shasta groene

Like every other parent, kidnapping is my most primal fear. And like many parents all over the country, I was both thrilled and horrified to hear that Shasta Groene was found alive yesterday, sitting in a Denny's Restaurant only miles from her Idaho home where last month, her family was murdered and she and her little brother Dylan were kidnapped.

Sitting with her in the restaurant booth at 2am ( a sharp eyed waitress spotted them) was a convicted sex offender with a history of child rape.

He is in custody. She's been reunited with her remaining family, but Dylan Groene is likely dead, based on what the police have been saying since finding Shasta Groene.

This morning I was reading some local (Idaho) coverage of this case and ran across THIS BLOG, kept by the sex offender who had Shasta. That's right, the man, Joseph Edward Duncan, kept a blog and only stopped posting in it a few days before the kids were taken and their family bludgeoned to death.

In his last entries, he said his dark side had taken over again and he knew something bad was going to happen.

If you read back through the blog, it's clear this guy NEEDED TO BE LOCKED UP...forever. He alternately claimed total innocence for the stuff he had done and then talked about his struggles with his own mind and impulses. Of course, he also refers to all the ways he was hurt and victimized as a child, which is probably completely true. I have a lot of compassion for the fact that 99.9% of child molesters were once molested children.

But the bottom line is that sex offenders do not, as a rule, ever, ever "get well." Yet we sentence them with an assumption that some level of rehabilitation is possible. Many of them, including John Couey, the man who killed Jessica Lunsford in Florida a few months ago have openly pleaded NOT to be released from prison (At one hearing, he told the parole board he knew he would hurt children if he were released. At his next parole hearing he told them he was all better, so they let him go.)

Many people who kill someone in passion will certainly never, ever hurt anyone again. They pose no threat to anyone, yet they are sent to prison for decades or life. Rapists, particularly child rapists, are highly, highly likely to commit more crimes and to escalate the violence associated with their crimes, yet we sentence them to much shorter sentences.

I am anti-death penalty. I am pro-rehabilitative services in prisons. But we have to reprioritize our sentencing laws to reflect what we increasingly know for certain about people who rape children. I don't want us sending a guy who sells crack to prison for thirty years and a child rapist to prison for six years. Child rapists should get life in prison or lifetime, locked mental hospital stays.