One Less on the Street

Because the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and three South Bay police departments did their jobs, convicted child molester Joseph Wells Noble is off the streets. For now.

Noble was first convicted in 1978 for committing oral copulation with a 7-year-old Redondo Beach girl and for masturbating in front of three girls at a schoolyard. Later he was convicted of molestation again, and after being released from prison he was found to be in repeated violation of his parole--almost always because he had approached children.

So when he was paroled again in April, law enforcement was ready for him. Authorities received court permission to install a monitoring device in Noble’s car. They waited and watched, and last week they arrested him for felony indecent exposure.

The operation cost $75,000. But was that too much to spare one child the pain and devastation of molestation? Some critics are now saying that. A parole agent said Noble had expressed interest in receiving medication to control his impulses. The great irony is that although the law once allowed child molesters to be sentenced to hospitals, where they could be kept indefinitely, now they must go to prison, where parole is mandatory as a convict earns time off his sentence for work and good behavior. The Legislature changed the hospitalization law because it was exploited--in one notable case by a patient who persuaded doctors he was cured, was released and weeks later killed a 2 1/2-year-old girl.

But, clearly, the present system is neither satisfying nor sensible--imprisoning sex offenders only to send them back into society as troubled or more troubled than they were when arrested.

Lacking more comprehensive direction from the courts and the Legislature, law enforcement rightly does in these cases what little it can to keep sick and dangerous people from hurting others, realizing that it’s likely that these repeat offenders will receive no useful treatment and will return to the streets. So it’s extraordinarily difficult to get indignant about the spending of $75,000 to track down a child molester. On the contrary, police deserve support for a job well done.