In yesterday’s post I mentioned World War Z. There was one part of the book in which the surviving members of society have formed various settlements and outposts. Having no prisons and few able-bodied police (all of those who can fight are off fighting the zombies) they resort to public humiliation to punish criminals. They soon discover that crime drops off significantly. This form of justice has existed in our society for as long as there have been laws but has been abandoned in the modern era.

Abandoned, that is, for all criminals except the sex offenders. We’re all well aware of the laws regarding registration and the various online databases. The most recent incarnation of this is Ohio’s plan (link to full story) to force convicted sex offenders to have special neon-colored license plates on their cars. They’re selling this not as a deterrant like the public floggings of old, rather as a means to simplify the tracking of perverts by local police. After all, deterrents don’t really work against sexual deviants.

I fully support the public humiliation of sex offenders but this law seems like it would create more problems than it solves. A crowd of drunken hillbillies smashing up flagged car certainly isn’t a grand stretch of the imagination. Hell, even I would be tempted to leave a nice scratch on the side of a sex offender’s car. Because defacing or smashing up a car is illegal even if the car belongs to a pervert, such incidents would pull police away from more pressing matters.

In my opinion, it would be just as easy to simply tag the most dangerous of these perverts with GPS enabled tracking devices that alert the police when they approach a school.