Politically Correct?
Or “What’s for Lunch?” Answer “You are.”

Item from a recent edition (July 15) of the Los Angeles Times.

REACHING OUT FROM DEATH ROW
Scores of California's most notorious convicts have pen-pal postings and personalized Web pages. Civil libertarians applaud the development as the exercise of free speech; victims' rights advocates say …
By Tim Reiterman, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

July 15, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO -- From the forbidding, steely confines of San Quentin Prison's death row, scores of California's most notorious convicts have been reaching out to the free world via the Internet.

Scott Peterson's Web page features smiling photos of himself with his wife Laci, whom he was found guilty of murdering and dumping into San Francisco Bay while she was pregnant with their unborn son. It also links viewers to his family's support site, where Peterson has a recent blog posting on his "wrongful conviction.” End excerpt.

There were other examples of postings by murderers, etc. Civil libertarians are angry that the rights of these prisoners are curtailed. They are totally missing the point that the specific intent of incarceration is to limit the civil liberties of prisoners. Hello? Do you want your teen-age daughter to be on-line pen pals with a convicted murderer?

Prisoners have the right to exercise their free speech in many ways. They can talk to each other, to their families, to their friends gained while they were free, and to their lawyers. The internet gives them access to the unsuspecting population at large. Incarceration is supposed to PREVENT access to the population at large. Allowing them to use the internet not only exposes the gullible among us to their persuasive ends, but gives them the appearance of legitimacy. The civil liberties being bandied about here should not be invoked as part of their Constitutional right to free access since free access is what is precisely meant to be denied to those sent to prison.

Moreover, their accessibility on line attracts women whose personal lives are chaos and who see in these men a way to a relationship, any relationship at all. She will show him how special she is because she will love him despite everything. “My love will change him." I don’t know why I should care what happens to these infantile dimwits, but someone has to watch out for them.

Modern technology has outpaced the safeguards put in place before it was so easy to gain access to the masses. These prisoners are removed from society precisely because they do not belong in it. Internet access allows them to move freely among the unsuspecting. Seems to me this is directly contradictory to the entire theory of imprisonment.

I really don’t know why some enterprising attorney does not fight this battle.

And a parenthetical aside to all this is that we have to do more to educate our over-protected children from falling prey to charming predators. I grew up in the inner city and it would never have occurred to me to go blithely off with some stranger no matter how sweet his talk or engaging his smile. I was not “ruined” by explicit knowledge, I was saved by it. Keeping our children too innocent is keeping them vulnerable.

xx, Teal