Read more at Seven Days.

Lately reborn as a defender of justice at Guantánamo, Coakley is a leading legal light among sex-panic witch hunters. As Middlesex county district attorney and, since 1997, Massachusetts attorney general, she rose to prominence via the tireless prosecution of crimes that never happened: satanic ritual abuse of toddlers at the hands of daycare teachers, bizarre grandparental incest, and unfounded priestly pedophilia.

Coakley has tried and won these cases employing always dubious and now widely renounced investigatory tactics and junk forensic “science,” notably “repressed memory” theory. She has enlisted public hysteria, attacked her marks in the media, and fought like a Tasmanian devil to keep people behind bars long after they’ve been exonerated. In short, she has used her office to demolish the lives of many innocent people.

Throughout the Senate campaign, Coakley’s liberal supporters kept this record under wraps. Perhaps they feared jinxing an increasingly ill-fated run. My own suspicions are darker: that the Left does not care about sex-crimes enforcement, which may comprise the worst injustices of a brutal criminal system. This isn’t just because there’s no political advantage in standing up for suspected deviants. It’s because progressives are implicated in the creation of this sex panic, and even those who might be sympathetic to its victims don’t understand it.

Coakley made national headlines in 1997 for her role in convicting 19-year-old British nanny Louise Woodward for the shaking death of her charge Matthew Eappen. The evidence was slim that the defendant killed the baby — much less intentionally — but Coakley’s crew wanted to lock her up for life. The jury convicted on its only option, second-degree murder. The judge reduced the charge to manslaughter and the sentence to time served. Woodward returned to England disgraced, and Coakley rode the case to statewide office.

But Woodward was not the first trophy in Coakley’s misguided child-protective crusade. Her hand was heavy in two of the most notorious, and globally condemned, false-allegation cases of the daycare and satanic abuse panics. In 1993, Coakley railroaded Lowell residents Ray and Shirley Souza for molesting their grandchildren. The charges, which included abusing the kids with what they described as a machine as big as a room and forcing them to drink a green potion, were born in the therapeutically exhumed “recovered memories” of the Souzas’ eldest daughter and spread to infect the rest of the family.

Shortly after her election as attorney general in 1997, Coakley threw her power into trying to keep three innocents behind bars forever. Violet Amirault, 60, and her adult son and daughter Gerald Amirault and Cheryl LeFave were the proprietors of the highly regarded Fells Acres daycare center until they were swept up in the daycare panics. In 1984 a kangaroo court convicted them of abominations ranging from the anal rape of a 4-year-old with a butcher knife (which left no injury) to the severing of a squirrel’s legs in broad daylight (also unnoticed by anyone). By 1995, the patent falsity of these claims moved a judge to order a new trial and release the imprisoned women. Although Coakley had not prosecuted the case, she fought ferociously to send them back. Violet died of cancer, waiting. In 2000, the Massachusetts Governor’s Board of Pardons and Parole recommended commutation of Gerald’s sentence, citing lack of evidence of charges they called “extraordinary if not bizarre.” Coakley persuaded Acting Governor Jane Swift to reject the panel’s advice.

The Souzas served decades; Ray died and Shirley, still protesting her innocence, is a registered sex offender. So is Gerald Amirault, released in 2004.

Coakley also turned her zeal against “pedophile priests” — unfortunately, ones who were not guilty. In 1994, she insisted on prosecuting Father Paul Manning for molestation, even though the 11-year-old alleged victim said nothing happened. When the jury acquitted, Coakley went on TV to try to convict Manning there.

In 2002, Coakley presided over the crucifixion of Father Paul Shanley, painted as the most depraved of Boston’s disgraced priests. The case was tainted by sensationalist press coverage, multimillion-dollar pretrial settlements by the Church, and wingnut “experts” lending scientific sheen to repressed-memory theory, long invalidated by research and professional critique. Shanley was convicted solely on the accuser’s muddled memories — sparked by reading the Boston Globe — and sentenced to 12 to 15 years, a likely life sentence for the defrocked priest, now 79.

Not surprisingly, in 2004 Coakley opposed efforts to create a state innocence commission, calling the idea “backward-looking instead of forward-looking.” Of course, that’s the point: to look back and redress wrongful convictions, two dozen of which have been overturned in Massachusetts. But Coakley never admits a wrong.

Massachusetts offers extreme cases of official collusion in mass sexual hysteria, going back to the Salem witch trials. But it is hardly alone: The nation is united in its war on perverts, making little distinction between violent rapists and teen sexters. Nor is Coakley the only law enforcer who has refused to make amends for the innocent lives she has ruined. Prosecutorial careers are built on such victories.

Yet, with few exceptions, progressives have kept their mouths shut about these injustices. For instance, the ACLU’s 2010 Workplan aims to dismantle “the Guantánamo Bay System of Injustice” and rein in excessive government surveillance. Yet it ignores the gulag of postprison psychiatric lockups and the parole requirements imposed on former sex offenders.

Why?

Of all “progressives,” feminists are most to blame. Feminists “discovered” rape and incest in the 1970s. This is good. But sexual conservatives in the women’s movement soon allied with the moral Right and law-and-order zealots to overblow the prevalence of sexual crime, particularly against children, and to oversimplify its traumatic potential. Both causes and effects of these exaggerations are the quack science, relaxed evidentiary rules, broadened statutory definitions and overlong sentences that pervade sex-offense policy and practice.

But liberals don’t generally listen to feminists. In fact, the male (now old) New Left condemned feminists and other cultural radicals for splintering solidarity and distracting activists from serious — that is, economic — matters. You need only peruse left-wing publications such as The Nation, the Huffington Post or The American Prospect to see that sex is an afterthought in their definition of politics.

Why does the Left avoid sexual politics? For one thing (and here’s reason two it won’t deal with sex law), it is desperate to look moral. Spooked by the Right’s monopoly on “family values,” progressives in the 1980s strove to seize upstanding morality as their own. Soon we had the Working Families Party and Families USA. Queers went normal and flocked to the altar, with progressives throwing the rice. In a “pro-family” agenda, there is no room for defending people accused, even wrongly, of incest or sex with minors. Indeed, one of the more distressing aspects of the priest scandals was the Boston gay community’s abandonment — nay, denunciation — of embattled clerics like Shanley, who had admitted to earlier sex with teenagers. This was even more painful given the city’s extraordinary brotherhood of gay adults and youth in the sexual liberation struggles of the past.

Third, besides Marcusians, Reichians and a few other marginals, progressive politicos are rationalists; they’ve been snail-like in grasping the emotional roots of political behavior. Part of progressives’ fealty to Reason is their antagonism to religion. A willingness to believe the worst about Catholics, journalist JoAnn Wypijewski points out, contributed to the Left’s piling on to vilify the accused priests.

Fourth, with the exception of anarchists, the Left trusts government. State child protection was invented during the Progressive Era. Fifty years later, feminist therapists, lawyers, and antiviolence activists — who had historically mistrusted the police — joined with law enforcers to turn child-protection agencies into machines of sexual reeducation and punishment. Meanwhile, many vocal critics of sex-crimes laws are right-wing libertarians, including Christians, whose children have been caught under the sexual surveillance regime. These people don’t trust the government to do much, least of all raise kids. They may believe that teen sex is wrong, but that doesn’t mean they want the cops slapping handcuffs on their sons.

Finally, criminal justice activists don’t recognize sex-crimes defendants among those ordinarily oppressed by the prison-industrial complex. A class-race analysis doesn’t work. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 1996 70 percent of offenders incarcerated for crimes against children were white (of these, seven in 10 committed a sexual assault), compared with 40 percent of those who’d offended against adults. A quarter of convicted child abusers were over 40, compared with 10 percent of violent criminals whose victims were adults. And, while statistics don’t offer easy substantiation here, sex offenders appear to have more money and education than do their cellblock confrères. A cyber-nerd downloading child porn is unlikely to be a 19-year-old African American high school dropout. Only recently have prisoners’ and human rights advocates begun to attack the draconian penalties meted out to sex offenders.

Condemning the pro-choice, pro-health-care Martha Coakley for hunting witches may sound like single-issue politics. But her ambitious vengeance and embrace of junk science say everything about her; ignoring all that says a lot about her supporters. It is long past time that progressives demand of their leaders a commitment to justice — even for those they despise.

This piece originally ran in  Seven Days.

“None of us in this building live under the illusion that anything we do will put an end to sexual violence against children in Vermont,” announced Senate President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin a couple of weeks ago, when the Senate Judiciary Committee unveiled 34 recommendations for stiffening the state’s already stiff sex offender laws. The report comes after a summer of hearings held in response to the public lust for revenge following the murder of 12-year-old Brooke Bennett, allegedly by her uncle, Michael Jacques, a repeat sex offender.

The committee report concedes that “it is impossible to know” whether its current proposals would have made any difference for Brooke. Research over the past several decades, moreover, should reinforce this agnosticism. Few data support the claim that longer sentences, broader sex offender registries or more surveillance of former offenders actually protect children. As I’ve argued before, sometimes these measures put kids at more risk.

Nevertheless, Shumlin told the press he is “confident” that the 34-point plan “will make Vermont safer [and] ensure our children won’t succumb to the kind of pain and tragedy that we all remember.”

Tougher laws, if implemented, will enhance not only child safety but also criminal justice, the committee suggests: Its investigation of the system’s handling of Jacques, says the report, “illustrates . . . why so many sex offenders unjustly avoid punishment.”

There is no evidence that sex offenders in Vermont are unjustly avoiding punishment — though I suppose that depends on your definition of unjust.

Shumlin promised to pass legislation implementing the recommendations in the first two weeks of the 2009 session.

But aside from the further vilification and chastisement of a wider universe of offenders, the laws will accomplish only one sure thing: They will shield the Democratic legislature from charges that it is soft on pervs, at least until the next gruesome crime. And after that, when a new committee is impaneled to recommend more stringent laws, it will concede that the existing laws failed to prevent that crime.

Strictly speaking, Shumlin is right to say that policy makers will not end the sexual abuse of children.

But that is not to say there is nothing they can do to significantly reduce child abuse and neglect.

No, not more treatment. Vermont already has about the best in the nation. Not more don’t-touch-me classes in schools or public awareness campaigns, as the 34 points recommend. Contrary to the claims of the ever-growing sex abuse industry — and the report — child abuse is not a “taboo subject.” It is, as Jim Kincaid, author of Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting, often says, the “unspeakable” crime about which we can’t stop speaking.

Special investigative units, which in many places have led to overzealous enforcement and a paranoid child-protective culture, may not stop abuse, either. These will almost inevitably increase the number of child abuse convictions. But couple that increased prosecutorial firepower with the evisceration of the public defender’s office and new limits on interviews with child witnesses, and the resulting convictions won’t necessarily be of the guilty.

Vermont can reduce violence to children. But the way to do so won’t win any sexy headlines. The state can make kids safer from abuse by making them less poor.

Poverty is the single greatest risk factor for child abuse and neglect. According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a child from a family whose annual income is less than $15,000 is 22 times more likely to suffer abuse and neglect than a child whose parents earn more than $30,000. I repeat: 22 times.

This is not because poor people are evil. It is not because they have a sickness called pedophilia. It is because poor parents are less educated and younger. They have more unplanned children. They suffer more frequently from alcohol and drug addiction and tend to be in poorer health. They live in unstable and overcrowded housing, with more people moving in and out. They are under daily stress, every day, every week and every year.

Each one of these factors, alone and in concert, increases the likelihood that a parent or guardian will batter, insult, underfeed, under-supervise, under-love or sexually molest a child.

Poverty is rising in Vermont. The percentage of the state’s children living in poverty grew sharply, from 8.9 percent to 12.4 percent, from 2002 to 2006. It dropped off a bit in 2007, to 11.7 percent, but the recession will probably wipe out that slight gain. Among these kids are a growing number whose families earn less than 50 percent of the federal poverty level. That level is $21,200 a year for a family of four. Half is $10,000 a year — about $200 a week. Try feeding a family on that — much less housing or clothing it.

Clinton’s “welfare reform” of 2001, which placed a five-year lifetime cap on public assistance, buttressed by Bush-administration work requirements that pushed even more people off the rolls, has created a new category of people who subsist utterly without public help. Some are emotionally unable to work; others have reached their five years and have drifted away. Social service professionals and advocates have given them a name: “disconnected women.” They are a growing group in Vermont. And they have kids.

And yet, the programs that would help give Vermont’s poor families the wherewithal to treat their kids better — the programs through which the state treats poor kids better — are among those that both Democrats and Republicans have placed on the chopping block to alleviate the state’s projected budget shortfalls, mounting far above $100 million.

According to documents released in September by the Joint Fiscal Office, among the programs being considered for cuts is SCHIP — the State Child Health Insurance Program — which will need to increase its premiums. As well, the already underfunded childcare-subsidy program could be required to limit its rolls and create a waiting list. Washington’s Center on Children and Poverty calls this subsidy the single most important method of getting low-income working families out of poverty.

The children’s mental-health program faces potential cuts of $600,000, although the economic crisis is likely to put more stresses on families and increase the need for this service. The Runaway Coalition, which helps youths on the street — sitting ducks for sexual exploitation — stands to lose $615,000.

Teen centers, homeless centers and post-adoption centers, all of which heat their offices with the friction from rubbing two dimes together, are looking at losing half their tiny allocations.

The state is also now proposing to comply with niggardly federal restrictions that it has long proudly resisted. Vermont has not subtracted people’s SSI grants from their TANF — Temporary Aid to Needy Families. Now it is considering doing so. Part of the federal work requirement for assistance was that if a parent did not comply with the rules, sanctions would be taken against the whole family (except for the children’s Medicaid). Vermont refused to let children be deprived because of their parents’ mistakes, so it has long deducted only a portion of the check and left some for the kids’ needs. Now, for the first time, the state is thinking of imposing “full-family” sanctions. Says Sheila Reed, Legislative and Community Advocacy Coordinator for Voices for Vermont’s Children, “They are nickel and diming the poorest of the poor.”

And, while all this is happening, the Vermont Child Poverty Council, established by the legislature in 2007 “to develop a 10-year plan to reduce the number of children living in poverty in the state by at least 50 percent,” receives no independent appropriation. A preliminary report will be released in January, but without money it is hard to know what more the council can do to make its wishes reality.

If the sex-crime laws are adopted, the state’s already shrinking budget will have to absorb untold new costs. Expanding sex offender registries will draw down the treasury by $3 million; special sex crimes investigative units and, of course, longer imprisonments will cost far more. Other stealth expenses will reveal themselves in time — the price tag for health care of geriatric prisoners; the police and probation officers’ time wasted chasing after beeping GPS devices and enforcing a growing list of impossible-to-comply-with restrictions; the loss of child support payments, not to mention taxes, from long-incarcerated fathers.

And as the life rafts that keep people above water start to deflate, those who make it to shore will need more attention. The costs won’t drop; they will rise.

Compared with other states, Vermont treats its poor people relatively well. That’s not saying much, however, says Voices Executive Director Carlen Finn: “The bar is extremely low in this country.” Until now, the state’s low-income advocates have been able to rescue most poor children’s programs from the axe. For their part, representatives in Montpelier have upheld a commitment to keeping people out of the deepest poverty.

For the first time in decades, that commitment is being tested, as policy makers consider abandoning the state’s most vulnerable.

And a big reason why they’re doing so is that they do not wish to discomfit its most comfortable by raising their taxes a few points.

Pain and tragedy, Senator Shumlin? Few if any of the 34 points will prevent these from befalling Vermont’s children. But that’s not the worst of it. The worst is that each shiny, sharp nail the state installs in a sex offender’s bed will be felt on the skin of a child.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

Hysteria is often catalyzed by a grisly event — this time the kidnapping of 12-year-old Brooke Bennett, allegedly by her 42-year-old uncle Michael Jacques. (So far he has not been charged with the girl’s apparent murder.) The event is then sensationalized by the press — this time, rumors of an Internet “child-sex ring” that turned out to be Jacques’ ruse to hoodwink the police. The hint of sex fans the hysteria, which needs no further proof that its object is real (we don’t know yet if Jacques raped Brooke, either). Emotion fuels emotion. Reason and rights are thrown on the bonfire, surrogates of the offenders themselves.

Often the catalyzing crime is not preventable or predictable. But mistakes are nevertheless investigated, fingers pointed. Blame is turned to political advantage. In Vermont, Governor Jim Douglas stumps as the tough-on-crime candidate. With his Fox confederate Bill O’Reilly slavering from afar, he flogs Jessica’s Law, a vastly expanded sex offender registry, civil commitment, chemical castration and the death penalty.

Barre passes the first sex-offender residency restriction, barring former offenders from living within 1000 feet of a school or park — three-quarters of the city. A week later, Rutland Mayor Christopher Louras allows that he hasn’t conducted any research into the efficacy of such laws, but calls for the same ordinance in his city.

In Rutland as in Barre, the aldermen pass the ordinance unanimously. The police, the administration and the people cheer. One Barre resident proposes to the TV camera that the scum be exiled to their own childless “mini-state.”

Not to let an opportunity pass, Attorney General William Sorrell and the state’s attorneys pull out their wish list of measures stacking the criminal justice system in the prosecution’s favor. The five-point package contains a rule allowing the defendant’s prior convictions into court as evidence. Another prohibits defense attorneys from deposing the accuser before the trial. Bennington County State’s Attorney Erica Marthage explains the latter: The process is so unpleasant that the “victim” sometimes backs out, and the case must be dropped. The prosecutors also want police to collect DNA samples from every arrestee and keep the samples for good, even if the person is let go without charges.

The Senate Judiciary Committee launches a series of six public hearings on sex-crime fighting. Chairman Dick Sears, a Democrat, hints that he is amenable to the prosecutors’ proposals. Committee members voice no concerns that the rules changes eviscerate the Constitution’s Sixth Amendment guarantees of a fair trial “by an impartial jury” and the right “to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation.” Presented with past bad acts, juries tend to conclude that the guy committed this one, too. And without a pre-trial deposition, the defense attorney can’t gather the information to prepare a case, uncover inconsistencies in the accuser’s story — or, hearing credible claims, counsel a client to plead to a lesser charge.

The committee is mum on the specter of local police deciding to draw blood from the arms of anybody they pick up. Only the ACLU expresses alarm at the state holding an archive of the bodily codes of its citizens, guilty or innocent.

As the flames of hysteria leap higher, opponents schlep facts to the conflagration. Victims’ rights advocates warn that residency bans send offenders underground, away from crime-preventive social life and surveillance. They point out that keeping offenders away from playgrounds does nothing to stop the vast majority of child abuse, which is perpetrated by the family and friends of the victims. Twenty-five-year minimum sentences like those in Jessica’s Law, they note, may prevent victims from coming forward, for no matter what Daddy did, it is the rare child who wants to be responsible for sending him up the river forever. Some prosecutors warn that mandatory minima deprive the state of the plea bargain, crucial to getting convictions in cases that are rife with reasonable doubt.

Vermont ACLU Executive Director Allen Gilbert sums up the opposition’s argument to the latest wave of sex crimes bills: “The problem . . . is that there’s absolutely no evidence they work.”

But Gilbert is looking for evidence in the wrong places. We aren’t talking about practical public-policy solutions to realistically assessed problems. Vermont is not in the grip of a sex crime wave. The Department of Corrections keeps close tabs on released prisoners. Recidivism of sex offenders is low. Crimes like Jacques’, thankfully, are ghastly aberrations, so rare as to be statistically almost nonexistent.

Instead, we are talking about perceived perils and heightened emotion. Laws born in hysteria are symbolic instruments fashioned in response to confusion, anxiety, terror and rage. They are crafted because the inexplicable demands explanation. It demands that something be done.

The label “predator” — even the more neutral “sex offender” — provides both explanation and a signpost to action. It tells us why Brooke died: because Jacques is that kind of creature. It informs us of what to do: hunt the creature down, cage it, mutilate it, kill it.

At best, such laws calm a restive public. At worst, they make the public crazier. But a grateful public or a vengeful public — both are politically useful.

The laws, in other words, work brilliantly.

Friends tell me not to worry. Vermont is a rational place, a smart place, a place that eventually finds a moderate solution. As Speaker of the House, Gaye Symington held off civil commitment. House Judiciary Committee Chair Bill Lippert has stood staunchly in the face of Bill O’Reilly’s vilification. Vermont still doesn’t have capital punishment.

But relentless calls for extreme penalties for sex offenders wear down resistance.

In response to the governor’s goading, now Democratic gubernatorial candidate Symington has vowed that if elected she will launch a “thoughtful review” of state sex crimes laws. What is left to review? On her watch, the Democratic majority substantially increased prison sentences for all levels of sex crimes (including life for second and third convictions for “lewd and lascivious” conduct, which includes brief touching and hands-off crimes such as flashing). It created an Internet sex offender registry and steadily boosted reporting requirements for more ex-offenders, as well as police surveillance and penalties for violation of probation. A “high-risk” registered sex offender who fails immediately to report a change of address or the purchase of a car faces getting locked up again — potentially for life. The legislature has created special sex crimes investigatory units, which will presumably yield more convictions. At the same time, it has allowed crippling cutbacks to the public defenders’ office. The crimes haven’t gotten worse. Only the political pressure has.

Hysteria gets what it wants. Draconian punishments start to make the merely cruel and unusual seem moderate.

Referring to the federal Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, which requires all states to vastly expand their sex-offender registries, Dick Sears told a reporter: “The idea [of the Act] seems to be that most sex offenders have to be on the Internet [registry]. I don’t think a lot of [legislators] have a problem with that.”

“Most sex offenders,” under the Act, include people as young as 14. The Act also creates pages and pages of new federal crimes and doubles or triples mandatory minima and statutory damages.

But compared with death by lethal injection, what’s so bad about life in prison? Compared with life in prison, what’s so awful about having your face posted on a globally accessible Internet list of sex monsters, and, with it, the permanent impossibility of finding housing, decent work, friendship, or hope — even if you were 14 when you committed the act?

Pretty soon, no penalty of a sex offender is considered cruel and unusual enough. When the Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment for the rape of a child is unconstitutional, both presidential candidates expressed disappointment in the decision.

“Everything should be on the table,” Sorrell told Vermont Public Radio when asked what sex-crimes laws the state should consider.

And while radical penalties become mainstream, formerly mainstream arguments against those penalties become radical. For instance: A defendant is not always an offender; an accuser is not always a victim. People lie about sexual assault, and they coach children to lie. Sometimes it is the contemplation of sending an innocent man or woman to prison — not traumatic memories of a real crime — that causes an accuser to scotch a complaint.

Some arguments can no longer be uttered. Here’s one: Being subject to a “lewd and lascivious” act won’t destroy your life, yet the offense can carry a life sentence. Where sex offenses against children are concerned, rarely does the punishment fit the crime.

Facts don’t cool emotions. Maybe only other emotions can. I can’t at the moment think what these would be. Compassion? The idea that everyone, even a rapist-murderer, deserves to be treated as a human being?

Spare the poison darts, readers. I already know that sentiment makes me a bleeding heart, a pedophile lover, and an accomplice child killer.

I also know that as long as terror and hatred persist — and as long as these emotions are fanned — the laws will keep coming, and their severity will keep mounting. Once they are on the books, the statutes are likely to stay. Even decades after this hysteria is tamped, politicians will be wary of broaching repeal. Wisely, they will fear the flammable fumes that might be released if the old feelings are stirred, like toxic gases lying inert in a mineshaft.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

For this we can thank the Consumer Product Safety Commission, whose Halloween Safety Alert admonished parents to dress children in flame-retardant costumes, emboss their bags and clothes with reflective tape, and make sure they were wearing sensible shoes: “Mother’s high heels are not a good idea for safe walking.” It also suggested keeping minors away from candle-lit jack-o’-lanterns.

At this writing, neither has any report surfaced of a trick-or-treater taking candy from a stranger and subsequently being sexually molested. Thank our government for that, too. Many states, including New Jersey, Texas, Illinois, New York and Virginia, prohibit paroled sex offenders from giving candy to children on Halloween. In New Jersey, such bogymen are not allowed to answer their doorbells on October 31. An article on one lawyer’s website states that the legal restrictions, most of which date from 2005, “were passed as preventative measures, rather than a response to any Halloween incident by ex-sex offenders.”

Halloween has always been scary. When I was a kid, scariness was the point. My pals and I crept out after dark, ran fast past the “haunted house” (which was probably just an old Victorian with a couple of gables in need of repair), and watched our backs for juvenile delinquents armed with eggs.

In those days — I shudder to consider the possibility — adults did not accompany trick-or-treating children.

Not that our parents didn’t have fears. Fifty years ago, a sex panic was also alive in the land. Sensationalist headlines proliferated: “Kindergarten Girl Accosted by Man,” “9 Charges Against Molester of Girls,” “What Shall We Do About Sex Offenders?” Subsequent analyses found no actual increase in sex crime during the period, yet commissions were empaneled and laws passed; arrests increased. Most of the offenses, like most today, were minor, such as flashing and consensual homosexual sex. But a few highly publicized, grisly crimes drew cries for vigilante squads, life imprisonment, indefinite incarceration in mental institutions, castration and execution of the psycho killers.

All of these proposals and tactics have been reprised in the past two decades, only to a more extreme degree. For instance, half a dozen states have recently approved, as part of their “Jessica’s Laws,” the death penalty for repeat sex offenses against children. In Texas, capital crimes may include “indecency,” such as groping a child outside his or her clothing.

As far as I know, however, criminalizing the distribution of Kit-Kat bars to a minor dressed as a skunk or SpongeBob SquarePants is an unprecedented measure.

In this age of terror, as in that one, the fear managers stoke and manipulate our inchoate anxieties, directing attention to threats looming in the shadows and away from real and present dangers. This year, that real and present danger was lead poisoning.

During the weeks before Halloween, Ashland University chemistry professor Jeffrey Weidenhammer repeatedly alerted the consumer safety commission that his lab had found dangerously high levels of lead in four Halloween items. The worst offender, “ugly teeth,” had 100 times the allowable level of lead in its paint — and this was meant to be worn in the mouth. A Halloween pail, a Frankenstein cup and a white, skull-shaped bucket also revealed unacceptable amounts of lead.

The CPSC issued a recall of the pails. Late on October 31, under enormous pressure from the press, it also called in 43,000 sets of the teeth. The agency offered no reason for leaving the other two items on the market.

Nancy Nord, the commission’s acting chair, has indicated in the past that she’d rather rely on her in-house labs to decide which products are unsafe. There’s only one problem with that approach: The CPSC has one full-time toy inspector. Only 15 staffers oversee all products imported into the U.S. — a $614 billion market.

And yet, when the Senate proposed to double her budget, to $141 million, and increase her staff by 20 percent (at 420, it’s half the size it was in the 1980s), Nord wrote not one but two letters in forceful opposition.

Ironically, what she objects to most is Congress’ attempt to grant her agency more power. The bill would raise maximum penalties to $100 million from $1.8 million, allow prosecution of executives whose companies willfully break the law, protect whistle-blowers, and let states enforce consumer protections.

Nord says she fears these measures would unduly burden companies. She also says that a ban on lead in toys, another of the bill’s proposals, would be impractical. These are similar arguments to the ones made by the building industries in 1976, when lead was banned from residential use. That move has had a dramatic effect. From 1976 to 2002, the percentage of children with elevated blood lead levels dropped from 88.2 percent to 1.6 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Indeed, all of Nord’s arguments echo those of manufacturers and importers, as well as of the Bush administration, which has appointed industry insiders fiercely hostile to government oversight as chiefs of almost every regulatory body, from environmental protection to antitrust.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called for Nord’s resignation. Nord has refused to budge, and the president is behind her. “We believe she is doing a fine job,” said White House spokesperson Dana Perino, “and we know she is committed to making sure that products that come into this country are safe for people.” Perino noted that it can be impossible to deny someone a toy he or she really wants, anyway. Well, that settles it. The U.S. government wouldn’t want little Sammy Walton to have a tantrum.

Not to worry, though. Child-protection legislation only shows signs of strengthening in the coming years.

Under the federal Adam Walsh Child Protection Act, beginning in 2010, wicked witches also will be subject to prohibitions on distributing candy and answering their doorbells on October 31. In addition, the CPSC will add an item to the “Choosing Safe Houses” section of its Halloween Alert, warning of the risks of children being enticed into gingerbread dwellings, pushed into ovens, and eaten.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

Defending his decision, the judge explained that Hulett was assessed at low risk of re-offending and was not going to get treatment in jail. Cashman thought Hulett needed treatment more than lengthy incarceration, which would only make him more dangerous. Then the judge averred that he no longer believes in punishment. “Anger corrodes the soul,” he said.

Although none of the critics knows exactly what Hulett did or how often he did it, Cashman was besieged by condemnation. Calls poured into Montpelier. Gov. Jim Douglas issued a statement eviscerating Cashman and calling for sentencing reform. Republican legislators resolved to impeach the judge.

By Friday, the national conservative media and blogosphere had joined the mob. Bill O’Reilly dubbed Cashman “the worst judge in the USA.” A blog called Imago Dei pointed to Cashman, a devout Catholic, as “proof of the existence of evil.” A contributor to the Wall Street Journal‘s opinion site called him proof that Vermont is insane.

On Vermont Public Radio’s “Switchboard,” Democratic House Speaker Gaye Symington declared that “as a mother and a citizen,” she, too, was appalled by Cashman’s decision. She plugged the House’s forthcoming Safe Communities bill, which may contain longer sentences for sex offenders.

It’s hard to say how news of the Hulett case got out. But you can’t understand its resonance without considering the mega-decibel amplifier created by Douglas’s two-year campaign to get tough on sex offenders.

What the governor wants most is a law allowing “civil commitment” of “sexually violent predators” — the indefinite psychiatric incarceration of people who have completed their prison sentences but are deemed likely to commit another crime. Among his other wishes are longer sentences and tighter probationary restrictions; posting more ex-offenders on the Sex Offender Registry website and availing the public of their addresses.

None of this is a response to a real problem. Rather, it’s a strategy to embarrass “soft-on-crime” Democrats and win votes for Republicans. After all, Vermont ranks 48th among the states in crime, 44th in rapes. As for sex crimes against children, thanks to good treatment programs, we have some of the lowest re-offense rates in the country: In 1995, Vermont reported after-treatment arrests at 7 percent for pedophiles, 3 percent for incest perpetrators, and 3 percent for those who had committed “hands-off” crimes such as exhibitionism.

Nevertheless, last session the lawmakers passed a Sexually Violent Predator designation, ready for deployment should civil commitment become law. And the speaker promises more. Fear, both public and political, is winning the day.

But if fear is the greatest political motivator, it is also the worst basis for policy. A tougher sex-offender law will not make Vermont’s communities safer. Indeed, it could make them more dangerous. Here’s why:

1. Such laws put resources where the problem isn’t. All but about 7 percent of sex crimes against children are committed by Dad, Mom’s boyfriend or a close family friend. Sex offender registries do nothing for these victims, who already know where the released perpetrator is. Requirements that ex-offenders stay away from schools and playgrounds are likewise unnecessary. Where molestation is concerned, kids are safest in public.

2. Sex criminals reform, and treatment works. Even for people who have committed many crimes, the one they’re caught in is usually the last. Large studies in the U.S. and Canada have found that about 13 percent of sex offenders are rearrested for similar crimes, compared with 74 percent of all other prisoners. “Being handcuffed and hauled away from decent society is a shattering experience for anyone,” an ex-offender told Eric Lotke, former research and policy director of the Justice Policy Institute. “But it is all the more electrifying and soul-stripping when the offense is as intimate and shameful a secret as is a sex crime.” That memory “stops most of us from ever doing it again.”

Treatment improves the odds greatly, as Vermont’s low recidivism proves.

3. In a free society, you don’t lock people up for crimes you think they might commit. Anyway, it’s almost impossible to know.

Not to worry, says the guv. Only the baddest of the bad — 19 ex-cons, tops — will end up in the bin. But most states have exceeded their estimates by hundreds, even thousands, using civil commitment as a backdoor to longer sentences.

Vermont’s new statute sounds reassuringly stringent. “The standard of proof . . . shall be clear and convincing evidence that the convicted sex offender suffers from a mental abnormality or personality disorder that makes the person likely to engage in predatory, sexually violent offenses.”

Such risk prediction, though, is anything but clear and convincing. Notwithstanding its definition in psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, “personality disorder” is a diagnosis about as precise as “a real fruitcake.” A “mental abnormality” is as common as anorexia. And depending on whom you talk to, “pedophilia” can refer to a 40-year-old who rapes a toddler or an 8-year-old playing doctor with his 5-year-old sister.

Before committing a prisoner, courts usually ask, “Did he cooperate with treatment in prison? Does he show remorse?” According to Canadian Solicitor General Karl Hanson, who conducted the widest, most sophisticated analysis yet of recidivism risks, neither of these says a lot about an offender’s future behavior.

One thing that does predict re-offense, Hanson finds, is youth: a person under 25 is far more likely to assault someone than an older person, and the compulsion lessens with age. Thus, very long prison sentences, even as an alternative to civil commitment, are a bad idea relocated — a waste of money, and lives.

4. Expanded sex-offender registries and tougher restrictions contribute to re-offense.

“The treatment research shows that the best way to [change antisocial behavior] is to normalize life,” says Lotke. Offender websites and community notification of neighbors, landlords and employers, coupled with requirements that registrants report their every move to the police, do the opposite. The U.S. Justice Department names “lifestyle instability” as a big contributor to re-offending.

In other words, as Robert Longo, a therapist and former director of Vermont’s Safer Society Program, told me, “You ban somebody from the community, he has no friends, he feels bad about himself, and you reinforce the very problems that contribute to the sex abuse behavior in the first place. You make him a better sex offender.”

5. Community notification encourages violence.

“Stronger sex offender laws give tools to parents and concerned citizens so they can be more aware of the location of convicted sex offenders, especially sexually violent predators,” Douglas proclaims.

And what are we to do with these “tools?” Gather the good old boys to patrol the offender’s place with shotguns? That’s what’s happened nationwide: harassment, assault, arson. Margy Love, former Justice Department Pardon Attorney, calls the new nationwide sex-offender registry an “incitement to vigilante justice” masquerading as “a responsible public safety measure.”

Imprisonment does two things: It punishes, and it protects the community by keeping bad guys off the street. A third function, in Vermont at least, is rehabilitation, which protects the community by helping ex-convicts create lives beyond crime. Commenting on the Hulett case, Corrections Commissioner Rob Hofmann suggested that punishment and rehabilitation are mutually reinforcing. Time behind bars, he told the Free Press, pushes offenders “to contemplate the pain [they] have caused the victim.”

Judge Cashman, reputedly more for harshness than leniency, seems to be grappling with the fact that prisons are rarely conducive to salutary contemplation.

If Vermont wants to solve real problems, it will keep doing what it already does: Educate the public about sexual violence; tailor sentences to the severity of the crime and the dangerousness of the criminal; encourage treatment in prison; improve prisoners’ reentry into family and community, with housing, job training, counseling and supervision.

But offender websites and civil commitment are not about safety. They are about vengeance. And votes.

The experience of other states foretells Vermont’s. Prison sentences and registries grow longer. The cellblocks fill, along with the locked wards. The public perceives more crime; it demands more laws, criminalizing more acts. Broader laws bring more arrests, which look like more crime.

Conjuring monsters in the streets, communities are divided, while children are left defenseless at home. People feel falsely safer and, at the same time, more fearful.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.