Politics & Power Quote by Jim Costa

“Sadly” is doing a lot of work here: it signals empathy while clearing the runway for a hardline policy stance. Jim Costa’s phrasing is calibrated for a familiar political stage where child safety is the highest moral trump card and dissent is risky. By opening with “hundreds of children,” he uses a broad, alarming statistic to create urgency without inviting scrutiny about scope, trends, or what “victimized” includes. The number functions less as data than as a mood-setter.

The quote’s engine is its tight moral binary. “Convicted sexual offender” and “convicted predators” slide into each other, rhetorically collapsing a wide range of crimes and circumstances into a single archetype: the irredeemable threat. That move smuggles in the subtext that nuance is indulgence and that any policy short of maximal incapacitation is complicity. “Where they belong” isn’t an argument; it’s a declaration of social order, implying prison as the natural endpoint rather than one tool among many (treatment, supervision, prevention).

“Kept away from our Nation’s children” adds a patriotic possessive that enlarges the stakes. It’s not only families at risk, but the national body. The intent is less to propose a specific reform than to stake out a politically durable position: protect kids, punish predators, project certainty. In the context of U.S. criminal-justice messaging, this kind of language often accompanies legislation that expands mandatory minimums, registration rules, or residency restrictions - measures that sound unequivocally protective, even when experts debate their real-world effectiveness.