DetectableNinja's Tournament: Sex offenders should be sterilized/chemically castrated.

The first order of business for this round is to establish the situation that caused my violation. I will be explaining in depth how my carelessness managed to translate to my sources, and apologizing to both Mestari and the readers. When I was doing research, I had many tabs open. One of those showed me those recidivism rates, being 5% and 9% respectively. That was from the wiki source that I cited as SEVEN from my previous round. It stated this statistic, then another statistic in the same paragraph, then cited it all with a 2. I followed the two to the bottom, found the link, which is the pdf file cited as two in my last round, and opened it. I know it seems completely unrealistic that I managed to miss the giant bold title in the beginning saying how it was a study on prisoners released in 1994....I skimmed through it (very big file) and read over some charts, saw the 5.3% in a certain section (although upon closer inspection, this section was in relation to the prisoners. The whole thing was...) and said Ok, good to go. I know that feeble excuses shouldn't be used as a defense, so I will just use my own stupidity to blame. I was disorganized that morning, with the multitude of tabs and tons of sources I never used. I apologize. In any case, this is me saying that my previous source is indeed wrong. In fact, the wiki source stated the two years that I had stated, but since they sourced the pdf file that didn't have any statistics in correlation with these two years, I hope everyone DISMISSES this statistic. Instead, everyone should replace it with this: A 1994 study by the United States Department of Justice stated that recidivism rates in sex offenders, after 3 years released from prison, reached 5.3%. [1] I will still be arguing my contention on recidivism and how the rate is smaller than what my opponent suggests. TO balance out the fairness in this debate, which has been construed, I will offer Mestari the ability to post new rebuttals and sources for his already existing arguments in the last round. I am not saying that my opponent may bring in a whole new contention, but that he can use new sources in relation to my argument. Mestari doesn't need to accept, though I think it will help balance things out. Note : These above statements are not me conceding in any way to my opponent, but acknowledging an accidental wrong and discarding the statistic. I really hope all the readers can look past it, and to be fair I will simply reiterate and touch on my position in this debate, to try and reel this back into a debate on the resolution. I won't bring new sources in this round, nor attack my opponent's position. We will save all the fun for next round :). Now, to make a brief support on my case. I will stop once I get to 2,600 characters, for that is when Mestari started making pre-emptive cases, which aren't to be used. I might stop before that, if I run out of things to say. C1: Recidivism My opponent and I both have conflicting recidivism rates. I would just like to make it known to everyone that my rates are actually from the United States Department of Justice (the 1994 jail study). My opponent brings a source that has to validity, no sourcing of it's own, and is not reputable. Also, it's important to note that with what I advocate, it is possibly to start dealing with the 99% of unreported sex offenses. So we could seriously mitigate ALL the recidivism rates with a Con ballot. C2: Costs This contention seems to be secondary, but none-the-less, vital. We see my numbers, which I will assume be challenged by Pro in the next round. As it stands, however, the cost of therapies, which are indeed effective, against the costs of castration are much lower. This is good for multiple reasons; we can start dealing with sex offenders with a much smaller amount of money; we can also not only stop recidivism temporarily, but we can cure their psychological issue. C3: Therapies In the last round, this contention focused on how therapies can help indefinitely cure sex offenders, and how what Pro advocates for will never do this. For now, I will reiterate how therapies are effective in means of recidivism and monetarily. With therapies, not only can we help sex offenders become contributing members to society once again, but we can do it at a fraction of the cost. What possible alternative to therapies would be more effective in all these facets? I will digress so that I don't overstep my boundaries in this round. |Conclusion| Once again, I want to formally apologize and let it be known that this debate will NOT include the 1984 and 2002 department of justice statistics. They are invalidated at this point, and if I bring them up again, the judges may give all 7 points to my opponent. It was an accidental mistake on my part, and my opponent has already forgiven me. I hope we can still keep this fair and balanced through the ways which I proposed. My points are that chemical castration doesn't target the mass of sex offenders, chemical castration is more costly than therapies, and chemical castration only prohibits a small amount of return offenders from committing the crime again. I thank everyone, and hope the debate will continue on it's previous course.