The 5 Most Popular Safety Laws (That Don't Work)
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#2.
Sex Offender Registries
The Idea: In theory, these registries are comprehensive lists of every sex offender in your state, updated regularly with the offender's home location and other pertinent facts to help parents and employers avoid exposing their children to kiddie diddlers. Megan's Law requires sex offenders to register and update law enforcement every time they change location. The law's namesake was murdered by a pedophile in 1994. But There's a Problem...
Nobody wants to be the one to stand up for sex offenders, but you've got to have pretty damned good cause to make a person face what is basically a life-long punishment, served even after their jail term is over. Which sounds fine if we're talking about a serial rapist murderer, but not when something like public urination can land you on the registry right alongside him. That would be just one reason studies show Megan's Law hasn't done a damned thing to stop child molesters. Why Doesn't it Work? So you take a guy who's committed a crime. Now you put him on a registry that may keep him from getting a job, or making friends, generally just totally isolating him for the rest of his life and giving him lots of free time. Do you think that makes him less likely to commit another crime?
And how does knowing there's a sex offender in your neighborhood help? Unless he's wearing some kind of clanging Sex Offender bell around his neck to let you and your child know he's approaching, it doesn't protect you from a guy looking to do it again. And then you've got the fact that 95 percent of sexual assault victims are victimized by somebody they already know anyway. So what's the point? Deterrence? As it turns out, someone who is willing to abduct, rape and murder a child often isn't stopped by the fact that he'll get put on a "registry" if he's caught. #1.
Zero Tolerance Policies at School
The Idea: When talking about crime, you may hear some refer to the "Broken Windows" theory. This goes back to an article in the Atlantic Monthly that made the case that petty crime, if not dealt with, would soon metastasize into serious ones: "Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.
Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars." There you have it, folks. One moment you throw your empty Snicker's wrapper on the pavement and the next, some crackhead is breaking windows and stealing cars.
In an effort to save our children, which by the way seems to be the motivation for half of the stupid things society does, in the 1980s they decided to introduce "Zero Tolerance" policies in schools. When it came to drugs or weapons, they would come down on any little offense like it was an act of terrorism. And, if that means strip-searching a 13-year-old girl because she was caught with a couple of Advils, well, it's worth it to avoid that slippery slope toward chaos.
But There's a Problem... As you can see, and as they should have seen five seconds after it was suggested, "Zero Tolerance" removes basically all elements of judgment or proportionate punishment from the process, making it a somehow even more retarded version of Three Strikes. Which leads to things like a child getting suspended for bringing in a keychain the size of an eraser shaped like a toy gun.
Also, it doesn't do anything about the problem it was created to solve. Why Doesn't it Work? The study linked above is from the American Psychological Association, who found the policies didn't distinguish between the kids behaving badly and the ones who were simply confused or showing poor judgment. You even got bizarre cases where a kid has been kicked out of school for possession of "... Midol, Tylenol, Alka Seltzer, cough drops and Scope mouthwash." Obviously deterrents don't work if there is no attempt to understand the behaviors they're punishing. Oh, and also this supposed plan to clamp down on ALL offenses equally still somehow delivers more serious punishments to minorities. The potential for abuse is huge, because if there's a kid you want gone, hell, most people reading this article probably didn't go three days in high school without violating some interpretation of Zero Tolerance. His damned shoelaces could be called deadly weapons. Is this any way to prepare our children for the adult world? By making them believe that authority figures often rely on unfair and arbitrary rules not based on any kind of logic or... Wait, that actually may be a pretty good way to prepare them for the adult world. Find more from Robert at TheDeadBeat and right here. To see why Batman only works alone when it doesn't involve the internet, check out 8 Awesome Cases of Internet Vigilantism. Or find out about some retarded laws your brain adheres to without you even knowing it, in 5 Ways 'Common Sense' Lies To You Everyday. And visit Cracked.com's Top Picks before it becomes regular Internet law to do so (and it will, because we own the Internet). |
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The Amber Alert thing is f*****g stupid. The Connecticut Dept. of Children Services once claimed that if my wife and/or myself left the state with OUR child, they would issue an Amber Alert, as they felt that cleaning one's house was unsafe with a toddler kept in his room with one of those fences.
My wife had a friend that was obsessed over my son, and would show up at odd hours to "play" with my son, and when I told her that I did not want her showing up at 3 in the morning, she called the CT DCS on us, and that is when the CT DCS said that we had to find a sitter for spring cleaning.
f**k CONNECTICUT!
Ha yea I was just about to comment on that Megan's Law broken link.
Upon googling that exact phrase, I came across this [maybe this is the missing link]:
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2009/02/despite_new_report_on_megans_l.html
Hey, Cracked.com staff? Your link about Megan's Law simply points right back to this page. I'd really like to see the research you're referencing, could you please, respectfully, repair the link? Thanks.
At my high school, if you had a headache you had to go to the nurse and she had to CALL YOUR f*****g PARENTS to make sure you could have it. As if one Advil is gonna make me trip so many balls it'll be as if the entire school is one giant ball pit. Furthermore, she had to make sure you swallowed it. Damn her, I was planning on selling this soggy 200mg brainfuck to some Freshman for $1.50. Point is, ZT is bullshit.
im happy that i don't live in the USA
i live in Holland(everything is legal here)YAY
One of my sons was expelled from school in the second grade for pointing his finger at someone and saying "POW". The evening before, he had been taught how to play "Cops and Robbers" by his teen cousin who lived in a state where they do not have Zero tolerance. My son suggested the same game to his friends at school during recess. He was labeled a trouble maker and couldn't sneeze without a teacher sending him to the principal who looked up his "RECORD". He eventually landed on the Juvenile Sex Offender registry for some innocent horseplay that caused his hand to make contact with another boy's pants. He was sentenced to 2 years Probation and mandatory Sex Offender therapy. I think it is correct that we are teaching children that no one should touch certain areas of their bodies but also understand that boys wrestle around and make contact with each other. The teacher who reported the incident and the District Attorney who prosecuted my son (over the protests of the parents of the supposed "victim") are out of their minds. Fortunately the juvenile sex offender list is not published on the internet, otherwise people would be looking at my other son like HE is dangerous.
@ geekella: If your kid's hanging out with the children of a Lifetime Movie villian, stop reading articles on a comedy site about it and PAY MORE f*****g ATTENTION TO YOUR GODDAMN KIDS YOU LAZY b***h!
f**k USA!!
ALL of these things do NOTHING AT ALL!!
Government watchdogs= poverty/safety pimps. Stay out of peoples business and mind your own! Down with all those pussies calling for oversight of everything under the sun. Orwell must be ready to rise from the dead already.
it's worth noting that America holds 1/4 of the world's prison population. 1 in 100 adult Americans is in prison. the closest after America is Russia with 600 in 100,000 or so. USA! USA!! land of the free and home of the brave!! http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/us/23prison.html
Wow - thanks for saying all this! It should be shouted from the housetops! It is really quite genuinely shocking that such obviously dumb things could actually come into being! Aagagag - as many others have said - where are the brain cells? where ARE the brain cells?? It essentially invalidates the whole legal and school system really if things like this can even be considered, and yet people still seem to cheerfully follow them and give them credence. Why are people as a whole so happy to let other people do stupid things to individuals - presumably assuming that they themselves never will be those individuals. Of course - YOU will never end up on the sex offenders register for no reason or have your kid suspended for doing nothing at all. Of course! And while you are in this clever frame of mind, i have a bridge to sell you!
Some kid in my high school brought some vicodin, or something of that nature to school. He was passing them out to his friends, one of which happened to be my little brother. My brother apparently wasn't paying much attention, and didn't realize what he was being handed. He realized what it was, and immediately said he didn't want to have anything to do with it and threw the two pills in a nearby trash can.
Well, as kids who pass out pills to large groups of people are apt to do in a small town high school, the kid who brought the pills was quickly caught, and implicated everyone he had distributed them to. My brother was among the implicated.
He literally had the pills in his hands for less than 4 seconds, a fact he admits, was verified by several eye witnesses, and the fact that the pills were still in the trash can at the time and were recovered. But that 4 seconds was considered "Possession" and the schools Zero Tolerance Policy required that he be expelled. For the first and last time in his criminal life, my little brother did the right thing. As his now lengthy criminal record will account, he learned his lesson well. If you're gonna get in trouble for something, might as well do it.
Oh man..one middleschool I went to had a Zero Tolerance Policy..it lasted one year.
The ONLY times in my entire scholastic career where I got detention..and damn near got suspended.
They had it set up so the MOMENT the teacher said "class come to order" you had to shut your piehole..if you so much as sneezed after she said that..the crazy psycho b***h (which she was) would send you down to the principal.
And they didn't care what you did.
First "offense" was a warning, then a detention, then 2 detentions, then a suspension, and it continues from there.
I got up to 2 detentions before the crazy-psycho-b***h of a teacher quit because "God told me to" and we got someone who was twice her age but 4 times as cool..and I never got sent to the principal there again. :D
Every person she sent down was just trying to finish their sentance/statement/word. One guy said "water"..I was talking about a bus and made a bus honking noise..the last half of that noise JUST HAPPENED to be after she said that statement..and down I went.
She didn't have many students that liked her.
The sex registry list is the greatest. It tells you exactly where to order 10 pies of anchovy pizzas to, or where to play ring-and-run, or where to make prank calls making believe that you're a 6 year old boy looking for a good time.
Ah man I had one of those tiny guns on the keychain when I was little. They're actually badass capguns that can be used to nearly deafen older/younger brothers.
3 just reminds me of that episode of South Park called "Child Abduction is Not Funny".
some of them are useful....
booz helps me get down the stairs with style
http://www.epiclosers.com/load/8-1-0-309
Hmmmm maybe the next one I read will be better (yawn)
The Sex Offender Registry is particularly flawed because it's based on the completely wrong assumption that sex offenders are incurable. That simply is NOT the case. Only 15% of sex offenders go on to re-offend (lower than the re-offending rates of most other crimes like Break & Enter) and the vast majorit of serious sex crimes (such as raping a child) are committed by people with no criminal record at all. But the Sex Offender Registry makes us FEEL safer, right? Too bad it doesn't do a damn thing.
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they're goin waaaaayyyy too far with "zero tolerance" rules at school. if you're hiding like candy nerdz or something, they make it seem like you're hiding rainbow colored crack