Dugard case should be a wake-up call
Publisher’s note: This editorial is from the July 11, 2010, Reno Gazette-Journal.
The kidnapping of 11-year-old Jaycee Dugard off of a street in South Lake Tahoe in 1991 turned the young girl’s world upside down.
It affected the lives of her parents, her friends and family over the next 18 years until she was discovered living as a captive, and a mother, in the San Francisco Bay area.
And now it’s cost the taxpayers of cash-strapped California $20 million in a settlement of a claim filed by Dugard’s family that argued that state officials failed to supervise her alleged kidnapper.
The wake up call should be to all the other lawyers to get on the gravy train with missing children. How many hundreds or thousands of other disappeared children have not be rescued because our system is imperfect?
Maybe kidnappers and rapists should spend the rest of their lives behind chainlink on a deserted island thereby ending recidivism and cases like Jaycee’s. Do it the Joe Arpiao way and the cost of incarceration would be minimal.