[PoBoy321]

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It's not JUST about saving the potential victims


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But that was your main argument for castration of first offenders, so I don't see how it ISN'T about just saving potential victims.

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Please humor this completely unrealistic hypothetical example:

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Well, I'm certainly going to try to tear it apart.

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Say my sex offender castration policy is adopted, and after 100 years, we know by looking through a crystal ball that only one castrated offender was innocent, but we saved, say, 100,000 potential victims by preventing repeat offenses. Would you agree that under that scenario it would be a good policy? Do you see my point now?

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Then it would also be just as effective to execute them, or ship them all to a desert island, cut off their arms and legs, or imprison them for life without parole. The obvious difference is that with life without parole, should exculpatory evidence be found, the punishment can be reversed and the wrongly convicted person can be released from prison. Not so with castration, which is ultimately my primary objection.

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Castrating innocent people would be awful, sure. But we wouldn't be killing them.

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Right, only implementing a different irreversible punishment. FWIW, I think that many men would much rather be dead than a eunich.

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Lifetime imprisonment for a first offender would also be fine w/ me (instead of castration...the point is they would no longer be a threat to society), I just think the castration + long prison term route might be more realistic, although I could be completely wrong. Of course this leads to the argument of which punishment is worse etc.

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I simply don't see what would be so unrealistic about lifetime imprisonment, or at the very least supervised custody for a first offender. We already have sex offender registries which are, essentially, lifetime sentences, and I don't see why it would be such a stretch to implement life sentences.

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Obviously I think it's a complete crock that some states are hesitant to adopt a law giving first-time sex offenders a minimum 25-year sentence.

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I'm not sure which laws you're talking about, but you have to realize that there is a wide spectrum of sexual offenses. A 19 year old having consensual sex with a 15 year old is far different from a 55 year old forcefully raping an 8 year old.