To answer your questions about the “small, idyllic neighborhoods,” the registry links you gave earlier were quite good. I was frankly posting about the reaction that parents such as myself get upon finding out a molester lives near. I can’t abide by the fact that these proven child molesters are even free amidst our children in the first place, registry or no registry.

Indeed, that is the impetus for the residency restrictions I mentioned in my first post. As I said, parents should NOT have to be terrorized into the prison camp mentality these molesters present; it should be the other way around. There IS NO middle ground.

In addition, most of the posters here are using the same old argument: sex offender colonies = Hitler style concentration camps. They even have the audacity of claiming that Sex offenders were the first to be imprisoned! That is a malicious lie. Remember, they claimed that homosexuality was a crime. I can’t even begin to compare the proposed Constitutionally mandated sex offender zones, which actually would be better for offenders than the current situation, with harsh prisons where individuals were starved, tortured, beaten, and killed. To actually impugn such an atrocity with a proposal to save our children is not only ludicrous, but demeaning to the very parents and children we are trying to save. Frankly, I’m offended at their cavalier argument.

The colonies would, of course be self sustaining, but would not have to be a massive Walden Garden project, complete with acres of farmland, water supply, etc. I can get into the specifics at a later time when our website is ready to go later this summer, but suffice to say the colony will be SELF-SUPPORTING IN ITS ENTIRETY once the base colonies are built. The actual startup will be provided similar to a bond, which has to be repaid with interest.

Anyway, I’m going to close off my remarks. Markus, I thank you for the opportunity to post, and I urge you to think of the colony for its intended purpose: a safe, humane, and constitutional method of segregating your children from these molesters. Thanks again!

Well it all sound good until you ask a few questions.

Lets take a look.

FIrst it is estimated there are around 500,000 to 600,000 offenders in the USA. If an average of half have a significant other and one child that grows to more than 1,000,000.

So now you need housing for over 1,000,000 people. That is a city larger than San Jose California.

Next if they are supposed to grow food you need 2 acres per individual of tillable land, so that is more than 2,000,000 acres just for farming. And a climate that can produce these crops.

You also need water, to produce 1 pound of corn requires about 1,400 pounds (175 gallons) of water for its production. That dosent count potable water needed for drinking etc. which is 60 to 70 gal/day per person.

Next you need infastructure, sanitation, schools, hospitals etc.

Where do you move the people that reside in the area you plan to put this colony? I don’t think the population of Rhode Island would take kindly to being relocated because you would need an area about that size.

I could go on ond on but there is no simple solution to this comples problem. Unless you are simple minded.

I’d like to thank everyone for their input and thoughts on this topic. I’ll leave this comment thread open for another day or two, and would urge anyone who is interested in delving further into this subject to follow the sources and links a woman apart provided .

I have an old sign government buildings used to post back in the early part of the 20th century that seperates drinking fountains between white and “colored” people. Fortunately we wouldn’t dream of turning a class of human beings into a segregated class with little or no rights as human beings, right?! What next? Are we going to revert to legalized slavery and death camps? It didn’t take long for Germany to turn in that direction.

While you people focus on registered sex offenders (many of which aren’t hardcore pedophiles, as there are a large number of minor offenses listed on the registry), the DoJ has stated only 1 in 7 sex offenders in prison are re-offenders. That means 6 out of every 7 are FIRST TIME OFFENDERS. While you are focusing on once convicted offenders, you ignore the larger issue at hand. There is a serious lack of real preventive measures out there and sex offender laws do absolutely NOTHING to address the issue.
People like Cruella De Valle and others like to shout about how great these atrocious laws are (until they get caught in them as well as Mark Foley and Jessica Lunsford’s own brother), but contribute nothing. America buys this nonsense these people spew. But face it, not one person can predict with any certainty that you know what the other person will or will not do. If we ever return to slavery and death camps (don’t forget, we had Japenese “Internment camps” in WW2) for people we believe are “likely to re-offend,” how far is the stretch to start imprisoning people without even committing a crime?

Ohio passed a “civil registry” already where you can be placed on a sex offender registry and subject to sex offender laws WITHOUT a criminal conviction. Just think, De Ville could date some lady (or dude) and when the lover feels jilted, slaps on a civil registry petition, then De Ville gets sent to one of his own concentration camps. Careful what you wish for…

The Fallen One
Life Without Love can NEVER be whole

So your belief is that rounding up all the sex offenders and placing them in ‘colonies’ will do away with the sex offender problem. Sounds like a good idea, let’s get to it. How about the guy who’s had too many drinks and got caught urinating behind a tree? Take him away, because in most states he’s classified as a sex offender. How about the 18 year old who’s been caught having sex with his 17 year old girlfriend? Ship him along too, so in most states in this country he’s still classified as a sex offender too. There’s so many categories of sex offenders out there how are you going to split them apart? Or in your mind do they all fall into one category, “sex offender”? Becuase the unfortunate truth is the fact that that’s the reality in this country today. Round ‘em up and stick ‘em on the registry, that way we can get more federal money because, see, we have a sex offender problem.

Besides, if you honestly think the entire ’sex offender’ problem goes away when you ship them all off somewhere, there’s something you need to keep in mind, even getting rid of the sex offenders doesn’t solve the problem. Take for example one of the hottest shows on TV today, “To Catch A Predator”. Take a real look at the guys that have been caught. I’ll bet you haven’t bothered checking real close, and I don’t remember the numbers exactly, but of approximately 130 men that have been sent to jail, 4 or 5 of them were registered sex offenders. I really guess that shipping them off somewhere is going to solve that problem too.

Either way it won’t matter to you. In your narrow-minded viewpoint there’s only one solution and heck with any problems related to it. Just remember that those countries that have started taking away rights from it’s citizens don’t stop until they have total control, and then their citizens have no rights at all.

I don’t necessarily think that most parents are unaware of the fact that they have convicted sex predators for neighbors (although, many are probably totally clueless). But as I pointed out in my post, when one lives in a relatively crime-free neighborhood, such as in Chicago’s Edgebrook or Sauganash neighborhoods, one tends to let their guard down, occasionally.

“Also, do you think that, at some point, every sex offender will be posted on the registry, and then, because we know who those guys are, that children will be automatically safer?”

I would hope so. The problem, as I pointed out at the end of my post, is that many of these offenders don’t register themselves upon release, thus making it nearly impossible for us to know where the heck they actually live. By us parents knowing what they look like and where they live, our kids may not be 100% safe, but safer than us not knowing anything at all about them. As I commented before, it’s not a solution to the problem, but again, I’m not sure what a totally fail-safe solution would entail.

Again, I don’t harbor any disagreements with you on parents being the primary educators of their kids when it comes to dealing with strangers. More information is always better, and I concur that it is indeed helpful to know what exactly these folks were convicted of. A “Romeo-and-Juliet” offender is certainly much less of a threat to my youngster than a pedophile is.

In conclusion, I have to say that what bothers me about this discussion in general, is that many people won’t waste much time rushing to the defense of convicted offenders (I’m referring to the bona fide pedophiles, here), whereas the molested children who are the true victims, are often left without a voice in their corner. While I’m not necessarily a fan of “colonies” or “concentration camps” or whatever one might like to call them, I don’t see a whole heck of a lot of constructive suggestions that may guide us to good solutions of this problem. Until those are found, I want to know what the danger looks like, and where it is, so I can keep my kid out of harms way.