Who Will Slip?

We find ourselves in full agreement with The Economist's argument against America's draconian sex-offender laws, which prescribe too-harsh punishments for youthful blunders and other crimes unlikely to be repeated. But we were struck by this passage from the polemic, which would seem to undercut the magazine's case:

A meta-analysis of 29,000 sex offenders in Canada, Britain and America found that 24 percent had re-offended after 15 years.

Those aren't the sorts of odds that will make an already ju