Sometimes it’s hard to choose which is more annoying — the radical feminists or the traditionalist anti-feminists. Take Amy Holmes who is featured in the July 27, 2000 edition of the USA Today ripping on the National Organization for Women. Why? Because NOW doesn’t advocate mandatory DNA samples from all convicted felons(“Save women: Take all felons’ DNA”).

According to Holmes, the only reason NOW doesn’t want mandatory DNA testing is that “the powerful liberal lobby, the American Civil Liberties Union” opposes it. But there’s an eminently good reason everyone should oppose it — it’s a stupid idea. I outlined the statistical problems with this approach in an earlier essay (Rapists, Thieves and Logical Fallacies), so will just summarize here that widespread DNA testing of all felons would be a) incredibly expensive and b) tend to greatly increase the risk that a false positive DNA match would occur which could greatly undermine the public’s confidence in DNA evidence that is used properly.

Holmes, in fact, doesn’t even understand the evidence she thinks buttresses her case. According to Holmes, “A study of Virginia’s DNA database released this month found that 40% of men arrested for rape previously committed property crimes.” That is in fact false. The study didn’t look at all rapists, but rather only those rapists who were convicted based in part on previous DNA samples in Virginia’s database. Nobody knows what percentage of rapists commit other crimes first, but most studies do indicate that rapists tend to be people already predisposed to commit criminal acts.

In this case, count me in with NOW and the ACLU.

The Help Women By Taking All Felons’ DNA? by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

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