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Schools embrace sex-offender scanners despite costs of this form of technocorrections

By Douglas A. Berman

This article from today's Philadelphia Inquirer reports on the hottest new school accessory this fall: The three mothers waiting to meet with the principal looked harmless enough, but before they were allowed into the Spring-Ford district school, they had to undergo a computerized background check. The women gave their driver's licenses to a secretary, who scanned them against a national sex-offender database.... So far, parents like it, administrators say, proof that after a decade marked by the Columbine massacres, the 9/11 attacks and high-profile child sex crimes, nothing may be "too much" when it comes to child security, regardless of the cost or intrusiveness. "I never want to be the superintendent who has to tell a parent something happened to their kid," Spring-Ford superintendent Marsha Hurda said during a demonstration of the system, installed in 13 school buildings this year at a cost of about $1,500 each...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on September 29, 2009 (boomark / email).