No one with a reasonably adequate education is unfamiliar with double secret probation, imposed by Dean Wormer on the naughty boys of Delta house.  It was a knee-slapper at the time, but its real life counterpart may not be nearly as funny.  Via Doug Berman, the Washington Post reports:

In April, the 53-year-old Beckwith left prison in Massachusetts and headed to a northern Virginia homeless shelter. Beckwith wrote to the Virginia attorney general’s office asking for help and was directed to Virginia State Police, which administers the sex offender registry. He wrote to the state police twice with no answer.

“I feel like I’m being set up to fail,” said Beckwith, who was convicted of having sex with an underage girl on a military base.

Unlike some states, Virginia doesn’t provide its 16,500 registered sex offenders with a list of restrictions on where they can live, work and play. Instead, registered offenders must search state websites to determine how to comply with laws meant to keep them away from schools, parks and other places where children could congregate.

Officials say it would be too costly to provide copies of the laws to all offenders and that the websites are sufficient.

Forget copies of the laws.  How about just a cheat sheet covering what they can’t do?  Just a clue as to what will send them back to prison will suffice.  Bearing in mind that the scope of defendants covered to sex offender registry laws is wildly, irrationally broad, including not only those who may present a risk of harm to children, but those who have never engaged in any act beyond being a normal hormonal kid, let’s not resort on autopilot to the “who cares, screw the sex offenders, they should all rot in prison forever” attitude.  Many, perhaps even the vast majority, aren’t sex offenders, in the sense that normal people would understand that phrase to mean, at all. 

Yet if they are never adequately informed of the limitations imposed upon them by law, how then are they supposed to comply? 

The Virginia response, that it’s too costly, is just sheer unadulterated nonsense.  Of the plethora of costs associated with locking them away, handing them a sheet of paper is the least of them.  Certainly, if it prevents harm to a child, it’s worth the nickel, right?

But there is an underlying sense that while this neglect, this double secret probation, dooms them to failure, no law-maker is losing sleep over it.  Whether it’s deliberate or simply the tyranny version of benign neglect, the ramification of sex offenders violating the terms and ending up back in prison smacks of an outcome that many people are happy to live with.  Oops.

For those who believe it bad enough that defendants who have completed their sentences, paid their debt to society as was once a notion that served to allow those who had committed a wrong to return to the fold, this twist is outrageous.  Not quite as outrageous as “civilly” imprisoning people in perpetuity after they’ve completed their criminal sentences, but outrageous nonetheless.

That we’ve lost all perspective when it comes to the underclass called “sex offenders” in this country has long been clear, but to affirmatively choose to withhold the limitations imposed on them, to make it a trick to comply, is not merely offensive, but counterproductive.  Unless, of course, you just want an excuse to toss them back in prison.