Law without Science is Injustice in a Society of Unreflected Anxiety

[For] Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions. - Michel Foucault, in Liberation (1991)

The following is an example of poor and hollow "research" by the legal system documented by The New York Times in "The 'Frightening' Myth about Sex Offenders".

The modern legal framework of harsh standing laws targeting sex-offenders (sex-offender registry and other matters imposed of sex-offenders) is justified on an erroneous recidivism rate ("frightening and high" cited by the Supreme Court) that is twenty times greater than the current plethora of peer and evidenced-based research.



This examples provokes the question: what other legal decisions and laws are decided on public perceptions of fear and pop, pseudo-science and remain in great disparity with the current truth--the empirical, scientific, actuarial truth?

Val Jonas, a Florida civil rights attorney, who appears in theNew York Times Op-Doc video, details the false and misleading information upon which the US Supreme Court based landmark decisions about sex-offender punishment. Her question, "What kind of measures do you take to secure yourself against these risks and at what cost to your society and your values as a society?"

My Disclaimer: This brief example is designed to challenge weak minds and weak society, the kind of "sense certainty" that drives fear and anxiety and feeds public perceptions, absent reason that is capable of approaching the complexity of an important issue at hand. In this example, the subject (law and society) do not in their development of laws seem to really know the object (the sex-offender) via real science.

“Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!” - Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra,  2.29 .

The disparity in this example is a difference between
 - The criminal act being punished and the criminal identity being punished
 - Punishment occurs at one concentrated point (justice with the offering of reform--empowering tretment) and punishment that happens in multiple nodes (unending and shaming)

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“Let us have compassion for those under chastisement. Alas, who are we ourselves? Who am I and who are you? Whence do we come and is it quite certain that we did nothing before we were born? This earth is not without some resemblance to a gaol [jail]. Who knows but that man is a victim of divine justice? Look closely at life. It is so constituted that one senses punishment everywhere.”
- Victor Hugo,  Les Misérables,  4.7.1 (1862)