Last week a Utah legislator quietly shopped an idea to lower penalties for child porn possession. Some Utah prosecutors and defense attorneys, and even the Utah Sentencing Commission, supported the change, mostly because sex offenders now comprise 34 percent of the population of the Utah State Prison.
We’ve been working to empty our prisons from drug addicts in favor of helping them seek treatment, and now our prisons are filled with sex offenders, who we apparently don’t deem as worthy of such treatment efforts. There’s a point there, of course, that addicts need help.
There’s also the problem of our teenage children, who are sexting pictures of themselves to friends, and then getting caught with the images on their phones.