Parole is a joke.

Parole in this state is a joke. In an article about the failure of sex offenders to register as ordered, the reporter used Michael Gilbert as an example.

I'm not going to go into the issue of his having failed to register as a sex offender or his attempts to convince authorities he was dead by killing a man and burning the body in his car. My issue for this post is parole.

Gilbert was convicted in 1987 for sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl. He was sentenced to 11 1/2 years in prison. He was paroled before he had been in prison half that time. And he violated his parole -- four times between 1992 and 2003. 

Parole is a joke! But not a very funny one. Just ask the dead guy in the trunk of Gilbert's burning car.

An added note -- I looked Mr. Gilbert up to see what his status is now. He's in Tarrant County jail on the murder charge. But what really caught my eye was his stated occupation: "care giver" for AB Enterprises. Wouldn't you feel good knowing he was taking care of Grandma? 

And one more added note -- there are a bunch of do-gooders out there who think sex offender registration is awful. One of those is Mary Sue Molnar, director of Texas Voices for Reason and Justice. When she was asked if she knew of any sex offenders trying to manipulate the rules, she said absolutely not: ". . .everybody is trying to do what they're supposed to do." Wow! If it was that easy, we wouldn't need any prisons, would we? We could just say, "Now be nice, and don't rape any more little girls." Problem solved!

"Shading a dirty identity." The Dallas Morning News; August 27, 2012; p. 1A.