How Much Punishment is Enough?
This is something which has been on my mind given the focus on allegations of sexual misconduct by politicians. Quite a few of the clients I represent are convicted sex offenders, ranging anywhere from stalking to serial rape. From my limited sample, they share a lot in common: all men, all non-white, and nearly all homeless. Virtually no one wants to hire them for work so they end up homeless, and even when they don't have a fixed residence they are required to register with the sheriff every 72 hours. They don't always do so, so jail becomes a revolving door for them. I previously wrote about them here.
All of them were also convicted, either by plea or by jury. Those methods aren't fool-proof and there's always a chance they were factually innocent of course, but questions of the strength of evidence is nothing close to your typical political sex scandal.
My question is this: if one of them decides to run for political office, how many of the people who consider themselves on the SJW side of things (I don't use that term pejoratively, I use it to describe myself sometimes) would automatically disqualify them because of their history? It's not meant to be a gotcha question. On first impression I think it would somehow feel more serious when a powerful white man gets accused versus when a homeless black man has already been convicted. Or maybe it doesn't. Right now a sexual misconduct allegation is purportedly a death knell for any position of power1, but do you think that standard would remain if you had a shall we say more realistic representation of sexual predators?
There's something of a schadenfreude at play when someone spectacularly successful gets pegged down by an accusation. I don't think that would exist when it's someone already downtrodden.
This ties into another issue: whether the current consequences of sexual misconduct are severe enough. Societal attitudes on this topic tend to gravitate towards “stricter”, but only in the abstract. If you actually asked people to sit and write exactly which restrictions they actually want, they’re very likely to come up with a list far shorter than what already exists for convicted sex offenders.
I've engaged in a similar exercise when people say there is a rape culture, and one of the aspects of which is lax prosecution on sexual crimes. I like to point out that 165k people are currently sitting in state prison for violent sexual crimes. This is about 13% of all inmates in state prison, or 1 in 8. If one hundred sixty five thousand people sitting in cages for sexual misconduct is indicative of a system that is too lax, I ask them "How much higher should that number be?" In real life, most people were surprised by the figure, and no one has volunteered a number so far.
Of course I know this is mostly used as political ping-pong when it's convenient. I'm ignoring that issue for the time being.
"How much higher should that number be?"
Well, ideally, 100% of the number of rapists.
I'm finding multiple contradictory sources regarding what percent of men are rapists, from 0.1 to 5% or higher.
Let's take the lower number, in that case we expect to see 165,000 rapists in jail, which is what you describe (and makes me suspect that is in fact the source for the number).
For 5%, we'd expect to see over 8 million men in jail, and the 165k rate is ludicrously low, and clear proof of "rape culture" where the vast majority of rapists get away with it.
But we don't actually know what percent of men are rapists.
I'm not arguing that we need a number higher than 165k in jail, although that does sound like it must be the case. Instead, if we could come up with something more effective and less expensive to tax payers like castration that would be better (I know castration does not always stop people from raping with objects or other body parts, but I still can't help but think it should be somewhat effective, and then the repeat offenders still raping sans penis could be dealt with as a separate category— given the high likelihood at that point of being irredeemable sadistic sociopaths, maybe the death penalty.)