felons in limbo

I just saw a short piece on CNN about some sex offenders in Miami who are forced to live under a bridge and actually had a parole officer who went under the bridge at 5 a.m. every morning to check up on them. The laws which said they couldn't live within half a mile of any place that "children might congregate" meant there was no place left for them to go.

Link here:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/wplg/20070323/lo_wplg/11346356

Obviously, these are dangerous people, and there's no good way to know which ones will repeat their crimes. It's a strange situation where the people can't be held in prison forever, but can't be set free either. New legislation may result in tagging the felons with radio transmitters, and one can picture a scenario where computers track them and sound alarms if they leave their prescribed area or enter some forbidden zone. It's almost a scenario for shared computing -- I'm sure there are people who would sit around all day watching little blips on a map and firing buzzers every time they saw something they thought was suspicious. Even easier, why not just tag everyone, and then we can zap each other and penalize each other for fun, or send anonymous drug tips about ex-boyfriends just for kicks.

I'm not trying to be facetious. We all should have our freedoms and rights, and each type of crime may properly result in loss of certain freedoms for the safety of the society. I'm just trying to point out one of those futuristic-seeming scenarios we never could have predicted, that doesn't appear to have a solution, now that Australia is off limits for all our riff-raff. Don't laugh just yet -- European nations used to send their convicts to remote islands, or the persecuted people could sail off to new lands, but the world is flooded with people now. Some of them even end up under bridges ...