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Iowa To Release Child Sex Abuser, Declares He's No Longer Threat Due to Gender Transition

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Still think preferred gender prison placement and taxpayer-funded medical transitions for transgender inmates are the pre-eminent LGBT policy prescriptions in progressive politics?

Yes? Well then step aside Elizabeth Warren, because the Iowa attorney general’s office is reportedly offering one lucky criminal what may be the first-ever transgender “Get Out of Jail Free” card.

According to the Des Moines Register, convicted sex offender Joseph Matthew Smith is no longer being forced to serve out the entirety of his sentence for molesting two children, as he recently underwent hormone treatments related to his upcoming gender reassignment surgery.

Reassessed by criminal justice professionals in the office of state Attorney General Tom Miller, the 23-year-old male-to-female transgender, now going by the name Josie, is apparently believed to have a substantially lower “likelihood of recidivism” in light of the treatments.

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“An offender’s hormone levels are an important part of substantiating an offender’s likelihood of recidivism,” said Lynn Hicks, spokesman to the attorney general. “We don’t believe we have evidence sufficient to prove Josie Smith has a significant chance of reoffending.”

Smith was initially incarcerated in 2015, convicted the previous year of molesting a fellow student at Midwest Christian Services.

It was not, however, until October 2017 that the sex offender began transition therapy, deciding he would like to begin “transgender classification” and be known by female pronouns in the midst of his roughly two-year stay at Newton Correctional Facility.

The length of Smith’s sentence was not been reported but, according to the Iowa Sex Offender Registry, the imposing six-foot, 210-pound biological male was convicted not only of sex abuse in the second degree, but also of lascivious acts with another child as well.

Both counts were perpetrated against children under the age of 13 and took place when Smith himself was also a minor of 15 and 16 respectively.

Yet, this seems not to have been the full depth of Smith’s depravity, as it has been reported that previous assessments indicated the offender may have victimized up to 15 separate individuals throughout his short life.

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Of course, in our progressive society, a change of “gender identity” is apparently all it takes for a state’s chief prosecutors to stop seeking a repeat child molester’s re-commitment to the prison system.

And that is not to say the science does not back the decision to release Smith.

Cross-sex hormone therapy has long been known to bring male recipients’ testosterone levels down low enough to alter bodily development and inhibit sexual desire.

In fact, that is exactly why some criminal justice hardliners have advocated for similar treatments, known as “chemical castration,” to be given America’s convicted sex offenders — and why conservatives have advocated against supposedly transgender children undergoing the treatments prior to adulthood.

Do you think Smith should be spending life behind bars?

But all this is simply digression.

The mere fact of the matter is not all criminal justice is about rehabilitation and feel-good societal restoration.

Some of it is punitive. Some of it is about punishment.

And the idea that some of the most vile and despicable among us — repeat child molesters among them — should be allowed to skip out on years of such penance because they have suddenly identified themselves as transgender is a disgusting, unjust farce.

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Andrew J. Sciascia was the supervising editor of features at The Western Journal. Having joined up as a regular contributor of opinion in 2018, he went on to cover the Barrett confirmation and 2020 presidential election for the outlet, regularly co-hosting its video podcast, "WJ Live," as well.
Andrew J. Sciascia was the supervising editor of features at The Western Journal and regularly co-hosted the outlet's video podcast, "WJ Live."

Sciascia first joined up with The Western Journal as a regular contributor of opinion in 2018, before graduating with a degree in criminal justice and political science from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he served as editor-in-chief of the student newspaper and worked briefly as a political operative with the Massachusetts Republican Party.

He covered the Barrett confirmation and 2020 presidential election for The Western Journal. His work has also appeared in The Daily Caller.




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