Picketing and threats for Brock: Is there a better way?

In the wake of Brock Turner’s stint in jail and subsequent release, America has not behaved very well. Like the cluster of schoolboys ganging up to neutralize the playground bully, their actions are understandable but not helpful to the ultimate goal of ending the violence.

What is the ultimate goal in regard to Brock Turner? Surely it is that he has learned his lesson and will not commit another sexual offense.

What is the broader goal in regard to the community and society? Surely it is that public safety is enhanced.

Groups of armed vigilantes outside his home and hate messages scrawled on his sidewalk fall far short of contributing to either goal, and many of those not close enough to strap on their weapons and descend on the Turner home are cheering on those who are. Additionally, some media reports all but encourage and applaud such behavior.

What will contribute to both goals? Culling from studies and experts who have worked for years toward these goals, who have made the choice to be part of the solution, it is this: successfully integrating the offender back into the community. And what works toward this? That is best answered by looking at what destroys it: isolation; shaming; rejection; ostracization; hatred; vilification.

Neighbors with guns, reminiscent of lynch mobs several decades ago.

Brock’s neighbors are not expected to welcome him with apple pies and invitations to backyard barbecues – at least not now.

But if they too want to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem, they will leave him and his family alone.

They will look within themselves and find the grace to consider the greater good of society rather than reacting out of a media-whipped, frenzied belief that he wasn’t punished enough – a judgment call that was not theirs to make in the first place.

No, Senator Grassley, the Adam Walsh Act does NOT need to be re-authorized

Mr. Grassley, like you, we grieve with families of children who are victimized and abused, and we especially grieve that virtually all of this type of crime is committed by the family members and others close to their young victims. Like you, we would like to see a strong commitment to keeping our nation’s children safe.

Unlike you, however, we have seen no evidence of this commitment for the past twenty-five years. Such a commitment must be based on solid research, on facts and evidence, and on the reality of both child sexual abuse and of those who are the abusers.

The Adam Walsh Act is ill-conceived legislation, contraindicated by empirical evidence, which fails to address the crime of child sexual abuse because it does not target those who commit child sexual abuse.

The rhetoric and the reality of the AWA are light years apart. The rhetoric says the AWA “was enacted in response to multiple, notorious cases involving children who had been targeted by adult criminals, many of them repeat sex offenders.” The reality is that the cases that drove the legislation are the rarest of rare crimes. They are crimes of murder. They are crimes that would not have been prevented by the AWA or by a thousand sex offender registries.

The reality is that the crime that set John Walsh upon his crusade, the murder of his son, was not committed by a person on the sex offender registry at all.

The reality is that the 800,000 persons on sex offender registries across the nation -- ranging in age, according to the various registries, from nine years old to well over a hundred – have not killed anyone. The reality is that the vast majority of them are not repeat offenders but one-time offenders who, after completion of their sentences, live in our communities without ever committing another offense.

The reality is that the many, many millions of dollars and many millions of law-enforcement hours expended in public notification and public registration of those who have committed sexual crimes do not advance public safety.  A huge and growing body of evidence attests that they do not affect the rate of first time sexual offenses, of repeat offenses, or of child sexual offenses. 

And so we grieve also, Mr. Grassley.

We grieve that our priorities have become focused on ineffective punishments rather than prevention programs. Last January, a coalition including both sexual assault prevention and victims’ groups called for the creation of a stable funding stream dedicated to preventing child sexual abuse and exploitation. The group asked for funding to equal at least one percent – ONE percent! -- of the millions currently spent on “after-the-fact” responses like sex registries and civil commitment. They are still waiting.

We, like you, grieve for Jetseta and Dru and Megan. We also grieve for other rare cases of children falling victims to repeat offenders, those in more recent years who were not “saved” by the registry or the AWA, those like Jaycee and Chelsea and Cherish.

And we grieve for the deaths of those who were murdered for no reason other than that they were on a public registry, targeted and slaughtered for an offense long ago paid for, such as were Gary and Jerry and Jeremy and his wife Christine, killed just because she was with him when vigilante murderers found him, and Hugh Edwards, who wasn’t even on the registry but was mistaken for someone who was.

We grieve for the registrants who have paid for their crimes and want nothing more than to be allowed to live law-abiding lives but cannot find a job or even a place to live. We grieve for their families, especially their children, who suffer ostracism and ridicule and abuse due to the crimes of their parents.

We grieve especially for the children of continuing and new sexual abuse who will grow up to know that their society chose to ignore their plight, invisible and easy to ignore, in favor of a very public and popular demand for policies and laws and legislation that wasted millions and accomplished nothing.

And we grieve for that society, which is OUR society, and for what it has become.

Are We Right to Encourage Hatred, Violence, Rape Against Sex Offenders?

Close your eyes and remember the worst thing that ever happened to you. Maybe you lost a loved one in a tragedy. Maybe you suffered a horrible accident that left you paralyzed or disabled. Or maybe you are one of the more fortunate ones, and the loss of an expensive diamond ring or the break-up with a boyfriend or girlfriend is the worst you have experienced.

Or maybe you are like Diena Thompson and suffered the almost unimaginable—the violent death of a precious child at the hands of a rapist and murderer. What kind of revenge would you have wished on her killer? What type of payback would ease your pain a little?

Jarred Harrell is right where he belongs, in prison for life for the brutal murder of little Somer in late 2009. Would that be enough for you, or would you want more payback, more revenge?

The house where Jarred had lived and Somer was murdered had fallen into disrepair and long been condemned. Earlier this month, it was burned to the ground as part of a fire-training exercise by the Orange Park, Florida, fire department—and Diena Thompson. She participated with glee, her smile described as “cathartic” by a journalist, and, according to his interview, she felt delight in the act, proclaiming herself “the big, bad wolf this time.”

I am sure there is not a one of us who does not understand her feelings.

The media is making much of this, and beyond the local level. Is this wrong? If so, why?

One answer is found in the comments posted to the comment board of one article. They range from, “He [Harrell] should have been in it,” to, “Maybe he will be getting raped for life where he is. Wouldn't that make you feel better? And when he is 80 and some young 25 y/o comes in and rapes him and the guards ignore his screams, that will be part of justice.”  

No, that will be part of something that has no place in justice. That is part of vigilantism. That is as much a part of evil as that which Jarred Harrell committed. What irony it is that, in a protest against sexual violence, one wishes for more sexual violence to be committed.

The journalist who wrote that article and played up the joy that Diena experienced in her metaphoric act of vengeance knew that comments would be of that nature, as did the media outlet that published it, as did other journalists and outlets that wrote and published like stories, and they are many.

The harm is more than just giving vigilantes a platform from which to spew their hatred, ignorance, and violence. There are, according to fairly difficult-to-gather figures, somewhere over 700,000 men, women, and children registered as sex offenders in our nation. A scant handful have come near the atrocities that Harrell visited upon Somer, but the vigilante mentality is unable to process that.  To those determined to hate, stories such as this are all of the justification they require to continue the hatred, to refuse to believe the facts, to demand with every opportunity the harshest possible consequences to everyone on the registry because, you see, they all molested children; they are all rapists and destroyers of innocent young lives, and if they haven’t murdered yet, well, just give them time because they will all do it again and will probably kill their next victims.

They are undeterred by the facts that give lie to these spurious statements.

So the questions remain: Are we right to encourage hate and violence against sex offenders? Does it really help those in pain heal? And the biggest question of all, in a paraphrase of an old cliche: Does an eye-for-an-eye make the world a safer, better place to live—or just a blind one? Or, in this case, a raped one? 

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth

On May 20, an editorial was printed in the Keene, New Hampshire's Sentinel. Titled "State's sex-offender registry overreaches,” it says much that is good and grounded in facts.

Its primary thesis is that inclusion on a public sex offender registry is punishment and not merely regulatory. When this scheme was first conceived, it was pronounced to be a regulatory mechanism, and the Supreme Court agreed. Since then, being placed on a public registry has indeed become, increasingly each year, a

death knell for many.

Employers have fired productive workers due to threats of boycotts and, in some cases, vandalism to their property because they employed a sex offender. Many registrants can’t even get hired.

Registrants with children suffer many varied punishments: inability to keep suitable housing in which to raise their children, forced separation from their families due to the housing and a myriad of other issues, having their children terrified by vigilantes vandalizing the home or the family vehicle, and seeing them come home in tears and even bruises from the treatment received at the hands of their peers due to daddy being on the sex offender registry.

Registrants and their family members are indeed targets for all sorts of acts of vigilantism, up to and including murder, as witnessed not only in Maine, as the article points out, but also in Washington State--twice--in California, in South Carolina, and, ironically, in a very suspicious case right there in Keene itself--and these are only the tip of the iceberg.

So--well done, Sentinel.

Until you said, "Given the recidivism rates involved in sexual assault cases, especially those victimizing children, there’s a lot to be said for keeping the public informed of legitimate threats."

Which recidivism rates, Sentinel? Those of the latest study by the Department of Justice showing the re-arrest rate for a second sexual offense by a registrant to be 5.7% and the re-conviction rate to be 3.5%? Or possibly New Hampshire's own  2010 state report of sex offenders returned to prison within five years for a sexual re-offense, as reported by the Citizens for Criminal Justice Reform. "... the 5-year new victim re-offense rate for sex offenders was just 1.2%….

"These low numbers suggests sex offenders respond well to supervision and treatment, and don't commit new sex crimes at the rate the public thinks they do, said Michael Lawlor, Connecticut’s chief of criminal-justice policy."

And as far as those who victimize children, two facts come into play. Children who are sexually abused are
overwhelmingly victims of those in close and trusted positions in their lives, many of them conditions of incest. Studies show that, once these types of offenders are arrested and dealt with in the court system, they have extremely low levels of re-offense, lower than the average lows, and it has nothing to do with "keeping the public informed." These are not the "legitimate threats"; they almost always are correlated with those whose chosen victims are random strangers, and those situations are rare.

Those who advocate for fact-based legislation governing the treatment of those who have sexually offended appreciate the Sentinel's tearing away some of the myths and exposing the facts. We will appreciate it more when all of the facts are revealed.

"We have to say you can't go out and kill sex offenders, but .... you really should"

This opinion piece masquerading as a public safety announcement has mastered the art of double-speak to a high degree.

The stated purpose of the piece is to inform their reading public that they will be publishing names and information on all registrants who move into the community. Yeah, they know that the info is available online and through the DPS and even to people's computers if they sign up, but they want to be sure they cover any gap, all in the interest of public safety, of course.

Really? After quoting the standard warning from the website about not using the information to injure or harass, this is their take on it: "In other words, just because you might know there is a convicted sexual offender in your neighborhood, it doesn’t mean you have the right to take the law into your own hands."

Take the law into your own hands---why? Because someone lives in your neighborhood?

And now the seed is planted. Being a convicted sexual offender, regardless of how rehabilitated, regardless of how law abiding a life is being lived now, regardless of how long ago the offense was, regardless of potential danger to children or other family members, is a reason for someone to "take the law" into his hands. What does that even mean, "take the law"? Surely we can hope that the law doesn't bully the children of registrants or egg their houses or beat them up or shoot at their cars for no reason whatsoever or ambush them and kill them.

Emboldened now, the article continues, "Many people wonder how the justice system can release predators and pedophiles back into society. Many of us wish they could be locked up forever or sent to an island somewhere ... or even more drastic measures be taken." Even more drastic measures...like bullying children, egging houses....committing murder?

Then, in an attempt to justify their thinly disguised attempts to encourage vigilantism, they continue: "We don’t condone any extralegal actions, though we don’t believe the judicial system is designed to adequately address the problems of sex offenders in society," and, "Despite how heinous the nature of their crimes might be, they have to be given the chance to prove they can hew to the straight and narrow. Unfortunately, many people with these deviant predilections never reform..."

Even a child could translate this: "The law just turns them loose and doesn't know how to deal with them, so it's up to us...they aren't ever going to change."

Even if that were true, even if statistical evidence did not abound that, once charged and punished, only a very small percentage of former sexual offenders will commit another sexual offense, the nastiness that seeps through every word of this article is the same sort of nastiness that left two little boys in Washington State without a father and took the life of a wife along with her registered husband in South Carolina and has swept and is still sweeping our nation like a blight, aided and facilitated by a hit list called the public sex offender registry.

And finally, for those of their readers who may have a few compunctions about picking on kids or vandalizing houses or attacking neighbors with baseball bats: "While you are legally restricted from harassing them, we don’t think a friendly reminder that we are watching is out of the question."

Other than really, really wanting their definition of "friendly," I wish they would at least look at the research showing that, along with housing and employment, community support for former offenders is essential in creating conditions that keep re-offense at its lowest and public safety at its highest. I mean, after all, this whole thing is about public safety....right?

Ironically, the title of this piece of writing is "Remaining Vigilant." Thanks to it, registrants struggling to build law-abiding lives and keep themselves and their children and families fed and with roofs over their heads now have another reason to be constantly vigilant for those who would harm them, their property, or their lives.

When is free speech not free?

~~by Shelly

We know we can't yell fire in a crowded theater. Or incite to riot. Or threaten the president.

What about gloating on air at the death of someone we don't even know because he is a registered sex offender? What about encouraging hate-mongering and violence against people who have paid their debts to society and have integrated into society as law-abiding citizens?

Comments posted on articles about the murders of or attacks on those on the registry make it clear that there is an element out there willing to encourage and praise such illegal vigilante activity, up to and including murder.

But from recognized radio personalities?

A portion of the Kimberly and Beck show from September 19, 2013, has these persons verbally high-fiving it with a caller who is expressing joy at a neighbor's death as a result of his house burning. Kimberly and Beck were encouraging all she said. Whichever of the two is the female seemed especially delighted that he might have been murdered, wondering aloud if someone might have tied him to the bed and set it on fire.

According to the broadcast, the man who died, Robert Harris, was on the public sex offender registry. He committed a sexual crime in 1993. These radio "personalities," one of them, with the other making grunts of agreement, said, "They never are rehabilitated." Since he has not re-offended in the 21 years since his original crime, for which he served his punishment, the ignorance of that remark is obvious.

It is disgusting that this hate-mongering and the dissemination of incorrect information was allowed to be made over the air. Among other comments, they said that he "got what was coming to him." That is the talk of vigilantes. He served his court-assessed punishment and was living a law-abiding life. Are they suggesting that private citizens have the right to mete out punishment over and above what the courts deem appropriate?

The radio station has received emails expressing consternation and condemnation. Due to the lag-time between when we discovered this abuse of public broadcasting and when it happened back in September, the station managers obviously feel our concerns are moot and warrant no response.

But what if their programming encourages more attacks on registrants? What if their hate-mongering finds fertile ground in some unstable mind and sends it out in search of a registrant to harm?

What if the cost of free speech turns out to be more lives?

"But....it's okay to bully sex offenders, isn't it?"

Bullying is very much in the news right now. My friend Marie over at Notes from the Handbasket posted a brilliantly done piece today.

And someone called Scoot at wwl.com wrote a most thought provoking piece about bullying.

These are the jewels gleaned from his piece.

"It is imperative for every parent to teach their children the coping skills to deal with bullying. The first simple lesson is that nothing anyone else says to you, or about you, can actually change who you are."

"We now live in a society that has developed the collective belief that we have a right to go through life and not be offended by anything or anyone. There will always be things that offend us in life and no one should expect, or demand, a world that is free of things we find offensive."

"Our quest to achieve a politically correct society has contributed greatly to the idea that we have this right not to be offended. Younger generations have been protected and coddled by their parents’ generations to the point where they are no longer taught the emotional survival skills we learned."

These are tidbits that may more appropriately fit with the philosophy, with which I totally agree, of another blogger friend, Lenore, over at Range Free Kids.

But I started with the Handbasket Notes, and there I will return.

Those who are registered sex offenders, their children, and their families, know first hand about bullying. It has been an element in the suicide of many a person who is accused of a sexual crime or who was on the public registry and found life intolerable. It has been the cause of misery, torment, property damage, and actual physical assault up to and including murder for many, many more. Research done by Jill Levenson and Lynn University in Florida documents the extent to which bullying of registrants and their families has gone.

In the arena of cyber-bullying, that against registered sex offenders as a class exceeds any other. Any article about a sex offender issue draws comments that are vile and vicious. The Internet offers anonymity, and that is when our true natures come out. I cannot judge the condition of another's soul, but if what they write when no one knows who they are is any indication, their souls must be as black as the jaws of Hell.

"Too bad the shooter was such a poor shot!" This was posted on an article about a registrant being shot, barely escaping death, just because his name was on the public registry.

On an article about legislation to forcefully castrate sex offenders at their own expense, we have, "Make them pay for it? I would cut their balls off for free," and, "I would vote for this in a heart beat. In fact, I think these pricks needs to be stripped naked, marched through city streets to a public area where he will be on a high platform for everyone to see...." What follows turned my stomach and made me wonder if all humans really come from the same beginning.

And finally, on an article about a man who was just accused of sexual misconduct being beaten within an inch of his life by a mob, a poster nailed it: "If the government didn't want the registered sex offenders assaulted and beaten, they wouldn't have them register so the public can find them and beat them. I say every one registered should get same treatment as this offender got, if not worse!"

Out of the mouths of vigilantes.

Are We a Nation of Laws or a Nation of Vigilantes?

According to a press release titled “Vigilante Assaults on the Rise – A Return to a Lawless America?” and posted on the RSOL website, “In a span of only a few months' time, local and national media, fueled by the fires of social media, have documented an alarming rise in open, public vigilante attacks against citizens of this country.”

New Mexico is contributing to that trend. In Albuquerque on Thursday, the 5th, in the early morning hours, a man was assaulted by three others and beaten so severely he was not expected to survive.

The man who was beaten was engaged in an illegal and disturbing act, and he will be charged. He was peering in the bedroom window of two young sisters, ages 13 and 15. He was nude. According to the 911 dispatcher, “Three men from within the residence chased the alleged prowler away from the property and a physical fight ensued.”

The three men were the father, the brother, and a neighbor of the girls. What ensued was not so much a fight as it was a brutal attack that left the victim of the attack barely clinging to life. He was taken to the hospital in critical condition. His condition has since been upgraded to stable.

Comment boards on online articles covering this story praise the trio of men for “protecting family” and “doing what any man would do.”

Running the man off of their property would have been protecting family.

Holding him, forcefully if needed, until law enforcement could arrive would have been protecting family.

Chasing him from the property, assaulting him on the street, and beating him almost to death is not protecting family. It is committing a criminal act. It is a violent assault. It is vigilantism.

New Mexico has its own history of vigilantism going back to 2008. A man named Elton John Richard had been sentenced to two years after pleading to voluntary homicide. He had caught a man breaking into his car, chased him almost half a mile from his property, and shot him in the back and killed him while he was climbing over a fence.

After being in prison for four months, he was freed by a state district judge who reduced his sentence to time served. He gave as his reason that Richard was no threat to the community. That may quite possibly have been true so long as no one else in the community tried to break into his car.

The pattern was set with this case that those who commit acts of vigilante violence in New Mexico will not be held accountable.

And now, five years later, the trend continues. The Albuquerque Journal reports that the father in the assault trio is facing charges of aggravated battery. We shall see. And what of the other two assailants? Will they be charged? We shall see. RSOL has issued a press release calling on the county district attorney to do the right thing and charge those involved appropriately.

There is not a one of us that at some point in life has not suffered an injustice, a harm, an assault, or an act of violence. If we each sought our own revenge, took the law into our own hands, and wreaked vigilante revenge upon out wrongdoers, the streets would run with blood from coast to coast.

We are a nation with a system of rules and laws; injustices, harms, assault, and acts of violence must be dealt with through our established justice system, which includes law enforcement, the legal and court system, and the prison system.

To not deal appropriately with vigilantes is to encourage them and to say that their illegal acts are somehow acceptable.

When crime is committed, it must be addressed by law enforcement.

And this includes crime that is committed by vigilantes under the guise of street justice.

Killing Sex Offenders--It Just Makes--SENSE??

By now the news of registered sex offender Charles Parker and his wife Gretchen being brutally slain in their home in rural South Carolina has spread beyond the boundaries of that state, although barely. A search for "sex offender" on a national database yields story after story about misconduct by registrants--parole violations, failure to register, a sexual assault, even a bank robbery in which the headlines loudly announce that the captured robber was also a sex offender--but, except for the affected counties in South Carolina, few seem to care that a husband and wife team, two crazed, skinhead vigilantes--self-proclaimed by words and tattoos--used the state's online registry as a hit list and road map to the Parkers' home and slaughtered them and, when apprehended, announced that they already had tomorrow's target picked out, another registrant chosen from the registry.

But that isn't what this post is about. That was covered in this press release that went across the state of South Carolina and to all other states as well.

This post is about something a psychologist said in an interview about the crime and the motive behind it.

" 'Parallel that to the prison system,' said psychologist Dr. Roger Rhoades. 'Are there a lot of sex offenders hurt or killed (there)? Yeah.'

Rhoades said that if you want to see some sense in what happened in Jonesville, you have to take a 'prison mindset,' and suddenly the case becomes clear.

'The bottom line is if this happened in a prison, there wouldn't even be a glitch, it would just be another day in prison life,' he said."

Did everyone get that? See some sense? The assault and murder of those in prison for a sexual offense is a commonplace, every-day event that makes sense within the prison context? And what makes this so horrible is...he is correct.

Violence in prison has always been accepted as just part of the penalty one pays for going there, especially for those with sexually-related offenses.

This is unacceptable. America imprisons more citizens per capita than any other civilized nation. America imprisons more citizens for sexual offenses than any other nation, period. It is totally unacceptable that men, women, and juveniles are thrown in prison for offenses ranging from trivial to serious, anything that can have the word "sex" attached to it, and then have those responsible for their safety turn their backs and shrug their shoulders and say, "Oh, well..." when they are raped, assaulted, and murdered.

To stop vigilantes from using sex offender registries as hit lists of their victims, registrants' addresses, at the very least,  must be removed from public view, but a responsible governor can do this; it was done in Maine immediately following a vigilante murder there of two registrants.

But what will it take to stop those with sexual offenses from being brutalized and murdered in prison? What will it take for the public to stop seeing that as just something that happens, something that makes sense? What will it take?

We aren't forgetting about sex offenders--we are forgetting about children

In 1992, a little boy was sexually assaulted by a 19-year-old young man who, as far as I can determine, had no previous arrests for sexual offenses. The episode was life altering for the young victim and even more so for his mother, Judy Cornett. She embarked on a personal vendetta to track out-of-compliance registrants and turn them in. She became a very vocal voice, and still is, earning her both praise and criticism from those who recognize that her persecution of those who had sexually offended is contrary to what research shows as most helpful in lowering future risks.

Others who have been through such an experience have used it as an impetus to action and advocacy. However, such an experience also produces tunnel vision. It isn’t sex offenders who have been forgotten, as the title of the Fox news item suggests. Every media source that can throw the term into a headline does so. Every politician who wants to increase his chances for reelection writes a “get tougher on sex offenders” law.

No, it isn’t sex offenders that have been forgotten; it is children who have been forgotten. The vast majority of children who are victims of molestation or any type of abuse are not victims of registered sex offenders; they are victims of those who are close to them in their lives. And they are indeed forgotten and ignored in the mad frenzy to push former offenders further and further from society.

Cornett says, “…sex offenders are coming out of prison every day….We need to get back on track. We need to get out there. We need to start doing the neighborhood notifications. We need to bring this into the schools.”

This is tunnel vision at its worse. How will this focus on former offenders address these facts?

• According to FBI statistics, less than 1% of abducted children are victims of a registered offender.
• According to the Office of Juvenile Justice, stranger molestation of children—not even RSOs, just those not known to the child or family—comprise between 2 and 6% of the total with family and acquaintances making up the rest. 
• According to all sources, sexual abuse of children comprises less than 10% of all abuse, and virtually all other abuse is at the hands of their caregivers, not registered sex offenders. 

Yes, we need to get on track. We need some portion—any portion—of the money and resources dedicated to tracking registered sex offenders diverted to awareness, education, and prevention programs that will help save children’s lives. What we are doing is criminal. What Ms. Cornett is doing is, possibly, well-intentioned, possibly even understandable, but criminal.

We aren’t ignoring sex offenders. We are ignoring virtually every child in America who is being abused and molested.