Like anyone else, criminals operate, to some extent anyway, from cost/benefit. (I readily grant that their versions of both cost and benefit are more than a little warped.)
To take it to a ridiculous extreme, if we give the death penalty for drunk driving and for murder, the result is going to be a lot of murdered traffic patrol cops and, eventually, a lot of unjustly dead citizens as the cops ramp up their defenses.
It's a cold, awful calculation, but leaving a criminal with nothing left to lose is not a useful strategy.
From my limited knowledge of pedophiles, I don't think there's a surgical answer available, either. I certainly agree with the sentiment, but castration doesn't seem to change one's sexual orientation. Remember how we did that experiment with gay men? Nor do the current onerous boilerplate probation conditions provide any useful outcome. The way it works out, by, basically, sentencing them to a lifetime ban from being within x number of feet of children and requiring, forever, notification of potential landlords and even neighborhoods of the probationer's sex offender status, the probationer is often left with nowhere they can legally exist, let alone operate as a productive member of society. Locally, for many sex criminals, what that means is there are a couple of freeway bridges under which they can live. There's even a national sex offender registry where anyone can search their neighborhood for registered offenders. "When you ain't got nothin' you got nothin' to lose" and suddenly "three hots and cot" doesn't seem all that bad. They hop the bus to recidivism and the revolving door goes around again. With a recidivism rate that hovers around the 40% to 50% mark, it is almost like we are handing out "life sentences on the installment plan."
Whatever the answer is, we sure haven't found it.
