A former student sent me a link to a website called Felon Spy. You type in an address and it claims to return information on all the convicted felons in the area. From the website:
Safety starts with good information, even if it ends with a loaded .44 caliber pistol. While FelonSpy.com can’t help you get a gun, we can certainly help you figure out which direction to point it in. Our patented Felon Search technology mines data from across the nation, from the web and otherwise, and combines it into a single, easy to use interface. Whether you’re checking up on your own neighbors or trying to find out if that hotel you’ve been eyeing is in a safe place, we can help. Simply type in the desired address, click enter and let your new knowledge be your peace of mind.
Luckily, the site is a hoax. However, I think a lot of people take it seriously–I found links to it on lots of different websites that didn’t seem to get that it’s not the real thing (and I’m not sure the person who sent it to me realized it’s a hoax). I think it would still be interesting for a discussion of issues of privacy regarding criminal backgrounds, as well as the stigmatization of ex-felons. I am certain that many people would love to find a website like this that was legit, but what’s the point, exactly? Do you move out of a neighborhood if any ex-felons live in it? Do you try to run them out of the neighborhood?
I might combine this with a discussion of gated communities to get at the ways in which Americans increasingly feel paranoid and unsafe in their (often very safe) neighborhoods and want to protect themselves from the type of people they believe are dangerous, as though if they live in a gated community and know who the people with criminal backgrounds in their neighborhoods are, nothing bad could happen to them or their children.
It might also be interesting for a discussion of Megan’s Law, the one that requires states to make information about sex offenders publicly available. I find the intense stigmatization of child sexual abuse, compared to other crimes, fascinating. With other crimes, once you finish the terms of probation, you’re pretty much done with the criminal justice system. Only with sex crimes (and generally only if they were against children) is there a requirement that the ex-felon register with law enforcement every time s/he moves even once probation is over, sometimes for a certain number of years, sometimes forever, depending on the state. I mean, you don’t have to do this if you murder someone, or even lots of people (or even if the victims were kids). Our culture currently defines child sexual abusers as unique, particularly horrific criminal who can never really be rehabilitated or reintegrated into society.
I wonder, though, to what degree this law makes children safer. It seems like a false sense of security–if you just know who the convicted sex abusers in your neighborhood are, you can protect your kids. Yet most child sexual abuse is committed by people known to the child and his/her family, not a stranger who just moved in to the neighborhood, and very often they have no criminal record, so these types of programs would be useless. Also, when and how did child sexual abuse come to seem like the single worst type of crime a person can commit? Is sexual abuse really worse than murder? What does that say about children who experienced sexual abuse–that they’d be better off if they had been murdered instead? I mean, not to in any way downplay the effects of child sexual abuse, but many, many horrible things happen in our society, and yet we’ve singled this one type of crime out for particular stigmatization, and I think that’s fascinating.
