aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Monday, April 30, 2007
Shame roundup
Again, the hypocrisy is appalling but the real cost is the criminalization of our kids and a culture panicked over sex offenders as a result of the guilt and shame of policy makers and law enforcement types suffer over their own behavior!
Mr. Figueroa, who was once head of a national child predator task force, was arrested after exposing himself to a 16 year old girl in a mall. This statement from the article:
Figueroa was suspended from his post as the special agent in charge of the Tampa office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the law enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security. If he is not fired by August, he will be eligible for retirement at age 50.The we get Mr. Doyle, another Department of Homeland Security official arrested for soliciting a "minor", in reality, a law enforcement deputy, for sex over the internet.
But, add these two arrests of child predators to the Texas Youth Prison scandal. Not only local prosecutor’s, but the Texas Department of Justice U.S. Attorney, pursued no charges as this scandal continued for years. But, this statement should say it all about how pervasive the problem was:
A convicted sex offender who was fired this week from his job at a West Texas youth prison said he told his employer of his background when he applied for the job. David Andrew Lewis, 23, was fired from the Texas Youth Commission’s Coke County Juvenile Justice Center when state investigators discovered he was a convicted sex offender. Mr. Lewis was fired by the GEO Group, a Florida-based private company that runs the all-male facility in Bronte, about 30 miles northeast of San Angelo.
[...] President Bush signed a bill to help end trafficking of women and children for prostitution, yet, we get a youth sex scandal in Texas and Bush administration officials involved with at least one escort agency we know of, not to mention, the child predators who were arrested out of the DHS. Let’s not forget that the U.S. Attorney for the Mariana Islands was forced out amid investigations.
So what was found to be occurring in the Mariana’s? We are told:
Human rights and labor investigators have found rampant abuses there over the years, notably the trafficking of women for a commercial sex trade and the exploitation of mostly female workers from poor Asian countries in a largely foreign-owned garment-manufacturing industry that uses the territory to turn out “Made in U.S.A.” clothing exempt from U.S. tariffs and quotas.
As a lobbyist for the Northern Marianas government and, subsequently, the garment industry on the main island of Saipan, Abramoff enlisted DeLay and other Republican leaders in a battle against the Clinton administration, human rights groups, labor unions and a bipartisan group of lawmakers to preserve local control over immigration and the minimum wage.
[...] If Texas couldn’t stop the molestation of our children, allowing it to occur for years; If Florida supplied one (that we know of) convicted sex-offender to those youth prisons; If the U.S. Attorney investigation into the Mariana’s included garment shops using female workers as prostitutes; If President Bush says one of his key issues is the trafficking of women and children for sexual slavery… doesn’t this say enough to us?
