Given the evidence⁸ that many of the treatment programs for serious sex offenders can have a substantial impact in reducing future criminality, initiatives which disrupt and discourage a person from continuing with their treatment, have to be viewed with alarm. All reason suggests that such disruptive measures will translate directly into increased numbers of victims in the community. The tragedy is not just for the individual victim of the crime but also for the offender himself who might otherwise have been successful. There are no winners with detention.

It has now become common to see public "warnings" about "dangerous" unsupervised offenders being issued by police and reported extensively by the media. The warnings identify the individual and often identify his address. Public disclosure is, at least partially, a result of the detention provisions in the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and yet was completely unanticipated at the time the legislation was passed.

When the National Parole Board detains an individual as being "likely to kill or cause serious harm before the expiration of the sentence", it is not surprising that police are alarmed to learn that the destination of the person will be to their community. Police have to take the assessment at face value. They recognize that the individual who carries such a serious label is being released without control, supervision, or expectation to participate in any treatment. Police face not just a criminal justice problem but also a political problem. They must seem to be doing something.

If there was little reason to believe that detention contributed to public protection, there is even less reason to believe that public notification does either. Taking individuals who are already at such disadvantage, placing them in a position where they are being hounded from one community to the next, to live the life of a fugitive, and placing them in circumstances where employment, housing, community support, and treatment are essentially impossible to obtain, cannot contribute to public safety. It is only in the sense that one might take some personal precautions (although it is unclear what those precautions might be) or achieve some short-term local public protection by driving the person into another community, that the illusion of public protection can be maintained. If one is safer by having driven an offender from this community to some other community, then surely that benefit is countermined by the fact that some other individual may be living as a fugitive in ones own community.

Forcing serious offenders to participate in a rough game of musical chairs is unlikely to reduce the risk that they present. The initiative to warn the public of a risk, while simultaneously abandoning serious correctional intervention strategies, amounts to little more than the government abandoning its responsibility.