The Clampdown

The great state of Georgia has decided to make life tough for sex offenders -- very tough: "The roughly 10,000 sex offenders living in Georgia have been forbidden to live within 1,000 feet of a school, playground, church or school bus stop. Taken together, the prohibitions place nearly all the homes in some counties off-limits -- amounting, in a practical sense, to banishment." According to the leader of the Georgia House, this isn't a real enforcement strategy, rather the idea "is to make it so onerous on those that are convicted of these offenses . . . they will want to move to another state."

The trouble, as Alex Tabarrok notes, is that lots of these people aren't dangers to anyone: "the list includes 'a 26-year-old woman who was caught engaging in oral sex when she was in high school, and a mother of five who was convicted of being a party to a crime of statutory rape because, her indictment alleged, she did not do enough to stop her 15-year-old daughter's sexual activity.'" Obviously, though, no politician wants the "soft on sex offenders" label on him, so nobody will stop this.