Best Sex Writing 2009 (9 page)

There are other consequences of residency restrictions. Laura Arnold recently had to find a way around the law to get a client into a drug treatment facility that was too close to a school. The client, a former prostitute, is a registered sex offender because she once said,“Show me your dick,” to a vice cop.“Counseling” a per- son to expose himself is a sex crime.

Unlike most new laws the City Council enacts, this one got very little discussion; councilmembers talked in general terms about needing to protect children, and Councilmember Ben Hueso talked about how a similar National City ordinance was pushing sex offenders into his district and so the city needed to push back. There was no factual evidence presented to the public as to why the ordinance was needed.

Not only does the ordinance lack any clear reason for being, but also, as written, it contains wrong information, specifically a portion included in the “whereas” statements that lead off the document:

“According to a 1998 report by the U.S. Department of Justice, sex offenders are the least likely to be cured and the most likely to re-offend and prey on the most innocent members of our society, and more than two-thirds of victims of rape and sexual assault are under the age of 18, and sex offenders have a higher recidivism rate for their crimes than any other type of violent felon.”

No such study exists. The information, rather, comes from a talk given by Florence Shapiro, a senator from Texas, at a 1998

conference organized by the Department of Justice. Shapiro was there to discuss Ashley’s Law, her overhaul of Texas’s sex-offender rules, prompted by the highly publicized death of Ashley Estell, a seven-year-old who, in 1993, was abducted from a playground and later found strangled. A man named Michael Blair, who’d helped search for the girl, was convicted and sentenced to death for her murder. Though an autopsy found no indication that Ashley had been sexually abused, Shapiro stuck with the story that the girl had been raped, and that’s what she told the audience who gathered for the conference. Blair, twenty-three-years-old at the time of the trial and already a convicted child molester, damned himself by telling the jury that he saw nothing wrong with consensual sex with underage girls. (Blair’s conviction is currently on appeal since repeated DNA tests of physical evidence suggest there were two men involved, neither of them Blair.)

Because Blair had served a shortened sentence for a child-mo- lestation case, he became Shapiro’s poster sex offender—if he’d re- mained in prison, she argued, Ashley would still be alive.

“Sex offenders are a very unique type of criminal,” Shapiro told conference attendees. “I like to say they have three very unique characteristics: they are the least likely to be cured; they are the most likely to re-offend; and they prey on the most innocent mem- bers of our society.”

Those words—attributed to a “U.S. Department of Justice study”—have made their way into various pieces of sex-offender legislation, like Jessica’s Law and San Diego’s new ordinance, even though the DOJ included a disclaimer along with the transcript of the conference, saying the contents “do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.”

One part of the statement is true—more than two-thirds of victims of rape and sexual assault are under eighteen. But the rest

of the information isn’t accurate. A number of studies, including two by the Department of Justice (one released in 1997, another in 2003), have found that sex offenders have a much lower recidivism rate than any other type of criminal. According to the 1997 DOJ report, for which researchers tracked 272,111 parolees for three years, only 5.3 percent of the 9,691 sex offenders in the group were rearrested for another sex crime. As for the non-sex-offender co- hort, 68 percent were rearrested. Other studies have found higher rates of recidivism among sex offenders—14 percent, on average, and as high as 26 percent—but still lower than for other criminals. Parole’s Kubicek said his own experience confirms what the studies have found. “It’s very low for us for a new sex offense,”

he said.

As the state’s Sex Offender Management Board put it, in its 219-page analysis of California’s sex-offender laws, released in Jan- uary, “Statements that sex offenders cannot be ‘cured’—a concept generally accepted by experts in this field—have often been mis- interpreted to mean that they will inevitably re-offend. In fact, the majority of sex offenders do not re-offend sexually over time.”

Ultimately, though, debates about recidivism mean little when it comes to the population most affected by sexual assault. As Phyllis Shess, the deputy district attorney who heads the DA’s sex-offender unit, pointed out,“You have to ask, is 1 percent [recidivism] accept- able? Is 10 percent acceptable? When you’re talking about these kinds of issues, no, it isn’t.”

So what’s the answer? Jessica’s Law mandated that all “high-risk” felony sex offenders must wear a GPS device for life, so that their movement can be monitored by law enforcement. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation began outfitting all newly paroled sex offenders—regardless of risk level—with some form of GPS device beginning last July.

In December, California was spending $21,000 a day on GPS monitoring, which comes out to $20 million a year. The state’s Legislative Analyst’s office estimated that within ten years, the cost for GPS monitoring could grow to $100 million annually and con- tinue to increase. Right now local governments are expected to pick up the cost after a person completes parole, an idea that no municipality has yet embraced.

While some studies have found that GPS-monitored offenders have lower recidivism rates, pilot programs in San Diego and Ten- nessee found no significant difference between GPS-monitored sex offenders and those not on GPS. It’s not necessarily going to stop someone who’s dead-set on re-offending.“It’s GPS, it’s not real-time; you’re not going to get the information until the following day.”

If anything, it stops an offender from absconding, though the device can just as easily be cut off. The Tennessee Department of Corrections warned that GPS devices are a resource drain when used too broadly and shouldn’t be used for lifelong monitoring. Successful rehabilitation requires that an offender be given a goal to work toward, the study found.

At a community forum on San Diego’s Child Protection ordi- nance, Al Killen-Harvey, supervisor in the trauma counseling pro- gram at Rady Children’s Hospital, questioned whether GPS de- vices were the best use of limited resources:

“We only have so much money, and that money’s now gone to looking at these kinds of tracking devices. We’ve wiped out early prevention and education programs that we used to have fifteen and twenty years ago where we taught kids about healthy touch and bad touch and how to report it. We’ve wiped out funding for mental-health services for families that are economically distressed, which is a factor that may lead someone to cross a boundary that they wouldn’t have crossed before.

“In the macro sense, yeah, we’ve missed the mark here, and we’re allocating way too much money in an area where the bang for the buck is minimal compared to where the real risk level is,” Killen-Harvey said.

His point on prevention is an important one. Eighty-seven per- cent of sex crimes committed each year are first-time offenses by people who aren’t already known to the police. It’s a statistic that turns public policy on its head—why put all the attention on the guys we already know about?

“There are agencies out there that have demonstrated that if you do a good public health, public awareness campaign, including a [hotline for] people who are afraid they might hurt a child…you can actually reduce the incidence of sexual assault in your commu- nity,” said Marian Gaston, the public defender.“Why wouldn’t we spend money on that? And instead, we’re busy spending how many millions of dollars on GPS for people who are in their sixties and who are statistically just not going to do it again.”

Then there’s the issue of treatment. The public’s perception is that treatment doesn’t work—a sex offender is a sex offender for life. But not everyone who molests a child fits the clinical defini- tion of a pedophile, for one thing—sometimes other self-destruc- tive factors drive behavior, like drug addiction. Recent studies have shown that, for repeat offenders, therapy does, in fact, lead to lower recidivism rates. California, however, is one of the few states that don’t offer in-custody treatment; only once a person’s released from custody is treatment mandated. It’s puzzling, given that Jessica’s Law is putting people behind bars longer.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has plans to build a new locked treatment facility for sex offenders, but, as the state’s Sex Offender Management Board pointed out in its January report, nothing’s moved beyond the planning stage.

Anyone who falls into the category of “sexually violent predator,” based on a prerelease assessment, is turned over to one of two state mental hospitals, rather than paroled, where the individual goes through a multiphase treatment program, is reassessed and then, if he’s found by a judge to be stable enough, released back into the community.

Once someone’s off probation or parole, treatment ends and it’s rare that those who need it will seek it voluntarily, said Shess, the deputy district attorney.

“We did an experiment through the [county’s] Sexual Offender Management Council, offering resources to people who felt like stresses—whatever it was in their life that might be putting them in a situation where they might re-offend—and no one took advan- tage of it. The counseling wasn’t free, but it would have been low cost,” Shess said. And, even then, the county would have made arrangements for someone who couldn’t afford to pay. “We didn’t even get that far. Nobody called to say, ‘Hey I’m a prior offender, I’m feeling like I might need help’—no one.”

Around 90 percent of sex offenders aren’t under state or county supervision, Kubicek noted.“The 10 percent that are on parole are receiving the best supervision available,” he said. “My concern is, how do we enforce the 90 percent who are receiving no supervi- sion, who are just registering?”

One might assume that when a sex offender goes in to register with the police each year (or, each month if he’s a transient), there might be a brief talk with a counselor or some other kind of as- sessment that happens. But, aside from an initial assessment when an individual first registers, there’s not much follow-up.The city of San Diego has only five officers dedicated to the sexual-assault unit (which includes sex-offender management): one sergeant (Mark Sullivan), two detectives and two code-compliance officers who

staff the office where more than one hundred people go to register each week.

What if, rather than putting restrictions on where a sex offender can live and move about town—strategies whose effectiveness isn’t supported by evidence—the City Council pledged to fund a risk- assessment counselor for the police department? Sure, money’s short, but it’s hard to argue when it comes to protecting kids. Hire an intake counselor or set up a hotline that someone like my mom could call to find out how to respond when her kid says the baby- sitter’s asking her to do things she doesn’t understand.

Another thing to think about: it’s difficult to turn in a friend or relative when you know that, unlike any other crime, this is one that will follow the person around for the rest of his life.Would my mom have turned the guy over to police if it meant a lifetime of public scrutiny and, in essence, banishment?

Probably not.

War games: no Wmds but military Police Find “dangerous” dildos in iraq

t om J ohansmeyer

In the middle of the night on July 5, 2007, U.S. Air Force Military Police cleared the 402nd Field Support Brigade’s barracks. When the dust settled, the MPs had walked away with armfuls of contra- band taken from the soldiers and civilian contractors stationed at Camp Anaconda in Iraq. The illicit fare removed from the facility included liquor, adult videos, and novelty items—all prohibited un- der U.S.Army Central Command’s (CENTCOM’s) General Order 1a (GO-1a).

For civilian contractors, the punishment for possession of con- traband is the immediate loss of employment; military personnel can be prosecuted either judicially or nonjudicially under the Uni- form Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).

Through the course of the search, MPs discovered dildos owned by two civilian contractors and confiscated them under the assump- tion that they were contraband. Immediately, the women feared

that they would lose their jobs, but the MPs later were advised by legal authorities that dildos are not considered pornography—and that the women should be permitted to keep their jobs.

GO-1a explicitly forbids the possession of pornographic ma- terials in Iraq, but it does not define clearly what is prohibited, making anything but the most monastic lifestyle a daily risk of unemployment or other penalties.The ambiguity inherent in GO- 1a makes attempts at enforcement perfectly comical to all except those personally affected.

GO-1a, issued by General Tommy Franks on December 19, 2000, explicitly prohibits the possession or use of privately owned firearms and explosives, entry into a mosque except as directed by military authorities, making or consuming alcohol, drugs, and drug paraphernalia, gambling, currency exchange, and “proselytizing.”

The rationale for GO-1a, according to the order itself, is to “preserv[e] U.S./host nation relations and combined operations of U.S. and friendly forces.” This need arises from the fact that “[c]urrent operations and deployments place United States Armed Forces into…countries where local laws and customs prohibit or restrict certain activities which are generally permissible in western societies.”

Fifth on the list of prohibited activities is the “[i]ntroduction, possession, transfer, sale, creation, or display of any pornographic or sexually explicit photograph, videotapes, movie, drawing, book, magazine, or similar representations.” GO-1a continues,“The pro- hibitions contained in this paragraph shall not apply to AFRTS [Armed Forces Radio and Television Services] broadcasts and com- mercial videotapes distributed and/or displayed through AAFES [Army and Air Force Exchange Services] or MWR [Military Wel-