we've become so frightened of just about everything that we are willing to put up with second best (or worse) just to calm our fears, whether the action taken actually makes us safer or not. Prop 83 is nonsensical in its drafting and in its effect, but to oppose it would be to invite accusatory screams of "molester defender." I suspect that is why Mr. Schwartzenegger was silent on the issue, as was Mr. Angelides.

And that is how we, on the national level, got the Patriot Act ( versions 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0, each with its own whittling away of Constitutional protections)and a host of other national acts which have resulted in the loss of habeas corpus, privacy, and the right to be secure in our homes. To have voiced an opinion against such acts would have been labeled softness on terrorism, or, even worse, treason.

It's time this atmosphere changed. Perhaps with the results of the 11/07 election that will be possible. Yesterday, Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut introduced a bill that will haul that obscenity known as the Military Commissions Act of 2006 back before the Senate. This is the law that ripped away habeas corpus, legalized torture retroactively, and essentially cut the federally judiciary out of any meaningful oversight.

It's going to be long, hard slog to correct all of the evils of the past 5+ years, but now is as good a time as any to get started. We need to cleanse the atmosphere.

[Note: Thanks to Atrios for alerting me to this good news.]