Not in my backyard

I don't know that I can say anything new about whether or not paedophiles should or should not be housed in communities with children [as Tony Jones rightly said on q&a last night "What community does not have children?"] but there are a whole range of associated issues that are being obscured because they are short-circuited by that particular circumstance;

• the assumption, for example, that the penal system actually does rehabilitate people seems to me to be a bold one. If it is not a safe assumption then the argument that if a person has completed their sentence they should be left alone is a tenuous one at best.
• there is lots of evidence to suggest that the system in many respects aggravates people's criminalities
• if the system does not rehabilitate then surely the state needs to take some responsibility when it releases the unrehabilitated back into the community...put simply it has not done its job

There is also a whole raft of questions about the total undesirability of vigilante-ism. This is surely a bigger issue than this particular circumstance warrants. Vigilante-ism seems to me to be an enormous threat to a stable society. But it's not easy