Banning Sex Offenders from social networking good or bad call? (DJE #11)

This article is about a recently passed Illinois state law banning sex offenders from using social networking services. The author of the article Larry Magid is against this because he feels that social networking is part of a kind of rehabilitation for sex offenders to talk to people in today's society and its a way of finding careers.  He believes they should be "integrated into society to the extent that they can function and be able to find and hold appropriate jobs. Keeping these individuals away from the very types of sites that can help them in their careers is counterproductive to the goal of rehabilitating them." I agree with that, not every registered sex offender is harmful to society, some are actually just misunderstandings. 


Larry Magid uses some compelling evidence mentioning several organizations that have actually researched that few people have been successful harming children through the web. These organizations such as the Crimes Against Children Research Center and the Internet Safety Technical Task Force have concluded that the risk of online predators is greatly exaggerated. A statistic that Magid uses in his article caught my eye, "A January 2009 analysis of Pennsylvania cases by the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use found, during a four-year period, that "only eight incidents involved actual teen victims with whom the Internet was used to form a relationship," compared to 9,934 children who were sexually abused in a single year in that state." That stat really caught my attention and got me interested. 


My opinion of this issue compares to much of Magid's.  I think this law is a bad call, I do think it could have negative affects.  Not all registered sex offenders are harmful to society now. Some registered sex offenders could have just been around 20 and dating someone in high school around 17 and the parents found out and got mad and got him arrested. That doesn't sound like a big deal to me, thats not someone that could be cut off from society. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I agree with Magid that not all registered sex offenders should have to be cut off, only the bad one's. There should be a degree of how bad the offense is and based on the level of the degree should determine whether or not they qualify for the ban.