Obviously I oppose this travesty.
...but unlike Opebo I'm here to explain:
As anyone who's looked at these databases knows, there's thousands of people on them and nowhere is far away from them. If it was meant to be reassuring to panicking parents, it must have failed its purpose. (As viz the statement, by a nice friendly liberal here in this thread, that "sexual predators cannot be rehabilitated", despite the incontrovertible evidence these lists present - that most actually do not commit a second offense. (Though the repeat offender rates are
higher than for many other crimes.)
As to the "mainstream" part, such laws do not exist in most other countries (though there is some support for it), so that notion goes right out of the window plz. (In fact I once chatted with a guy campaigning for harder penalties for sex offenders in the street, and he disavowed "excesses as in America" - this was obviously something he'd been trained to say if someone was appearing wavery or cautious. He didn't say what exactly he meant by that.)
Sure, there is a responsible way to behave with these lists: You might know through them that a certain neighbor was in prison 10 years ago for molesting a 12 year old, and reacting by not sending your own daughter to babysit there, and warn her against him if and once he tries to, ahem, befriend her, though not before. I wonder how many people do that, actually - and how many ignore these lists, use the knowledge to mob their neighbor, just read around to stare at pervs' mugshots like I did, or worse.
That said, obviously Megan's Law, monstrous as the infraction of privacy it represents is, was not the end of the world some people might have feared it to be.
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