 editorial, Wed, July 15th, 2009 Town of Colonie officials have proposed a licensing and points system to help control the town’s growing number of sex offenders and to address the so-called sex-offender “hot spots” that residents have noticed popping up, mostly in hotels and motels along Central Avenue. For a detailed review of the proposal, see Ariana Cohn’s story on page 3 of the July 15 Colonie Spotlight, but the gist of it is this: Property owners will pay a licensing fee if they house sex offenders, and they will be limited to the number of offenders they can house based on the offender’s risk level. We at The Spotlight commend Supervisor Paula Mahan and company for thinking outside of the box, but there are a few things about the proposal that smack us as wrong. The first, and most obvious, we would think, is that no business owner worth his or her salt would exhaust their “sex-offender points” by taking higher level offenders. When faced with the choice between taking six Level 1 sex offenders and receiving $270 per day from Albany County, or taking two Level 3 offenders and receiving only $90, the obvious choice is to cater to the lower level offenders. What does that mean for the town, then? That Level 3 offenders — those most likely to commit another sex crime, as deemed by the courts — will be tossed out of motels in favor of the lower risk, and now more lucrative, offenders? Will Colonie, then, create a new problem by playing host to a new group of homeless, high-risk sex offenders, roaming the streets because the point system made them a bad investment? Aside from the dollars-and-cents issues the proposal will create, there is also the business of humanity. Despite the nature, severity and ramifications of their crimes, and despite this newspaper’s call in past editorials for stronger penalties for sex offenders — penalties that we hope would make a ridiculous system of points and licenses unnecessary — sex offenders are human beings. And while the courts have devised a system of levels to gauge an offender’s chance of recidivism, we at The Spotlight don’t think that system was ever meant to gauge a person’s value. That is exactly what Colonie’s point system would do. A Level 3 sex offender would simply not be worth the space to a business when compared to a Level 1 offender who brings in the same revenue. This is a difficult problem to face, and we don’t envy the people who will be involved in the process of hashing out the logistics of managing Colonie’s sex-offender population, but assigning people a numeric value is not the road to go down. CATEGORY: General Society
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