Bills promote digital scarlet letters for drunks, sex offenders

Ostracism inhibits the reintegration of offenders into law abiding society, which to my mind argues against a pair of ill-conceived bills proposed by Democrats which are on the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee agenda today.

A bill by Rep. Trey Martinez-Fischer, HB 23, would require sex offenders on social networking sites to "ensure" the following information is viewable by everyone who comes to their page: An "indication" that the person is sex offender, the type of offense that required their registration and the city of their conviction, "the person's full name, date of birth, sex, race, height, weight, eye color, and hair color," and their home address. The definition of a social networking site is broad (see Art. 62.0061(f) of the Code of Criminal Procedure). It wouldn't just apply to sites like Facebook or LinkedIn, but also to blogs and any other site through which one can post information and receive communication from the public. The law already requires registrants to report online pseudonyms; this bill would effectively prohibit them.

Another bill by Rep. Richard Raymond, HB 133, would require the Department of Public Safety to create a searchable website for people convicted of intoxication-related offenses that, for ten years after their conviction, would publish "the person's full name and last known address," and "a recent photograph of the person, if a photograph is available to the department." It would also require that this data be made available to police in a timely enough fashion that it could be accessed at a routine traffic stop, though inexplicably the Legislative Budget Board claims such functionality would have no significant cost.

These bills have little to do with public safety but instead are mostly about shaming. For Raymond's bill, police can already access criminal history information and nobody but voyeurs and mugshot rags will find any use for the website. As for Martinez-Fischer's legislation, there's already a public online sex-offender registry for those who care. But the registry is already too broad, including many who have never engaged in predatory behavior. Forcing registrants to wear a digital scarlet letter in all their social networking activities - including, for example, their LinkedIn profile where they're looking to find work - creates more harm than it prevents.

In any event, this is a counterproductive ploy borne of haughty, short-sighted puritanism bereft of Christian forgiveness. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's, The Scarlet Letter, the protagonist, Hester Prynne, found that her public labeling as an adulteress became "her passport into regions where other women dared not tread." Similarly, applying this sort of digital signage of shame may actually promote further misconduct by excluding those listed from polite company, preventing interactions with those who might lead them toward righteousness and confining their online interactions to a silo of sinners.

Last week, the Senate Criminal Justice Committee passed a bill out of committee that would remove the employer from public sex-offender registration information. The committee heard testimony about how DPS' decision to include such information - despite the Legislature having specifically declined to require it by rejecting the federal Adam Walsh Act - was deterring employers who'd otherwise be willing to hire ex-offenders. In the end, the goal is safety. Offenders who get jobs and reintegrate into society are less likely to commit new crimes. But these bills undermine that goal, leaving offenders walled off from normal human and economic activity. The House committee should reject such an ignoble purpose.

MORE: See coverage of the hearing from the SA Express-News.