We can't afford showy but ineffective sex offender policies

This was a recent headline in the Daily Democrat in Yolo, California, recently:       " 'OperationVigilance’ targets Yolo County sex offenders.”  

“Yolo County law enforcement conducted surprise compliance checks on over 300 sex offenders earlier this week…”

“While many of the sex offenders investigated were in compliance, two sex offenders contacted were arrested for a variety of weapons, pornography and other violations. An additional 18 of these offenders are the subject of further investigation to determine whether or not they are in compliance.”

“Over 60 law enforcement personnel from seven local, state, and federal agencies participated in this joint operation from 15 agencies…” 

I suggest we look at this from a slightly different perspective. 

An unknown number of law enforcement man hours and an unknown amount of taxpayer dollars were expended in Yolo County recently when more than 60 law enforcement officers from 15 local, state, and federal agencies visited over 300 persons on California’s sex offender registry who were all living exactly where they were registered as living. Two of the 300 + persons were arrested. One or both of the two were in possession of weapons, illegal for all felons, and one or both were in possession of pornography. Whether or not the pornography consisted of legal or illegal images is not stated, but if they were on parole or probation, viewing even legal pornography is forbidden.

An additional 18 of the registrants are being further investigated for some sort of possible minor registration or probation compliance violation such as driving a family member’s car not listed on the registration form or being in a location that was, unknown to the registrant, inside an exclusionary zone too close to something like a day care facility or a park. 

Almost 300 registrants are indisputably in compliance. None of them, in fact none of the over 300 with the possible exception of the one or two in possession of pornography, has been arrested for a sexual re-offense. 

Questions need to be asked. 

How many have been on the registry 0-5 years? 6-15 years? 16-30 years? With California’s policy of lifetime registration for all, an enormous and growing number are still required to register decades after the commission of a single, possibly misdemeanor, offense. 

Does the expenditure of resources accomplish the stated goal? Do these checks by law enforcement prevent or even discourage future offense? It seems highly improbable that it could. Knowing where a person lives places no restraints on what he does when he is away from home or, indeed, even when he is at home. Lawenforcement regularly visited Philip Garrido, a registered sex offender, for all of the 18 years that he was holding and raping kidnapped Jaycee Dugard in backyard outbuildings.  

Is the expenditure of funds and other resources effective in preventing child sexual abuse? Empirical evidence says no. Those who are not on the registry but rather in the victims’ lives as trusted family members, peers, or authority figures commit, on average, 95% of all child sexual abuse; the younger the child, the higher the percentage. 

And of the up to 5% who are strangers or barely-known acquaintances, only an extremely small percentage are on the registry for a previous sexual offense. 

Are such visits to registrants disruptive to their lives to the point of interfering with successful rehabilitation? Do they negatively influence community opinions to the point of making successful re-entry extremely difficult? 

That one can be answered with another question: How could they not? 

Rehabilitation is a criminal justice goal equal to if not surpassing punishment in importance. Smart policing furthers that goal. Studies show that the longer a person with a previous sexual offense, for which he was convicted and punished, lives in the community with no further offense, the less of a risk he is to re-offend going forward. 

California’s own Sex Offender Management Board supports this position, stating (page 2) “The longer a sex offender remains offense free in the community, the less likely he is to reoffend.”  

Public resources are limited and must be expended as suggested by empirical evidence. We can no longer continue practices that may earn the approval of the public but do not further the goal of protecting the community, especially those that fail in the goal of protecting our children from harm.

No validity for keeping those on sex offender registry from state parks

"What is the point in doing everything right for years when it counts for nothing? Where is the incentive? What I did was wrong, but that was 15 years ago. I'm not the same person I was when I was 19...My oldest is 9, and I've had to explain it to her -- why we can't go to a lake, why there's no point in our getting a boat. She understands as well as she can at her age."

Shawna is a mother of three. She is on the public registry in Oklahoma for life for a one-time sexual encounter on her 19th birthday with a 14-year-old boy. Her court-ordered punishment was a jail sentence, which she served, and lifetime probation and sex offender treatment. She is also serving an additional life sentence on the public sex offender registry, one whose requirements can shift and change depending on the whims of legislators and new laws. Since it is not considered punishment, applying conditions retroactively is apparently not a problem.

Oklahoma, where Shawna, her husband, and their three children live, is one of only three states defining “parks” to include public state parks and with a state-wide law forbidding park usage, access, or loitering to some or all who are required to be on a sex offender registry. The other two are Louisiana and Illinois. A fourth, Tennessee, couches its language ambiguously, saying that such access is prohibited “…when the offender has reason to believe children under eighteen (18) years of age are present…”

Oklahoma extends the definition of “park” far beyond children’s playgrounds, parks, and areas whose primary use is intended to be by children, the definition adhered to by other states with presence restrictions and by all individual counties and cities with similar ordinances. In Oklahoma, Illinois, and Louisiana, a park is a park is a park, and state parks are included. All access to lakes, beaches, and waterways are state parks.

Oklahoma passed its law in 2014, twelve years after Shawna was ordered to register on the Megan’s Law registry as a level 3 offender, an automatic designation when the victim, even a statutory one, is under 16.

Another Oklahoma registrant, writing a comment on a With Justice for All blog, said, “I was surprised that here in Oklahoma, I cannot go to a park. A park does not mean a place with swings and playground equipment... it means ANY park, State Park included. I really wanted to buy a boat, and I can, but I would have no place in Oklahoma to use it.”

The state of criminal justice reform as it applies to those required to register as sex offenders is very much in flux. While some jurisdictions and states recognize that no evidence supports residency and presence restriction as effective and either eschew or overturn such requirements, others are rushing to implement them.

In North Carolina such and other restrictions have become so onerous that National Association for Rational Sexual Offense Laws (NARSOL) and NC-RSOL have filed a suit against the state on constitutional grounds.

A fourth of the states follow what research clearly shows as the most beneficial to public safety, making serious efforts to integrate law-abiding former sex offenders into their communities by placing no restrictions on where they may live, work, or go with their families. The majority of the other states range widely in the restrictions and requirements they place on their registered citizens.

Only three – Oklahoma, Illinois, and Louisiana – have taken steps to assure that children with a parent on the sex offender registry will not enjoy, as a family, the wonders and beauty that their state’s national parks offer to all citizens and the educational value of their state’s historical monuments – all, that is, except those who are punished beyond reason and with no safety justification all the days of their lives for crimes committed far in their pasts. Those like Shawna.

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Punishment does not equal prevention

How wonderful that Mr. Gary Greenburg, a wealthy New York businessman, is concerned about the young victims of child sexual abuse and wants to help. He has offered $100, 000 dollars toward that end.

That is a lot of money.

The first thing that comes to mind when reading this is an appeal made many months ago by a coalition that includes sexual assault prevention and victims’ groups. The National Coalition to Prevent Child Abuse and Exploitation called for the creation of a stable funding stream dedicated to preventing child sexual abuse and exploitation. The group asked for that funding to equal at least one percent of the millions currently spent on “after-the-fact” responses like sex registries and civil commitment. As far as I know, the group is still waiting for a response. Mr. Greenburg’s pledge would surely be a healthy beginning toward that.

A second real possibility is using the money to help establish a Circles of Support and Accountability program in New York. First begun in Canada in 1994 in the Mennonite community, these programs have gained great credibility in England and in parts of the United States. The most recent success story comes from Vermont, where preliminary results of a Circles program begun there in 2005 is seeing a reduction of 86% in the recidivism of convicted sex offenders.  

While the Circles programs are invaluable in aiding the rehabilitation and reentry of former offenders, which also serves public safety, to actually make inroads against child sexual abuse requires addressing the problem where it is occurring.

The research is very clear on this subject. First time offenders, not those already registered for a previous offense, commit the vast majority of all sexual crime. This is even truer for the sexual abuse of children and minors. Except for a tiny percentage – and an even more minute percentage are repeat offenders -- they are victimized by those in their lives, i.e., their family members, their peers, and their authority figures. Any attempts to effect a change in this scenario with a focus on those who have already committed offenses will fail; indeed, it is failing every day.

Dedicated and comprehensive programs of education and prevention are a large part of the answer. A bill called Erin’s Law is one such program that holds promise. Begun by a young woman, Erin Merryn, who, like Mr. Greenburg, was sexually abused as a child, the bill requires an age appropriate curriculum in public schools for both faculty and students. Its focus is recognizing child sexual abuse and the appropriate measures to be taken. It has already been adopted in 26 states. 

Other valuable programs, such as Stop It Now and SAEN – Sexual Abuse Ends Now -- focus on utilizing what research and science tell us about sexual offending to confront the problem of child sexual abuse.

Mr. Greenburg’s many dollars would almost certainly be welcomed by any of these programs and would certainly meet his goal of helping child sexual assault victims and preventing new ones.

What will not help is his intended campaign against legislators in New York who are questioning the efficacy of harsher and stricter laws and punishments against those who commit sexual offenses. Recent years have seen ever-increasing harshness in penalties and sentencing. Children are still being molested. While sentences appropriate to the crime committed are necessary, we should not fool ourselves. These do very little to deter the continuing sexual abuse of children committed overwhelmingly by those never arrested or charged with a sex crime.

Punishment is not prevention, and overly harsh punishment is not focused on victims or prevention but rather on vengeance.

Like Mr. Greenburg, all decent people want an end to the sexual abuse of children. To attain that goal, we must focus on the children and the situations in which they are being abused.

                    

                        

This is how to pass a bill with no facts to support it

The discussion in the U.S. House pertinent to International Megan's Law has ended with a vote to pass the resolution under suspension of the rules. It will now go to the President for his signature.

Ten legislators spoke in favor of the bill. They all threw out a lot of numbers, sometimes in conflict with each other, all designed to draw conclusions that cannot be concluded with any degree of logic.

Remember that the bill is named International Megan's Law to Prevent Child Exploitation and Other Sexual Crimes Through Advanced Notification of Traveling Sex Offenders. Child exploitation and other sexual crimes. Sexual crimes. Traveling sex offenders. Keep that in mind.

One legislator said, "There are tens of millions of victims of human trafficking," and another said, with somewhat less hyperbole, "There have been more than twenty million victims of human trafficking."

These are the kinds of figures that are thrown out, totally unverified but never challenged, but the actual point is that the term "human trafficking" conflates individuals trafficked for the purpose of labor and those trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation. Examination into the issue suggests that the far greater number is for labor, and those individuals are more likely to be adults than children. Forced labor, amounting to slavery, is horrendous, but is that what those legislators hearing the impassioned speeches of their colleagues thought of? No. They thought of little girls being kidnapped, raped, and prostituted. They thought of little girls like Megan Kanka because Megan's tragedy was recounted for them, if not by every one of the ten speakers, certainly by the majority of them.

And that is another problem. Megan's killer was not a "traveling sex offender." Megan was not trafficked to the human sex trade industry. As horrific as Megan's death was, there is not one syllable or one comma in HR 515 that would have prevented what happened to her. There is no parallel to be made except--oh yeah--she was killed by someone on the registry, and that point was pushed by the speakers for the bill also.

Nothing was said to suggest that the individuals responsible for all of this raping and exploiting were on the registry. It did not need to be said. That was nevertheless the message received because, if the purpose of the bill is to stop these things from happening, and the bill targets those on the registry, then those committing the acts must be those on the registry, just as Megan's killer was.

One speaker said that, in a given time period, passports had been issued to 2,000 registered sex offenders. That may well be true. Another, also speaking of a specific time period, said, "4,500 registered sex offenders received passports; that is unacceptable." Unacceptable? Unacceptable that 4,500 American citizens, for a myriad of reasons, chose to apply for and receive an American passport? Nothing was said to suggest that any of those 2,000 or any of those 4,500 used the passport to facilitate a sexual crime against a child--or any crime against anyone. But is that the message sent and received? Of course it was. If the purpose of the bill is to prevent these things from happening....

And so it passed. If all that had gone before had not been enough to secure its passage, the last, closing remark would surely have done so. "This will save children's lives."

Again, totally lacking in evidence, but a statement that will be heartily embraced and received and repeated as though it were gospel truth.

Freezing weather, shelters, and sex offenders; it's deja vu all over again

A month shy of a year ago, I posted a long and bitter post about the policy of at least one homeless shelter regarding sex offenders. That place, as part of its general policy, excluded anyone

on the sex offender registry from, literally, coming in from the cold.

Parts of California, it seems, are having uncharacteristically cold weather this year--and it isn't even winter yet. A shelter in Sacramento with the Biblically-referenced name of Loaves and Fishes has teamed up with area churches from late November to the beginning of next April with a program called Winter Sanctuary. This service offers a meal and a place to sleep out of the elements for the cities' homeless. It unquestionably is doing good work, needed work, and I read the article about it with equal amounts of increasing admiration for what they are doing and guilt for not doing more myself for those less fortunate.

And then, close to the bottom, there it was. After a short digression about the behavior of someone who was obviously suffering a mental or emotional problem was the statement, "The screening process is intended to weed out sex offenders or those who are intoxicated or agitated."

Weed out sex offenders. Does this mean those who are actively offending as they are applying for admission to the shelter? Could it be that someone on the screening committee had personal knowledge that certain individuals had just committed sexual offenses and intended to do so again?

Of course not. It means that part of the screening process involves running each applicant's name against the public sex offender registry, that unwieldy and unreliable list containing the names of people who broke the law--or in come cases were falsely accused of doing so--by committing an offense ranging somewhere on the scale between a stupid misdemeanor to a serious felony, some of them with a single offense committed over twenty years ago.

There is no murderers' registry to check and exclude the murderers. There is no drug dealers' registry to consult in order to keep out those who might sell illegal drugs to other shelter-seekers. There is no thieves' registry to enable the exclusion of those who might steal the meager possessions of other residents. Those who are drinkers are only excluded if they are drunk at the time of admission, and those who tend toward agitation must be visibly agitated at the time to be turned away.

But someone on the registry? All that is needed here to turn these men and women into the freezing cold is their names on a list, a list that no more tells anyone who they are now than their eye color predicts how tall they will grow.

If this discrimination were done on the basis of race or ethnicity, gender or sexual preference, religious preference--or lack of--, political persuasion, handicap or deformity, or any of the myriad other characteristics that set us apart from each other, all it would take would be a phone call to the local newspaper to have the place swarming with media and civil rights advocates and specialized lobby groups, and the shelter and the churches and everyone involved would be knocking each other down to get to the microphone to apologize.

But registrants? Those whose names are on a public sex offender registry?

The question answers itself.

The train wreck continues in Rhode Island

Byron Deweldon is not the poster boy for one-trial learning. He has several sexual assault convictions behind him and was civilly committed for eight years.

But he was released from civil commitment last year. That means that he was found no longer to be at a dangerous risk of re-offending. He could live in the community, monitored, as a registered offender.

And that is exactly what he did for almost a year. He settled down in a home with his mother in Warwick, Rhode Island. He lived quietly and with no further arrests. He was monitored by the authorities in Warwick and was on his way to becoming a slow learner who finally got it.

Then the Rhode Island Legislature, driven largely by one legislator who was angered when a registrant moved a few blocks from him, passed legislation increasing the residency restriction “buffer zone” around schools from 300 to 1,000 feet for the higher-level registrants. This encompassed the home occupied by Mr. Deweldon and his mother.

According to Deweldon, he was notified of this change and his imperative to find another place to live on September 17.  The next day he left home.

He traveled. He went to California, Florida, Maryland, Connecticut, Maine and Pennsylvania. He did not register in any of the states he visited for brief periods although the states required him to do so. Meanwhile, during a routine compliance check at his home in Rhode Island, his mother told the officers that he was traveling.

Deweldon then talked with the Warwick authorities and returned to Warwick where he was immediately arrested and is being held on warrants of failure to register in violation of SORNA.

He will most likely go back to prison—not for committing a sexual re-offense, not for stealing or assaulting or murdering, but for committing a crime that didn’t exist a few years ago, the crime of failure to register. Instead of continuing to live peacefully in his home with his mother, he will now again most likely be back in the Rhode Island prison system for a non-violent crime and because of a retroactively applied law that gave him no choice but to leave his home and go somewhere else.

This is the beginning. Numerous other registrants across Rhode Island, those that have stayed in their homes up to this point, will in a few days face either arrest or homelessness. The ACLU is fighting this. RSOL is fighting this. This cruel and retroactive piece of legislation was passed with no support from anyone except the Rhode Island legislators and the president of a union representing the correction officers who work in the Rhode Island prison system. Much evidence was presented against it, including expert testimony that these restrictions do only harm and do not provide a public safety benefit, but it passed anyway.

Byron Deweldon knows where he will be residing for the immediate—and most likely beyond—future. Sadly, other registered citizens in Rhode Island do not.

There are idiots, and they walk among us

I have a friend who often expresses the reluctance to say, "Well, now I've seen everything!" because, he claims, something more ridiculous is sure to come along.

And he's right.

A state senator in Florida has filed a bill "that would make it a crime for registered sex offenders to use a remote control drone to spy on kids or take their pictures." 

A drone. 

This is a prime example of what my buddy Lenore Skenazy likes to call "worst-first thinking." That is the tendency, in any situation, to think of the absolutely worst thing that could possibly happen and then proceed as though it would. This, however, goes right beyond worst-first thinking and off into the realms of "what were you smoking when you dreamed that up?"

The good senator admits she has "never heard of a case where a sex offender used a drone to stalk a child, but she contends it's bound to happen eventually."

This is the same reasoning that has put Halloween restrictions for registrants in place in three-fourths of our states in spite of the fact that no case can be found of a child being abducted by a registrant on Halloween in America and in spite of the fact that, year after year, both the states that have such restrictions and those that do not report zero such instances.

But getting back to drones--what's next? How about a law against registrants tunneling underground from outside their 1000-feet restriction areas and popping up, like a gopher, in a playground, camera in hand? Or dropping from parachutes into a park? Or, a-la-Trojan Horse, wrapping oneself inside a huge box, bow on top, and being delivered to a child's birthday party?

I suppose it would be too much to hope that some legislator might go for facts and evidence and propose legislation shown to actually be effective in increasing public safety and doing something toward actual prevention of child sexual abuse.

I guess that would REALLY be in the realm of the ridiculous.