Lawmakers in Indiana have recently pushed a bill through its General Assembly that will outright prohibit convicted sex offenders from using social networks, IM and chat rooms. Additionally, the convicts will be required to register their email addresses every year and to alert the state within 72 hours of changing it. The penalty for non-compliance is felony charges.

It’s clear that this law won’t stop everyone, but the law follows the common deterrent theory that the judicial system is based on: make something illegal and punishable and it’ll scare people from doing it. The efficacy of that is widely debatable, but I’m not really one to argue with laws intended to protect children.

On the other hand, we all know what is said about good intentions, and I’m not sure this one has been thought out thoroughly enough. The amount of resources that will be vaporized on attempting to enforce this in even the basest sort of way are wholly wasted, as the likelihood of an offender getting caught on a social network is improbable at best.

Oh well, hopefully I’m wrong; hopefully it protects a lot of kids — hopefully.

Indiana law bans sex offenders from social networking sites and chat rooms [OhMyGov!]

Technorati Tags: social networks, sex offenders, child protection, legal, facebook

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