I think the rate of reoffending would be substantially and dramatically reduced if these (usually) men would receive proper psychiatric counselling and help within the correctional system. Anyone involved in corrections will tell you that just increasing the harshness and severity of punishment usually and often leads to far worse consequences over the long run than originally intended.
Most of the time, sex offenders are isolated from the general prison population for security reasons. While this allows them to survive their period of incarceration, it leads to the end result of an individual who is probably suffering from more mental illness than when they first incarcerated for their sex crimes.
Its a terifically hard thing to do, and takes a lot of political and administrative courage to do, but I think increasing funding to sex offender rehabilitation programs within the jails is the only way the 'problem' will effectively be tackled within our 'civil' society. A common theme with sex offenders is that most of them are themselves the victims of sexual abuse as children -- a perpetual cycle that spans generations.
I don't think having elaborate sex offender registries, which, AFAIK, are filled full of individuals convicted for statutory rape, ie: 20 year olds convicted for sexual relations with a 16-year-old, or a conviction for the unwanted grabbing of the hiney of someone really does a lot of good. The emphasis needs to be on putting sex offenders back on the street either 'cured', or not putting them back on the street at all if they cannot be rehabilitated.
[ March 20, 2005, 02:41 AM: Message edited by: pitzel ]