Lawmakers and the White Rose Social Welfare Association accused the Ministry of Justice yesterday of failing to crack down on repeat sex offenders as anger mounted over the recent rape and murder of a junior high school student.
The latest outrage involved a 13-year-old who was raped and murdered last week. The suspect, a twice-convicted sex offender surnamed Lin (林), had been released from jail on parole last month, generating widespread criticism and questions on whether parole laws are being abused, particularly in cases involving repeat sex offenders.
The association spokesperson, who asked to be identified as Eva, said the government was responsible for failing to prevent such tragedies.
“Putting electronic ankle monitors on sex offenders should be the responsibility of the government,” she said.
Allowing sex offenders to live in society puts them in an environment filled with strong temptations and that it was a “lose-lose situation” because the offender is being tested while society is forced to put up with repeat offenders, she added.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Huang Sue-ying (黃淑英), who was at the press conference, said Minister of Justice Tseng Yung-fu (曾勇夫) once said that convicts who are at risk of repeat offending should be “kept [in jail] until their death.”
If that was policy, why were repeat offenders like Lin allowed to walk free, she asked.
DPP Legislator Tien Chiu-chin (田秋堇) criticized what she described as the ministry’s inadequate budget for counseling and treatment of sex offenders.
Statistics show that Taiwan only spent 7 percent of the judiciary’s budget on correctional facilities, a low figure compared with 33.52 percent in the US, Tien said.
“Prevention is the key to decreasing the rate of repeat offenses,” she said, calling on the government to make crime prevention a priority by allocating more resources toward this.
Lin was first granted parole in 2000, halfway into a sentence for the rape of a young girl. He was again released on parole last month while serving a nine-year sentence for sexually abusing a woman in 2002.
The family of the latest victim has asked whether crime prevention authorities in Yunlin County had failed in their duties by not requiring that Lin wear an electronic tag, as is required for sex offenders on parole.
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