As communities around Maine struggle with how to protect their children when child molesters are released from prisons into their midst, it might be useful to begin with this thought: Notification is an extreme action, one not taken for any other type of crime. It is also an admission of failure; the refuge a community seeks when nothing short of automatic lifetime prison sentences for molesters would keep neighborhoods safe.

Notification, properly handled, is necessary because laws do not allow for molesters to be locked up forever and the rate at which molesters repeat their crimes once freed from prison is unusually high. Some states have considered keeping those convicted in mental institutions after they have served their time, using the argument that they remain “mentally abnormal.” Maine has yet to debate that idea, perhaps because lawmakers can sense the cost of such a proposal is steep.

One reason communities are struggling is that the state, having decided that these molesters are too serious a threat to treat like other former criminals, has not devoted a commensurately serious level of resources to the problem. Communities are too often on their own.

Admittedly, the record of treating sex offenders is not encouraging. It is, in fact, dismal. But that doesn’t mean Maine’s correction’s facilities should stop trying. Nor does it mean that adequate networks to help these misguided individuals beyond prison are unnecessary. Giving them a place to turn when they are fighting the urge to molest again could make the difference between a wrecked young life and an unaffected one.

The question of notification goes beyond whether it is needed to how and to what extent a community should be informed. Does, for instance, announcing where a molester lives harm his chances of living a normal life and never hurting anyone else? Does it give molesters incentive to avoid telling police where they are living? Does it lead to misperceptions in the community, who may mistake a new tenant in an apartment house for the molester who lived there the week before?

Bangor is considering the broadest posting possible — worldwide, via the Internet. That brings with it all sort of potential problems because it greatly increases the number of crazies in this world who will have this information. To make the case for the Internet, the city will have to explain why telling someone in Kansas or Los Angeles or Tokyo where its perverts live increases local safety.

Many Maine communities are taking their time with this issue, as they should. They know that it has serious implications for both the safety of a neighborhood and the rights of a person who has served his time. Even without simple answers, however, the state’s elevation of this issue demands that it take further action, as well.