Preventable Murder

From IBD:
Posted 6/9/2006

Crime & Punishment: Jerry Buck Inman committed countless infractions while serving 30 years for sex offenses. Yet he was foolishly released after 16 years. And now 20-year-old Tiffany Marie Souers is dead.

We may be kidding ourselves if we think there's any effective substitute for simply keeping violent criminals away from society. Sex registries, for instance, are an innovative idea, but it didn't save Tiffany, whom Inman reportedly admitted strangling to death with a bikini bra.

Inman was registered in Tennessee and Florida, but Kris Rahe, who heads the sex offender unit in Charlotte, N.C., cites a hole in the program. "If a convicted sex offender doesn't register at all, or leaves the area where he is registered, there's no mechanism in place to track him down," Rahe told Charlotte's WSOC-TV news.

At the end of the day, there's simply nothing to replace incarceration. According to the Justice Department, sex offenders are four times more likely than nonsex offenders to be arrested for another crime after leaving prison. And some 40% of repeat sex offenders commit a new offense within a year after release.

Inman was already convicted of crimes including rape, sexual battery, robbery with a deadly weapon, grand motor theft and aggravated assault with a weapon. He tried to escape prison three times. Behind bars, he committed dozens of offenses, including raping a fellow inmate. Yet Florida took 14 years off his sentence.

In South Carolina, where Tiffany was murdered, Republican Gov. Mark Sanford signed "Jessie's Law" on Thursday, allowing prosecutors to seek the death penalty for some repeat child molesters. It also imposes a mandatory 25 years of prison for sexual predators.

We could and should get even tougher. Life in prison for a second sexual assault, or even two strikes you're dead — execution — is perfectly reasonable, and constitutional.

And colleges themselves have duties. The narrow corridor leading to Tiffany Souers' Clemson University apartment was dark even in the daytime. For years, educational institutions busied themselves with all sorts of politically correct mandatory sensitivity training. Of more practical use would be:

• A required basic personal safety course tailored to the specifics of the campus and the surrounding area.

• Mandatory self-defense instruction for women students.

• Encouraging women to own weapons, like mace or even handguns. Simply producing a lethal weapon can save a woman's life.

• Adequate security and lighting in parking lots, dorm areas and everywhere predators can corner a potential victim — with the Council for Higher Education Accreditation or some other national body imposing penalties for colleges that don't keep their students safe.

• Educating students on the specifics of violent incidents that have occurred on campuses — and the personal safety mistakes that may have led to them.

• A permanent campus crime office in a prominent location, where college security and local law enforcement can provide a constant flow of usable information about suspicious activities and local crime.

Still, there's no surrogate for jail. The bipartisan Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons released a report last week complaining that although we spend $60 billion a year incarcerating 2.2 million people, 67% of former prisoners get rearrested.

The commission is misfocused; the most vital purpose of prisons is not rehabilitation, but the protection of society from criminals.

Amnesty International bemoans America's "overcrowded and underfunded prisons," and for once that consistently leftist organization may be right.

More money to build more prisons and the imposition of longer sentences that actually get served are the steps that will save future young innocents such as Tiffany Marie Souers.