Trust me no tattoo is needed. Pedophiles are a large target of violence in prisons
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I find quite a powerful voice in Steinbeck’s discussion of monsters.
I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Some you can see, misshapen and
horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies; some are born with no arms, no legs, some with three arms,
some with tails or mouths in odd places. They are accidents and no one’s fault, as used to be thought.
Once they were considered the visible punishment for concealed sins.
And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The
face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical
monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?
Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or a less degree. As a child may be
born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience. A man who
loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust himself to the lack, but one born without
arms suffers only from people who find him strange. Having never had arms, he cannot miss them.
Sometimes when we are little we imagine how it would be to have wings, but there is no reason to
suppose it is the same feeling birds have. No, to a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since
everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no
visible thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must
seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a
variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.
emphasis added
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“I used to be a young pedophile like you. Now I’m an old pedophile like me! Two weeks community service.”
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Both need bones broken. All of them.
Not from that guy apparently.
More and more, when I read the news, this keeps popping into my head, because apparently it’s a frequent judicial response:
Although on the outrage scale, it all pales in comparison to the Columbian extraditions the NYTimes did an article about recently. The right wing paramilitaries the US set up to fight the leftists turned into major drugs exporters to the US, so now that the conflict is over, the US is having them extradited to the US to face drugs charges. The problem being, theses guys committed crimes against humanity that they’re not having to face as a result. We’re talking about warlords who ordered/committed mass kidnappings, torture, rape (in one case, dozens of children), murder (in one case 1000 people), who are pulled out of Columbian courts and brought to the US where they do deals with prosecutors (that apparently include being allowed to stay after they serve their time). The end result being that those who exported uncountable tons of cocaine to the US and who raped, tortured and murdered on a grand scale literally do less time than the mandatory minimum for selling a single ounce of crack on the US street corner.
THE ARISTOCRATS! THE AMERICAN JUSTICE SYSTEM!
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Thank you for pointing that out.
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I didn’t say he is a monster. I said he is evil. Evil is not a deformity. Evil is what he did. Locked in an asylum and drugged into stupor is as far as my compassion goes for this blight upon the world.
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This comment is very full of ick.
More chasers. Stat:
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thanks man. Doesn’t restore my faith in humanity, but it does take the sting off.
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I found out after I bought my current home that the prior owner moved because their 6 year old was sodomized/raped (unsure of distinction and what exactly happened) by the ~11 year old next door. The two families were very good friends until that all went down. The kid spent some time in a halfway house but that was all, I think. The whole neighborhood knew because the mom of the 6yo went door to door warning everyone before they moved out - she just didn’t warn US and nobody told us until it was a done deal. It’s hard to blame an 11 year old for that and it has made me wonder WTF was going on there. Where’d he learn this from - was his brother abusing him? Or his father? Needless to say, it made us very nervous as parents knowing a child aged child rapist was next door. It’s all sealed record stuff. The day they moved was a big relief, even though by then the kid out of college and rarely there.
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I wonder if you could’ve requested the sale reversed. Failing to disclose that a sexual predator lives next door seems like the kind of thing that might be good information to have, not sure if it’s required information though… laws on that might vary from state to state?
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We went through a range of emotions and considered moving. Having the sale reversed would have been difficult, we assumed. And the understanding at the time was that it was not their legal obligation to disclose that information. We ended up thinking … well better to know about the kid next door and manage that, than to risk moving somewhere else and NOT know about.
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I have to inject a little bit of sense here because of this idea that I’ve heard repeatedly: That it’s worse than murder.
It is absolutely not worse than murder. Murder is forever. There’s a reason we don’t euthanize child victims in compassionate resignment because they can only ever have unhappy fates: That reason is that there is life after a sexual assault or rape. Look at the research. The rates for certain long-term mental health issues aren’t great, but it’s hardly a sure thing, and people with mental health problems do go on to lead happy and productive lives. If you want to have an emotional reaction, because you feel that it’s worse than murder, that’s fine. But it’s not, and the law currently reflects that (even if this case demonstrates that it’s not applied evenly or well.)
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Either of those would be more appropriate since human skin would fall into the subtractive color model rather than additive like RGB. 
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come on boingboing if you’re going to report on this don’t leave out the name of the judge. Here I’ll help you. It’s Myron Gookin.
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Why can’t we have both? I’m not saying that you need to feel both, and this isn’t really directed at you at all, because that’s obviously a very personal choice. But I don’t really understand how they are mutually exclusive, as some people seem to be voicing. We shouldn’t be “feeling bad” for this person and letting them off, but the calling for torches is pretty gross. (Again, not yours, @SpunkyTWS …just speaking in generalities)
So easily do we, as humans, display our own lack of humanity by willingly and almost gleefully removing the title of “human” from those whose acts we despise, and treat them as the animals that we hope they are. A disturbing sight to see people seeking to throw this “evil” into an abyss, never to be thought of again, because they are not deserving to be seen as human. Let us cover up the parts of the mirror that reflect the grosser parts of our species, so we never have to catch a glimpse of what we’re capable of.
I am not here to excuse the crimes, which fill me with disgust and utter revulsion at the darkness that people can do to each other. I only seek to fight this odd notion that those who commit evil acts are 1) inhuman and undeserving of either compassion or human rights, and 2) irrevocably broken and not worthy of healing. I am sure that some people fit into the category of the second, but the assumptions that people seem to be making has a taste of pitchfork to it, since none of them are his doctor.
And lest we forget:
The attitude that @Shuck calls out is abysmal, with this “Think of the young man’s future!” hand-wringing nonsense that erases personal responsibility, or hope of contrition and punishment, from the equation. But the opposite is equally deplorable, with a “get rid of the beast” hearty toss onto the pyre.
Also, fuck the judge for this bullshit. It reeks of “washing his hands” of the matter. I truly hope that the victim can be protected from further anguish, and overcomes what will possibly be the hardest, most subtle mental/emotional scar that I could imagine.
EDIT: This so much.
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The rapist in this case deserves no empathy from me, and i offered none. Now if i was in a position where i was to sentence him or be responsible for executing his sentence i would be more impartial and try to rehabilitate him. But that does not fall on me so fuck that guy.
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I don’t think our country’s justice system is currently set up to deal with crimes such as this, which should probably involve a long period of involuntary detainment and counseling in a setting where the teen is unlikely to be raped himself. I’d like to see our prison system restructured to look more like what they have in places like Norway, where violent crime is low and prisoners are treated like the flawed human beings they are rather than animals to be shut away in tiny cages and left to fight each other for dominance.
But the real key is that I don’t just want that for privileged white guys like this teen, I want it for ALL prisoners. It’s the inequity on display here that makes this sentence particularly offensive.
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I think a monster is like an animal, or a dinosaur. Something that doesn’t know the distinction between right and wrong, just chomping virgins tied to stakes because it is hungry.
Evil knows the differences and chooses wrong.
At least that is my take.
I’d agree.
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