William French, 29, was arrested two weeks ago after being accused of raping a woman.
What makes it worse is how easily it could have been avoided. The devil is in the details, as they say.
French probably wasn’t too worried about having the “sex offender” label attached to his name after these accusations, considering that it already was. According to WCVB, an ABC affiliate in Boston, French was already convicted in 2002 of aggravated rape, assault and battery and breaking and entering. He served only eight years in state prison before he was released in December 2009 with a probation period for the next six years.
The system’s first failure when trying to reintegrate French into society was when he was able to move just a few miles away from his first victim’s apartment.
The second came when French failed a random drug test in January 2010, and the judge let him off with a slap on the wrist and a GPS monitoring bracelet. Just one month after the placement of this GPS bracelet on French’s wrist, he ripped it off and went on to repeatedly rape his second victim before finally being arrested after neighbors called the police when they heard screams.
“Why did they give him a bracelet? Why didn’t they send him back to prison for the rest of the 25 years they told me he would serve if he violated parole?” said his first victim after hearing about the second rape, according to WBZ.com, a CBS-owned Boston news source.
What type of mindset decides that the proper punishment for a violent rapist and a noncompliant parolee is a GPS bracelet?
If our country is serious about stopping crime, we need to let criminals know that we are not weak. We need a court system that is as intent on hurting criminals as the criminals are on hurting us.
I’m not asking for Code of Hammurabi treatment, but at least something more than a small device that is fairly easy to take off, especially for violent criminals.
According to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, 46 percent of rapists released from prison were re-arrested within three years of their release date, and, considering that only 6 percent of rapists will ever spend a day in jail, the court system needs to stop trying to change people and realize that it needs to change the situation it’s putting us in.
French is a 29-year-old man with a deranged set of morals, and there’s a good chance he will not change. We need to do something that will get these rapists off our streets and away from our society. The court and judge that allowed this to happen to French’s second victim in the first place deserves the same blame.
Instead of protecting the rights of criminals, the courts need to concentrate on protecting the lives of law-abiding citizens. Maybe citizens should place a GPS device on the courts’ wrist to make sure they’re still where they say they’re supposed to be — on our side.
Reach Brian at brian.p.anderson@asu.edu
