Um, No.

From "Unchartered Territory: Civil Commitment of Sex Offenders," which appeared in the June 2007 edition of Forty-Fourth Street Notes, a publication of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York:

To be sure, the problem of sexually violent predators is an extremely difficult issue to resolve. The public must feel safe from those individuals who cannot control an impulse to commit crimes of a sexual nature. Thus the public is not necessarily satisfied that the individual has served his "debt to society" by completing a prison sentence. There is always the fear that the individual will commit the same crime again. No one knows for sure if therapy works and there are many experits who maintain that sex offenders can never be "cured."

No. The public must not "feel" safe. The public must be made as safe as law enforcement, the legislature, and the judiciary can reasonably make it given our system of government which includes -- the last time I checked -- a Constitution and a Bill of Rights.

Look, feelings are not facts. Let me repeat that:

Feelings are not facts.

Just because you feel unsafe, doesn't mean you are unsafe. Here: read this:

When we confuse the way we feel with the way we are, we use feelings as a bar to progress. "This is how I feel" can be tantamount to declaring, "This is my point of view and I'm not going to change it."

When we use our moods and emotions as evidence that something is a certain
way and that's all there is to it, we are closed to conversations about the future and we are stuck in an unsatisfactory present.

Yeah, I know it's some new-agey shrinky-dink speak. But there's truth in there.

When I was younger I used to worry about becoming a murder victim. Sometimes I was scared on a dark street or in the subway or in a strange neighborhood. Who knows why I felt afraid? It could have been because I'd watched the six o'clock "If it bleeds, it leads" news, which gives the impression that 21st century New York is pure "French Connection"-era mayhem. It could have been some tawdry "true crime" book that haunted me. It could have been an over-active imagination. The point is, I had no data or real-life experience on which to base my fears. I'd never witnessed a murder. I'd never been a victim of an attempted murder. I'd never known anyone who had been murdered.

Then last year, the NYT ran an article about murder trends in New York from 2003 through 2005. Look what they found:

The offender and victim were of the same race in more than three-quarters of the killings. And according to [NYPD deputy commissioner for strategic initiatives Michael J. ] Farrell, they often had something else in common: More than 90 percent of the killers had criminal records; and of those who wound up killed, more than half had them. "If the average New Yorker is concerned about being murdered in a random crime, the odds of that happening are really remote," Farrell said. "If you are living apart from a life of crime, your risk is negligible."

I don't have a criminal record. I am very down with the whole abiding-the-law and keeping-the-social-contract concepts. I don't hang out with people who break the law, unless you count jaywalkers. So after reading this article, I knew that a lot of my fears were irrational, i.e., my feelings were not fact-based.

A lot of the same irrational fears are driving the passage of civil-commitment of sex offender laws. The writer of the bar journal article acknowledges that the fears are constant when he says, "There is always the fear that the individual will commit the same crime again." What he doesn't mention is that fears may be irrational. Americans worry that a sex offender is going to pop out from behind every hydrangea bush in every corner of the United States. And because they are afraid, they're not asking the right questions, e.g., "How many sex offenders are there in the U.S. (relative to the entire U.S. population)?" "How do we classify sex offenders?" "Do all sex offenders have high recidivism rates?" "What is the likelihood of becoming a victim of a sex offender?" Instead, we conflate sensational salient exemplars of "sexual predators" into "trends" in our own minds or assume that one convicted felon is representative of the entire universe of sex offenders. The result is fear that is out of whack with reality. Meanwhile, people are getting re-locked up after they've served their sentences in insane environments at outrageous costs to taxpayers when we're not even sure that (a) they're still (or ever were) dangerous and (b) if they are dangerous, that they can be "cured."

And no, I'm not arguing that we should let them all out of prison. I believe that that there dangerous people out there and that some of them do need to be locked up or, at a bare minimum, closely supervised. What I would like is for the head of the damn bar association to acknowledge that the fear driving passage of these laws is irrational so that law can help society to start figuring out ways to deal with this problem that are a little more reality-based.