Here's Another Idea

While we're self-immolating in the virtual world, here's another thing that's become bothersome:
When did prison stop being about reform and start becoming about punishment? Foucault said that, as we became more civilized, social institutions of power began to create ways for people to self-repress, thus moving the locus of punishment from the body to the mind; from the exterior infliction of punishment to the interior, self-punishing. Discipline, he called it. I get that. But what I don't get is the trend towards eternal punishment.
Example (this is a good one [grimace]): pedophilia.
OK, hear me out. I think pedophilia is a mental illness, not a crime. I am speaking, of course, of a legal definition. Moral crimes are another issue. Clearly, you cannot commit a crime if you are compelled to do so by biology, which is beyond your control. Our judicial system chooses to accept a double standard on this point, whereby a pedophile can go to prison but someone with schizophrenia cannot. Bad call.
Anyway, when a pedo gets out of jail, he (let's just assume it's a "he", eh?) has to go register with local authorities as a sex offender.

My question is, why?

Either he is or isn't sick. Which is it, government? If he's sick, he never should have gone to prison in the first place, but to a hospital where he would receive indefinite treatment. I am pretty positive that he got very little therapy in the joint, unless pillow-biting is cathartic. If the authorities are worried he might do it again, then he ought to never have been released. If we follow the government's logic all the way through, we must conclude that, as he is a criminal, not a mental patient, at least some forms of criminal behavior are perpetual and bound to be repeated. In other words, criminals are born to break the law, and there's nothing we can do about it.
Now, this thesis has been so thoroughly and repeatedly disproven that it needs no further flogging here. Suffice to say that such assertions are asinine in the extreme. It's the kind of argument Republicans would make if they had no shame...oh wait! They don't!
But I digress. If, in fact, the authorities view pedophilia as a crime and not an illness, then they must punish it. And in this society, we punish people by putting them in prison. However, when one gets out of prison, there is the assumption that one has paid his dues to society: the slate is wiped clean. You can get a job. You can leave the country. You can vote again, unless you live in Ohio or Florida or Texas or another shithole state. You may have to do a short parole stint, but even that eventually goes away.
And if you were convicted of being a pedophile? Nope. You get to stay on the sex offender list forever. You get punished for the rest of your life. And I should think that "convicted sex offender" probably ends just about every conversation you'll ever have from that moment on.
How can a society that claims to be just allow such a thing? The eternal punishment of criminals is antithetical to our laws and our spirit of reform. I should point out that most everyone, including our government (which exists as a single, legal entity) now believes in a God of mercy, not of retribution. Or at least we like His tenets. They are, after all, the basis for Western secular morality.
So what's up? Do we punish prisoners for a period of time or for all time? Is this a case where the law is just plain wrong? Is pedophilia so severe an offense that we as a society cannot allow it to be treated, but instead demand perpetual "justice"? Why do we lump pedophiles and rapists together--are they the same? Why should anyone care about either group? What's with the questions?

The other option besides imprisonment and continuing punishment after release, of course, is that I'm right, and pedophilia is a sickness, in which case pedophiles must be kept under supervision all the time, just like psychotics. Which one seems more just?