Continuing from this thread in wildeabandon's post, so we don't hijack/derail the original post any further.

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I'm getting so much interesting information from this discussion, heh.

Regarding sympathy - I think our opinions diverge on this issue, because as soon as it comes out that someone knew something was wrong at the time and did it anyway, my sympathy goes flying straight out of the window. If there were mitigating circumstances around lack of education that meant they weren't sure it was wrong, hmm, maybe. Unfortunately, all of the ones I know of from work were sure and did know and just ignored it.

Regarding "exotic" treatments for "normal" rapists - the sex offender programme that probation run where I work spends a huge proportion of its foundation block tearing down the idea that there's a difference between sex offenders. They will have paedophiles, stranger rapists, domestic sexual abusers, date rapists, people who expose themselves, people who've committed sexual offences online, people who've viewed indecent images of children but never actually touched a child and so on and so forth, all in the same group. One of the first exercises they do is to split the group into three, and ask each group to write down what they think the victim of an offence would feel as a result of the offence. One group looks at a child's feelings, another looks at an adult's feelings, and the third looks at someone who has an indecent picture of them on the internet. The point of that exercise is to put each list up next to each other so you can see, immediately, that they're all but identical.

The programme goes on in that same vein, pointing out that there will be individual differences, but they don't matter because fundamentally all their offending is based on sex. So it's known before the group starts that every person on the group has some form of distorted view/distorted thinking around sex, partly because of the nature of their crime and partly because of an assessment pre-commencement. When you pare it down, all these crimes that seem disparate on the surface - the distinctions between them fall away in the face of the realisation that it's all based on distorted ideas of sex and relationships.

Of course, the US is a hell of a lot bigger than the UK. My geography's not great, but I know we're smaller than most if not all of the US' states, and even we have to devolve policy to a county-wide level - in London, for example, sheer population density necessitates totally sentences than where I work, simply because of how London probation has had to restructure to manage the overwhelming numbers of people they deal with. But then, that's sentencing, not charging for the original crimes.

And for crap's sake, charging someone with indecent exposure for peeing discreetly in a public place is just stupid. Our indecent exposure charge is tagged with the priviso "...with intent to insult a female" (which pisses me off on one hand, because why not just with intent to insult?) but that does seem to cut out bullshit like that.

Of course, the other day I walked out of the front of my work to find one of the offender's peeing against the side of the building. I'm pretty sure that was with intent to insult. *eyeroll*