A Stitch in Haste

To review: the original justification for sex offender registries and "redlining" zones prohibiting convicted sex offenders from, say, living or working within 500 of a school, was the assertion (not fact, but assertion) than sex offenders have an unusually high recidivism rate (i.e., once a sexual predator, always a sexual predator).

So much for original justifications:

Just before year's end, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) got a new, online Meth Offender Registry up and running that will enable anyone anywhere to quickly and easily look for persons convicted of methamphetamine offenses in Tennessee.
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The TBI describes the registry as "another tool to help fight the war on meth."

People beat meth addictions (or stop dealing drugs) all the time, so the "recidivism argument" is no longer available. I'm also not aware of a widespread problem of meth dealers trying to hook innocent young schoolchildren -- it's really an adult drug.

So what is the justification for a "meth registry"?

Clearly, this home-made drug is destroying Tennessee families, contaminating our environment and creating a type of violent and erratic criminal rarely seen by law enforcement. Meth is an epidemic Tennesseans can’t afford to ignore.

So if you don't have a registry, then that means you're "ignoring" the problem?

And what crime isn't "destroying families, contaminating our environment and creating a type of violent and erratic criminal rarely seen by law enforcement"? Why not just cut to the chase and have a "felon registry"? Maybe I don't want to live next door to an embezzler any more than I want to live next door to a child molester or former meth lab operator.

A "meth registry" does absolutely nothing to help wage the "War on Meth" except add a (weak) deterrent factor (the threat of jail time won't stop you from opening a meth lab, but the fear of being on a registry will?). If that is the sole excuse for having a registry -- if registries are recast as "just another tool" in law enforcement -- then we can expect ever more expansive registries in ever more states until we indeed end up with one giant national "crime registry."

The slippery slope at its most frictionless.

Hat tip to To The People; see also Stop the Drug War, Hit & Run.

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Meanwhile, St. Paul, Minnesota, is also a contender in the Registry Race to the Bottom, albeit via another path:

St. Paul wants to be the first city in Minnesota to use satellite tracking to monitor Level 3 sex offenders long after they're released from custody.
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Losing track of one dangerous predator is enough to panic a community. But according to state records, there are three homeless sex offenders sleeping on St. Paul streets at any given time. And only one has regular contact with police. The St. Paul Police Department says two probably have moved out of the area. And officers have an arrest warrant for another predator who isn't living where he said he was. The department also is concerned about tracking offenders who might become homeless in the future.

So in order to accommodate (not stop, but accommodate) the "panic" that has resulted from "at most three but probably one and perhaps even zero" unaccounted for sex offenders dangerous predators, a major city is going to start tagging people like zoo animals. That's sure to help catalyze their rehabilitation.

This is becoming akin to the War on Terror, with people tripping over themselves to justify increasingly draconian policies that increasingly erode liberty while increasingly defying all common sense -- all for the amorphous reason that "there's so much at stake."

Indeed there is.