Even though sans registry Dugard would have never been rescued. I guess that little tidbit slipped past guest blogger and “expert” Wayne Logan (author of a sex offender martyrdom fantasy disguised as a textbook called Knowledge as Power) in this Washington Post piece in which he basically repeats the arguments that “sex offender activists” make about how unfair and ineffective it is to have sex offender registries. You know, because it somehow makes children less safe to have known degenerates listed on a database people can check before they hire or date them:

The alleged kidnapping, sexual assault and 18-year imprisonment of Jaycee Dugard highlights the need to reassess the nation’s sex offender registration and community notification laws.

Suspect Phillip Garrido was on California’s registry, which like other state registries is known to be rife with inaccuracies and missing data. Garrido, however, was not among the scofflaws. He dutifully kept authorities apprised of his whereabouts, and his identifying information (including home address) was prominently posted on the Internet due to California’s concern about the significant offenses in his history.

Perversely, Garrido was thus a “success.”

But his sustained depravity highlights a reality long known to police: Individuals determined to commit repeated sexual crimes will find a way to do so. Garrido not only was compliant when his crimes came to light in 2009 but also was on California’s registry when he abducted Dugard in 1991.

No, actually Garrido was a failure. He was a failure of a system that never took a dangerous predator seriously. Law enforcement failed to investigate him aggressively and ignored the woman who married and aided him in his crimes, his parole officers failed to keep up with him or his co-conspirator wife and his neighbors all were happy to turn a blind eye to obvious and overt degeneracy. Garrido was a failure of society not the registry.

But let’s say none of that was true and Garrido still got away with his crimes, until of course he was caught due to the great police work of Allison Jacobs, who used her head, the registry and some good old fashioned common sense. Let’s say Garrido slipped through the cracks. How does that prove the registry is useless? Does the fact that some murders go unsolved mean prison sentences don’t work? Does the fact that felons get handguns mean we shouldn’t have laws prohibiting felons from buying guns? This is what Logan is basically saying, that one case of a program not being 100% effective means that program is totally ineffective.

And the program here failed due to human error (or negligence really) a point Logan himself is aware of but considers unimportant:

A reassessment of the laws will need to surmount at least two major obstacles. First, any effort will be distracted by the knowledge that human error played a role in this case — police repeatedly failed to aggressively investigate Garrido. If registries are to exist, individuals such as Garrido surely should be on them. Yet, we know that registries contain far more individuals than can realistically be monitored, including many low-risk convicts.

This problem calls to mind Justice Potter Stewart’s comment that “[w]hen everything is classified then nothing is classified, and the system becomes one to be disregarded by the cynical or the careless.” There will always be a risk of police errors, but the nation’s over-inclusive system significantly heightens this possibility.

In other words monitoring the registry is too hard so let’s quit. It would seem to me an author and professor would be embarrassed to use the same logic we scold children for using. It’s hard to stop gangs from taking over inner city neighborhoods, should we stop trying? It’s hard to get addicts off meth, does that mean we should simply legalize meth or should we be re-doubling our efforts to educate people about the dangers of meth use? That effort would be helped by showing teens meth users during their health classes, because there would be less people trying meth if they knew beforehand what tweakers eventually look and live like.

Likewise the registry is as educational as it is functional. Despite what people like Logan would have you believe, the registry isn’t full of people who were caught peeing in the bushes of a park. Anyone who has looked one up can tell you they are full of rapists, child exploiters and criminal sexual deviants. This exercise, in and of itself, is educational for many people who buy into Logan’s brand of hug-a-thuggery. Logan seems to think that the registry is full of too many types of offenders, but this simply isn’t true. Most of the offenders are people who A) shouldn’t work with children and B) should be on a list people who need to know can check (single mothers or non-profits, for example) and the idea that we “can’t monitor them all” doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to monitor any them. If anything the Dugard case proves we should be more proactive in monitoring sexual predators.

Then Logan simply starts repeating the SOSEN talking points about how awful we law and order types are for making these poor rapists and child molesters suffer:

Second, any effort at reevaluation will likely face political resistance. Politicians raising the possibility of a reevaluation risk being branded as soft on crime or — worse — regarded as disrespectful of victims after whom laws are often named. Moreover, one often hears that the laws are justified “if one child is saved.”

Lessening penalties for people who rape infants, bury children they raped alive and trade in child porn is being soft on crime, and indeed disrespectful of not only well known victims but all victims. Here Logan is truly exposed. He doesn’t believe there is such a thing as being too soft on crime, that’s just nonsense we right-wing knuckle draggers say to politicians when they aren’t torturing some poor helpless rapist. And certainly the idea that one child’s life could be weighed against the inconvenience of being put on a list of people not allowed work with children or the possibility that the single mother some pervert is trying to date acts responsibly and checks out her boyfriend before allowing him to babysit is the very definition of fascism!  Logan acts as if the registry grabs random people of its own volition. Every person on the registry committed a crime that violated another person.

To Logan that’s irrelevant. He goes on:

But the nationwide social experiment of registration and community notification laws, affecting hundreds of thousands of individuals and their families, imposes significant costs. It also distracts from other — possibly preferable — public safety strategies. The system demands a closer look. Indeed, it would be difficult to identify any other social policy of such magnitude that has evaded a critical review.

“Other preferable public safety strategies” like not forcing sex offenders to take responsibility for their crimes? Not empowering communities to ensure the safety of their children? I worked in after-school and teen programs and public registries of sex offenders are a god send. When I hired a staff for a summer camp in Brooklyn we required all applicants to pass a background check where their fingerprints were to be taken to the police and their prints and name checked against all manner of criminal databases. A significant portion of those applying never got that done and never came back. Many of those people were likely dangerous to children. The system works there, but it cost a pretty penny to implement. So what if there is a program in a state which doesn’t support background checks? What if I wanted to check out a volunteer at a church program or teen center before leaving that person alone with children?

He goes on to sound very much like Tom Madison or “Zman” wrapping up his essay with rousing leftist articles of faith such as it’s unlikely for a child to be victimized by a stranger … as Jaycee Dugard was. I hear this repeated so often I suspect it’s taught in some sociology textbook. It’s a tidbit that’s meaningful to the academic trying to prove a point, but probably not to the mothers of the hundreds of thousands of missing children who have experienced this “rare” stranger abduction. It certainly is a finer point lost on Jaycee Dugard. Or Jessica Lundsford. Or the 12-year-old girl who was molested by a stranger in Chicago who walked up to her out of the blue and made her touch his genitals. Or the six-year-old boy grabbed and French kissed by a stranger in California. But that’s the real world, not the university quad or a faculty meeting, so Logan will never have even heard of such things.

Police and communities having the ability to know what kind of people live in an area is a good thing, and sex offender registries, public or not, are part of that. But Logan and his ilk aren’t interested in that. They are interested in boilerplate platitudes that mesh well with liberal sensibilities and the intellectualizing of degeneracy, sadism and ultimately evil. Logan is one of a thousand academics in their ivory towers who throw out dubious statistics always meant to mitigate people’s depravity. They write their books and articles with the cold detached eye of the sheltered and the privileged, always ready to deconstruct the next rape and murder until the savages become the victims and the victims are forgotten. The supreme irony of all academics that study criminals is that they see them ultimately as the real victims, and work to promote that idea no matter what the cost.

But they rarely even mention the real victims. Sympathy for them isn’t a narrative that gets you a cushy job at a liberal arts college which is much more important than some child they don’t even know.