Tougher Punishments for Sex Offenders in Florida

Florida Governor Jeb Bush has signed the Jessica Lunsford Act into law, which not only strengthens sentencing for child sex abusers who prey on children under the age of 12, but also includes a provision allowing the state to track such offenders for life.

The bill was quickly drafted after Jessica's body was discovered in March, and sped through the legislative process, pushed by outraged lawmakers.

Bush said Florida's sex offender laws are already tough, and "this bill will make our laws even tougher. It think it is right and just."

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The bill would require 25-year minimum prison terms for people convicted of certain sex crimes against children and lifetime tracking by global positioning satellite once they're outside of prison.

The bill also requires more monitoring of people convicted of molesting older children.

The new requirement only affects people convicted in the future, but it also has a provision that provides for GPS tracking of sex offenders who violate probation.

Advocates for the satellite monitoring say that in addition to warning authorities when a sex offender is someplace he shouldn't be - such as near a school - it also will allow for quick pinpointing of suspects if a child is abducted.

The new law also could open the door to the death penalty for more murderers, saying someone's status as sexual predator can be considered as an aggravating when judges and juries weigh capital punishment.

I honestly don’t know how I feel about this. I was raped when I was 16, and although I truly wish the situation had been handled differently, I wouldn’t support my attacker having been subjected to being tracked for the rest of his life and possibly hauled in for questioning each time a rape was reported in the area. But that said, I know that child molesters are even more likely to be repeat offenders than rapists, who themselves have a high recidivism rate. Pedophiles and serial rapists are notoriously hard to rehabilitate, and by some accounts, they are, in fact, not rehabilitatable at all.

From everything I’ve read and studied on the topic, I support the latter theory, and yet there’s still something that makes me uncomfortable with tagging a sexual predator like a wild animal (despite their many similarities). I can’t even really explain why this bothers me quite so much, especially as I am keenly aware of how devastating these crimes are and how difficult they are to effectively prevent. Part of me feels that nothing is too cruel and unusual for these monsters, and yet there’s another part of me that recoils at the notion of a serving one’s time and being released into a freedom that is never truly free, no matter how likely an offender may be to offend again.