Showing posts with label MassHysteria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MassHysteria. Show all posts
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Thursday, May 9, 2013
OR - Portland's NIMBY Elite
Labels: CrimeVigilante , MassHysteria , MobMentality , Oregon , Treatment , Video
05/08/2013
By Pamela Fitzsimmons
When registered sex offender Thomas Henry Madison of Gresham, Ore., turned up six months ago at a neighborhood meeting protesting a sex offender clinic, he was tossed out.
- He was tossed out because people don't want to hear anything except their opinions.
That protest was in the Inner Southeast Portland enclave of Sellwood/Moreland, and those neighbors succeeded in shutting down the clinic.
Last week, Madison was back at a different neighborhood protest – this one fighting the new location of that same clinic, Whole Systems Counseling. It’s now open in Outer Southeast Portland in a working-class neighborhood. These residents let Madison have his say.
They also made it clear that while they don’t like inheriting Sellwood/Moreland’s problem, they also don’t want to dump it on some other neighborhood. They would like to find a solution.
- Like we've said many times, no matter where they place the treatment facility, someone will start a mob.
Inner and Outer Southeast Portland are flip sides of the same city.
Inner Southeast Portland attracts New York Times restaurant critics. The neighborhoods found in the Inner Southeast, such as Sellwood/Moreland, merit their own walking maps. Sellwood/Moreland is home to antique shops, galleries, pubs, restaurants, a movie theater, a farmer’s market. Reed College nestles along its border.
Outer Southeast Portland attracts snubs and ubiquitous, strip-commercial development found in any American city. The specific neighborhood where Whole Systems Counseling opened includes a trailer court, mobile home park and apartments. The clinic is in Plaza 125, which looks like the typical small-office complex where you would find a dentist, an attorney, an ob/gyn. There’s plenty of parking.
When Whole Systems Counseling was located in Sellwood/Moreland, it was in a nondescript building at 7304 SE Milwaukie Ave. Residents were concerned that the Boys and Girls Club was nearby at 7119 SE Milwaukie, and a Montessori pre-school was at 7126 SE Milwaukie.
But it’s also a lively, well-traveled stretch of Milwaukie Avenue. It brims with people – pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists – all potential witnesses who could discourage criminal activity. These are not just any people, either; they are middle-class and upper middle-class professionals. The kind of people who, if they – or their sons and daughters – were victimized in a violent crime, would receive immediate attention.
By comparison, the new location of Whole Systems Counseling in Outer Southeast Portland looks like the kind of neighborhood where someone might get the idea that they could get away with a crime.
That was the concern of the 50 or so residents who gathered last week in the board room at David Douglas High School, not far from the clinic.
“Is there anyone here who thinks it is OK for a sex offender clinic to be located by kids?” asked Chris Piekarski who led the meeting.
- Not all ex-sex offenders have harmed children. You are just putting them all into one basket.
Madison raised his hand. Many of the men and women in the room had the weary appearance that comes after putting in a day’s work. Madison looked crisp and chipper, like a man going into a job interview. He was one of the few men in the room wearing a tie.
He stood before the residents and told them that he wanted to put out all the facts about sex offenders.
Madison didn’t volunteer that he was a registered sex offender until he was later asked. Instead he delved into studies and statistics.
“Ninety-four percent of brand new sex crimes are committed by people not on the sex offender registry … not the few over here at Whole Systems…,” he said. “More than 90 percent of sex crimes are committed by people in the family.”
Madison eventually led up to this declaration: “It is all of us that commit sex offenses.”
That’s when Piekarski asked him if he was a registered sex offender.
“Yes, I am a registered sex offender,” he said.
There was a brief gasp from the audience, and a woman cried out that she was a victim. Another woman reached out to comfort her, and the audience quickly calmed down. They let Madison continue.
It was only when he veered off into what he really came to talk about – he belongs to a group that wants to do away with sex registration entirely – that the audience turned on him.
“We’ve heard enough of this,” one man shouted, and Madison sat down.
State Rep. Jessica Vega Pederson spoke briefly about HB 3509 (PDF) she has sponsored that would allow counties to govern where sex offender clinics can be located.
It seems like a gesture that probably won’t have much impact if it passes. These clinics are going to be located somewhere.
Members of the audience struggled with what to do. Piekarski pointed out that one of the local TV news shows had portrayed them negatively. The show had focused on the fears of the clinic’s owner, Johneen Manno, who said windows had been shot with a BB gun.
Nobody at the meeting took credit for the vandalism, and Piekarski reminded them not to support that kind of activity.
“It just makes us look like kooks. …. ‘Those people in east Portland are so immature … they are criminals and hooligans.’ … Violence is not acceptable …,” he said.
- Wow, the typical blame others mentality. Some in East Portland may be mature, but so are you, in our opinion.
Finally, one woman rose. It would be great, she said, if they could step up as a group and find a solution for the clinic. She wondered if the clinic had deliberately chosen their neighborhood because there is a large number of residents who don’t speak English.
- Well, if you live in this country, you should speak English, in our opinion. And do you really think that is the reason they moved there? That is just the typical BS to make somebody look racist.
“I hate to say this, but it’s a needed service. … Don’t be a NIMBY…,” she said. “It’s not appropriate for anybody’s back yard.”She is right, but if it has to be in somebody’s backyard make it a prosperous one.
For too long, violent crime has been borne primarily by the poor and working class. The good people of communities like Sellwood/Moreland seem like the kind of folks who gladly embrace politicians who promote rehabilitation over incarceration. It’s an easy concept to support when felons settle in poor neighborhoods. But wouldn’t they stand a better chance at rehabilitation in a nice neighborhood?
- I don't think it matters if it's a poor or rich neighborhood, as long as the treatment is doing it's job. And again, the fact is, most ex-sex offenders do not re-offend, so the crime in that county would not be due to ex-sex offenders but probably gang bangers, drug dealers and DUI offenders. Do you raise this much hell for crack houses and other places in the neighborhood? We doubt it.
If it takes a village to raise a child, maybe it takes a village of well-educated, broad-minded liberals to watch over and rehabilitate a sex offender.
- No it doesn't "take a village" to raise a child. It takes one responsible adult.
In which case, the people of Sellwood/Moreland and the Inner Southeast should come to the aid of their less fortunate brothers and sisters in the Outer Southeast.
Perhaps the sex offender clinic could relocate near Reed College, considered one of the most intellectual colleges in the U.S. It could be a merger of academic theory, philosophy and hard-core reality. The life of the mind meeting the temptations of the flesh.
As a bonus, the school’s president is John Kroger, former Oregon attorney general and a fan of Jeremy Bentham, the 19th Century philosopher who influenced prison and law reform.
Among other ideas, Bentham believed that public humiliation could be useful in deterring deviant behavior. He might have found sex offender registries and clinics practical crime prevention tools.
- Just because someone believes in something doesn't make it right. Many countries believe in cutting your head off, fingers, or putting you to death for some small crime, doesn't mean it's right.
It would be something for Reed’s intellectuals and Whole Systems’ clients to explore.
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
NY - Counties struggle with homeless sex offenders
Labels: DayCare , Homeless , Housing , MassHysteria , NewYork , Park , Playground , Residency , School
05/05/2013
By ELIZABETH COOPER
UTICA - Since state and local laws about where they can live were tightened around a decade ago, sex offenders have become more likely to end up homeless.
That’s caused problems for counties across the state, because they are required by law to find housing for anyone who needs shelter within their borders.
Different counties have cobbled together different strategies to deal with the thorny issue, but officials and homeless advocates from several counties said there is no easy answer.
- There are easy answers! It's just something they don't want to hear. Eliminate the residency restrictions and stop letting mass hysteria define laws.
“I don’t know what the solution is,” said Greta Guarton of the advocacy group Long Island Coalition for the Homeless. “We, of course, think everyone needs a place to live, but certainly understand the community’s concerns.”
The issue came to a head in Oneida County in February, after an Observer-Dispatch report found that at least eight Level 2 and Level 3 sex offenders had been housed at three North Utica motels in a two-week period. Amid public outcry, two of the motels announced they would stop taking homeless individuals referred by the county, and County Executive Anthony Picente has said he is looking for other options.
“We have to find a solution given the lay of the land here, in terms of the shelters, the neighborhoods and the community,” he said. “It’s an ongoing process and discussion.”
Sex offenders have been required to register with officials where they live since the mid-1990s. The federal government and states across the nation adopted so-called Megan’s Laws after the 1994 murder of Megan Kanka, a New Jersey child who was killed by a released sex offender living near her home.
- Why do we continue to punish everyone with similar crimes due to one bad apple? Are we going to start doing the same for all other crimes? One person commits a crime with a gun and all gun owners are punished? Oh wait, they are already working on that one!
In subsequent years, states and many communities adopted laws regulating where sex offenders are allowed to live. In Oneida County, a 2007 law prohibits sex offenders from living within 1,500 feet of a school, child care facility, playground or park.
Counties in New York must find housing for any individual, regardless of their criminal history, if they come to the Department of Social Services and say they are homeless.
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
NY - Advocate Thinks Reporter Too Harsh on Sex Offenders
Labels: Housing , MassHysteria , NewYork , Opinion , Residency , School , ShanaRowan , USAFair
 |
| Shana Rowan |
04/30/2013
By Shana Rowan (Blog, Website)
As a registry reform advocate and fiance to a registrant whose crime was committed as a minor, I felt compelled to respond to the numerous sex offender-related issues brought up in several recent articles.
Buffalo/Niagara is no different than other urban areas in our country in terms of high concentrations of registered sex offenders. The public’s mentality towards those on the registry often makes it difficult for those convicted of sex crimes to find housing, and often impossible when municipalities enact residency restrictions. Schools and other “child oriented places” are usually centrally located, so finding housing more than 1,000 feet from such facilities is often not possible. Former sex offenders and their families often find themselves with little choice but to live in poorer, higher-crime neighborhoods.
A 2012 study by Dr. Jill Levenson (studies), one of the leading authorities on sex offender recidivism, found that residency restrictions do not reduce child sexual abuse and several previous studies corroborate her findings. Lack of stable housing and employment actually increases the likelihood of recidivism, making such restrictions counter-productive at best. Empirical research on sex crime reveals that children are overwhelmingly victimized by people they know, family members, friends, coaches, clergy, etc., not a stranger. Even the toughest laws directed at registrants only apply to those who have already been caught and since recidivism is so low, the impact of these laws is minimal.
It’s possible to feel anger at sex abuse and support harsh punishment of perpetrators, while recognizing the importance of fact-based policies. The unfortunate fact is that putting a stop to sex crime is far more complicated than perpetuating sex offender hysteria. The media plays a large role in communicating such information to the public, hopefully, the Niagara Falls Reporter will do this from now on.
Learn the truth at www.usafair.org/studies.
Shana Rowan is executive director of USA Fair, Inc. (USA Families Advocating an Intelligent Registry).
TN - Tipton County cracks down on sex offenders
Labels: ComplianceCheck , MassHysteria , Tennessee , Video
04/29/2013
By Justin Hanson
COVINGTON - (WMC-TV) - Action News 5 received an inside look at how one Mid-South county is cracking down on sex offenders living in their neighborhood.
It was a combined effort from the Tipton County Sheriff's Office, U.S. Marshals and others as the county made unannounced visits to sex offenders in Tipton County – making sure they are in compliance with the law.
Covington resident [name withheld] was just one of 21 handcuffed and taken to jail on Friday and over the weekend.
[name withheld]'s arrest was part of a two day sex offender compliance check in Tipton County.
Action News Five was not only part of ride-along, but there to see those sex offenders heading to jail.
"We've recovered even pornography from some of them, a gun from one of them and the list goes on," said Tipton County Sheriff Pancho Chumley.
Chumley takes crimes against children seriously.
That is why he wants sex offenders living in his county to know he or his deputies could come by at any time to make sure they are following the law.
"We don't want to go out, and one of them have a gun at their house and another one looking at pornography. We're making sure they're doing what they're supposed to do and if they're not, we're locking them up and if they don't do that, they can leave," said Chumley.
He said if they leave the area, they are required to let his department know the change of address.
Sex offenders are also not allowed to be within a certain distance of children.
"They're not going to be able to do what they want to do, they're going to be monitored by police," said Memphis Police Department Lt. Wilton Cleveland.
Officials said registered sex offenders are
- Not based on the facts!
"Here in Tipton County, it does take a village to raise a child and we're going to watch out for each other as much as we can, especially the children," said Chumley.
- No, all it takes is a responsible parent!
Those arrested will face a judge for the first time May 14. They will all stay on the sex offender registry and some could get jail time.
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Clinician Prejudice Toward Sex Offenders
Labels: Fear , MassHysteria , National , Treatment
By ROBERT WEISS LCSW, CSAT-S
Perverts and Rapists and Creeps, Oh My!
A couple of weeks ago my colleague Jenner Bishop posted an open letter on the IITAP (International Institute for Trauma and Addiction Professionals) listserv about clinician prejudice toward sex addicts and sex offenders. Jenner had just come from a “suite meeting” for an office she’d recently rented, at which she’d been bombarded with angry questions from the other therapists about how they were supposed to protect their clients from her “unsupervised” sex addicts and offenders. She had explained that she doesn’t work with violent offenders, and that the offending behaviors of her clients were typically something along the lines of hiring prostitutes and/or looking at illegal pornography – which the other therapists’ clients were probably also doing, even if the therapists weren’t aware of it – but Jenner’s fellow professionals just wouldn’t let it go.
She writes:
I was shocked. Eventually someone admitted that – despite the landlord sending around an advance email informing tenants the potential new renter is a Certified Sex Addiction Therapist – they wish they’d further investigated what a CSAT does, because they’d have informed the landlord that my practice is incompatible with theirs. You know, I just forget. We’re on the front lines of healing such a grossly misunderstood population. And it’s not just the masses, it’s fellow clinicians with these massive prejudices and blind spots.
Jenner is absolutely right. The world is filled with sexual prejudice of all types, and even highly trained professionals are not immune to this bias. I face this fact every single day both in my educational efforts and in my practice. Honestly, even the most basic and factual of my blogs is likely to draw “friendly fire” from certain colleagues. And only a year ago I had to host a three-day staff training session at one of the addiction treatment facilities I work for, the sole purpose of which was to calm the staff’s fears about working with a sexually addicted, potentially offending population. And their concerns – their prejudices if you will – were exactly the same as what Jenner recently faced. In other words, they were convinced that the facility’s sexually addicted clients were monsters who were going to be molesting and raping all over campus. Never mind the fact that they’d been treating these same people for years as part of the chemical dependency population.
Ignorance = Fear
The good news when it comes to clinicians is proper education can help to alleviate concerns. While it is true that some people’s prejudices toward sex offenders are simply too deep to overcome, for the most part therapists are open-minded individuals who respond well to unbiased, factual information. And that is my goal with this blog – to present the facts about who sex offenders are and the risks these men and women do and don’t present.
Saturday, April 6, 2013
OR - Sex offender clinic getting heat from Portland neighborhood
Labels: MassHysteria , MobMentality , Oregon , Treatment , Video
04/06/2013
PORTLAND - A clinic that treats sex offenders was forced to move at the end of last year, but now there's a push to force it out of its new location.
- Of course, no matter where you move, it's going to be the same thing, because the media, politicians and other organizations have pushed the sex offender hysteria!
Neighbors in Southeast Portland said Whole Systems Counseling and Consultation at 12672 Southeast Stark Street didn't properly notify the neighborhood when it moved from Sellwood and opened in late march.
- Even if they did notify you, you'd all still be out with your pitch forks screaming about it!
One neighbor has already collected some signatures from those opposed to the clinic and she is looking into collecting more during the weekend.
“They need to move in an industrial area where there’s businesses, like down on Marine Drive where there’s businesses not children,” said one neighbor who wished to not be identified.
- You see, the sheeple in this country think all sex offenders are child molesting, pedophile predators who are waiting behind bushed to sexually abuse and murder their children, and all due to the media, politicians and organizations pushing lies and fear.
“I just don't think it's a good community safety position to hold facilities, staffing them in residential areas. It makes no sense to me,” said Bridget Sickon with the Portland Police Bureau.
KGW spoke with the clinic's owner, Johneen Manno, on Friday, and she said she has worked to notify neighbors and businesses and even held an open house.
She also sent KGW this statement: “Court-ordered treatment for sexual offenders that is accessible and integrated within the communities where they live is how our society has chosen to deal with the rampant problem of sexual abuse. We need to work together as a community to carry this out.”
Thursday, March 28, 2013
MA - In wake of alarming audit, state to check whether child care workers are sex offenders
Labels: DayCare , Disinformation , FearMongering , Massachusetts , MassHysteria , Residency , Study , Video
 |
| Susan Bump |
Just because someone is forced to wear the "sex offender" label doesn't mean they have sexually abused a child. Out of the 119 matches, how many had sexual crimes against children, and how old were they when the crime occurred? That is information that is needed in a study like this, unless you are just fear mongering?
03/27/2013
By Martin Finucane
People who work in child care centers or live on the centers’ premises will be checked to see if they are registered sex offenders, the acting head of the state agency that oversees the centers said today.
Acting Early Education and Care Commissioner Thomas L. Weber commented in the wake of a state audit (PDF) that found 119 matches between the addresses of registered sex offenders and the addresses of child care providers.
“We take the safety and security of children in the care of providers very seriously. It’s our highest priority. Any time we receive suggestions or findings related to safety, we’re going to treat those very seriously,” Weber said.
“We’ll obviously work closely with [the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security] and the Sex Offender Registry Board to ensure that all those who are working with children and/or living with children are being reviewed for any safety concerns,” he said.
Auditor Suzanne Bump today unveiled the audit, which covered the period from July 2010 to September 2011, calling for the state to check whether those who work or live at child care sites are sex offenders, something 17 others states do, she said.
Bump also called for the state to continue to check for address matches. Weber said the address matching would also be done. “We’ll take advantage of all publicly available information,” he said.
“No parent who drops their child off at day care should have to worry about the safety of their son or daughter,” Bump said in a statement. “The presence of registered sex offenders in such proximity to groups of children is information parents, providers, and the EEC must have and act upon.”
- Not all ex-sex offenders have sexually abused children! That is like saying all ex-felons are serial killers because a couple are, but it's the typical reaction by politicians and many in today's society.
The child care agency said in a response included in the audit report that its investigation had found that 16 of the address matches uncovered by Bump’s office were for programs that were closed, 39 were for workplaces or community college campuses where the sex offenders were either working or going to school, and 10 simply weren’t matches.
In 50 of the remaining cases, Weber said, the sex offender lived in the same building but not at the child care facility and operators were directed to “complete a safety plan” for the children.
In four cases, at four separate locations, Weber said, the investigation found that sex offenders were living in homes where family day care was provided. Those licenses were immediately revoked, he said.
The 119 offenders matched addresses with 75 child care locations, said auditor’s spokesman Christopher Thompson, meaning multiple offenders matched up, in some cases, to a single location. Weber said that could be explained, for example, by multiple offenders listing a community college campus.
After a thorough review of all 119 “individuals of concern,” Weber said, “we haven’t received any evidence of any wrongdoing. ... Should we have any information brought to our attention we will take action and, if appropriate, report it to public safety officials.”
The audit matched the addresses of Level 2 and Level 3 offenders against the addresses of child care providers licensed by the agency. Weber said he had no information on how many of those with matching addresses were Level 3 offenders, those considered most likely to reoffend.
The audit also contained other findings critical of the agency, but Bump said the agency had already taken actions in response.
“While I know that EEC has the best intention to fulfill its mission, this audit shows that more can be done to protect young children,” said Bump. “Unfortunately, there is little margin of error as just one case can have dire consequences.”
Weber, the acting commissioner, has been on the job for only a little over two weeks. The commissioner of the department, Sherri Killins, resigned earlier this month after revelations that, while working at her nearly $200,000-per-year state job, she was enrolled in a superintendent training program in the town of Ware.
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Patty Wetterling questions sex offender laws
Labels: AdamWalshAct , Audio , CivilCommitment , DayCare , Disinformation , GPS , JohnWalsh , MarcKlaas , MassHysteria , MeganKanka , MegansLaw , OffenderChild , Park , PattyWetterling , Playground , Residency , School , Video
 |
| Patty Wetterling |
03/20/2013
By Jennifer Bleyer
The outspoken activist has a change of heart over the wide-reaching scope of laws she helped put into action
On an overcast spring day in 1996, a handful of people filed out of the Oval Office and assembled on the driveway of the White House before a scrum of reporters. They cast satisfied glances at the television cameras as birds chirped and a helicopter whirred nearby. Nothing except for the white memorial ribbons pinned to their lapels indicated the nature of their fateful connection to each other as the parents of children kidnapped by strangers and, in all but one case, viciously assaulted and murdered.
Standing together, they represented a grim who's who of notorious child abductions of the late 20th century. On one end was John Walsh, whose six-year-old son, Adam, was abducted from a department store in Hollywood, Florida, in 1981 and later discovered decapitated. Then there was Marc Klaas, the father of Polly Klaas, a 12-year-old girl who was kidnapped at knifepoint from her bedroom in Petaluma, California, in 1993 and whose body was found two months later in a shallow grave. In the middle were Rich and Maureen Kanka, whose seven-year-old daughter, Megan, was kidnapped, raped, and murdered in 1994 by a convicted sex offender living across the street from their home in New Jersey. At the front of the group was Patty Wetterling, the mother of Jacob Wetterling, an 11-year-old who was abducted at gunpoint near his home in St. Joseph, Minnesota, in 1989 and never found.
- Let's not forget that Mr. Walsh also dated Reve when she was underage, but he seems to ignore that fact.
There was a stoic, familial air between the parents, a soldier-like bond. Minutes earlier inside the Oval Office, they had watched President Bill Clinton sign legislation known as Megan's Law, named for Megan Kanka, that required states to release information about registered sex offenders to the public. The law was an amendment to the Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act, which was part of a landmark violent crime bill in 1994 that required law enforcement in every state to maintain registries of convicted sex offenders and track where they lived after being released from prison. The original law gave states the option of whether to notify the community of a sex offender's presence. Two years later, Megan's Law said that they must.
But before long the victorious mood at the press conference abruptly shifted. After the group thanked legislators who'd helped shepherd the law through, some reporters mentioned challenges to its constitutionality. The parents grew defensive. John Walsh, whose son's murder had led him to become a renowned campaigner for children's safety and eventually the host of TV's America's Most Wanted, pushed himself before the microphones and raised his voice.
- It was never proven that his son was sexually assaulted, nor if the person who did it, which they claim was Ottis Toole, was a known or unknown sex offender. They also suspected Jeffrey Dahmer as well, but they settled with putting the blame on Mr. Toole.
"This is letting parents know that the fox is in the henhouse," Walsh said, jabbing a finger in the air. "We're sick of seeing these people get all the rights and our children and the parents not getting any rights. Believe me, I've hunted these people for nine years now. They're predators, they prey upon children — that's their business. We deserve to know these people are in our neighborhoods!"
- Mr. Walsh, in our opinion, is just angry, which is understandable, and is just wanting to avenge his sons death by punishing all ex-sex offenders for his sons death, even when it was never proven sex was even involved in his sons death. Not all of those on the sex offender registry are predators who prey on children, regardless of what he says.
Patty Wetterling, a petite woman with a neat chestnut bob, looked dismayed in her taupe skirt suit. She interjected, explaining gently that Megan's Law was the equivalent of warning children about a dog in their neighborhood that's known to bite, and adding that it was not about revenge but ultimately just one piece in a large puzzle whose goal was a safe society.
- Patty is the reasonable one among the group. John Walsh and Marc Klass are always foaming at the mouth when talking about sex offender laws.
"I do think it will have a positive effect," she said.
Several years later, Wetterling flew back to Washington for another press conference, this one announcing the most comprehensive proposed legislation ever to manage sex offenders. Again, she stood among a cohort of other parents who had suffered unspeakable tragedies.
The proposed law would set national standards for sex offender registration, establish civil commitment procedures for people deemed sexually violent predators, require the registration of kids as young as 14 who had committed sex offenses, and be applied even to people whose crimes predated the law and who had successfully completed their sentences.
- Punishing someone who has done their time and in which their crime was before the law came into being, is called an ex post facto law, and is unconstitutional.
By then, sex offender restrictions had mushroomed in a way that was starting to trouble Wetterling. In the years since Jacob's abduction, she had devoted her life to children's safety. But the more she learned about the nature of child sexual abuse, the more she felt like these laws simply didn't get to the root of the problem, and actually made it worse in ways that were hard for most people to grasp.
At the Washington press conference that day, members of the media sidled over to Wetterling to ask her for a comment about the proposed new law. In her earnest manner, she confessed to some misgivings.
"I do have a little bit of concern about it being retroactive," she admitted, "and that it's now going to register juveniles."
Later, on a glorious midsummer day in 2006, President George W. Bush was joined in the White House Rose Garden by lawmakers and victims' families, including John Walsh and his wife, Reve. The president delivered a triumphant speech. Then he sat down and signed the legislation known as the Adam Walsh Child Safety and Protection Act.
There are nearly 750,000 registered sex offenders in America today, up 23 percent from six years ago. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent each year on registering, publicizing, tracking, and confining them. Since the Wetterling Act was passed in 1994, laws governing sex offenders have grown successively stricter and more far reaching. In many places, residency restrictions dictate that sex offenders cannot live within a certain distance from schools, playgrounds, daycare centers, parks, bus stops, and other places where children gather. Online registries broadcast the names and pictures of offenders, often without specifying the nature of their offenses. Juveniles treated as adults and labeled as sex offenders for acts involving other kids bear that stigma well into adulthood.
Virtually all the major laws regarding sex offenders have been passed in the wake of grisly, high profile crimes against kids and, like Megan's Law, they bear victims' names as somber memorials. The laws tend to fuel the impression that sex offenders are a uniform class of creepy strangers lurking in the shadows who are bound to attack children over and over again.
That's what Wetterling used to believe about sex offenders, too. Yet over the course of two decades immersed in the issue, she found her assumptions slowly chipped away. Contrary to the widely held fear of predatory strangers, she learned that abductions like Jacob's are extremely rare, and that 90 percent of sexual offenses against children are committed by family members or acquaintances. While sex offenders are stereotyped as incurable serial abusers, a 2002 Bureau of Justice study found that they in fact have a distinctly low recidivism rate of just 5.3 percent for other sex crimes within three years of being released from prison.
 |
| No Easy Answers |
These days, Wetterling is a 63-year-old grandmother with a warm smile, soft blue eyes, and a folksy manner. She's well known for her two campaigns for Minnesota's Sixth Congressional District, which she lost to Mark Kennedy in 2004 and Michele Bachmann two years later, as well as her personal story, which is deeply imprinted in the state's collective memory. Her eyes still gloss over with tears when she talks about Jacob.
She's less well known for having quietly emerged as perhaps the most unlikely voice questioning sex offender laws. Although she remains a prominent advocate for child safety — she is the board chair of the influential National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the director of the Minnesota Health Department's sexual violence prevention program — she has expressed gnawing doubts over the past several years about how we deal with sex offenders, a striking stance for someone who has been personally affected in such a devastating way.
"We have an intolerance for sexual violence, which I agree with," she said recently over coffee downtown. "People want a singular solution, and the solution that's been sold over the years is lock 'em up and throw away the key. But we've cast such a broad net that we're catching a lot of juveniles who did something stupid or different types of offenders who just screwed up. Should they never be given a chance to turn their lives around?"
She paused.
"They are very different than the man who took Jacob."
Long before Wetterling became a public figure, she was a stay-at-home mother in the small town of St. Joseph. On the evening of October 22, 1989, she and her husband, Jerry, went to a party celebrating a local arts festival that she chaired. Their 11-year-old son Jacob stayed at home with his best friend, Aaron Larson, along with their other son Trevor, 10, and their eight-year-old daughter, Carmen. Trevor called over to the arts festival party and asked permission for the three boys to go to a local convenience store, where they could rent a movie and buy soda. They got a neighbor girl to come babysit Carmen and took off on bikes.
The boys were riding home in the dark when a masked man emerged from a gravel driveway along a country road. Pointing a gun, he told the boys to lie down in a ditch, demanded to know their ages, then ordered first Aaron and then Trevor to run into the nearby woods or risk being shot. By the time the two boys caught up to each other and dared to peek back, Jacob and the gunman were gone.
For the Wetterling family, the weeks and months that followed were an agonizing blur. Dozens of county, state, and federal investigators flocked to St. Joseph in the effort to find Jacob. Throngs of firefighters and student volunteers combed the surrounding woods and cornfields.
It soon hit the national news: Peter Jennings on ABC reported, "the effect on Jacob's family has been obvious, but his kidnapping has also torn the tightly knit social fabric of the entire town." Pictures of Jacob, a handsome, tawny-haired boy, were plastered at truck stops, tollbooths, and convenience stores across the Midwest. Billboards and bumper stickers pleaded for information. Thousands of fruitless tips poured in.
Investigators regretfully shared that the most common motive in this kind of abductions was sexual, and they felt all but certain that this was the case with Jacob.
Patty was shocked. "Who would do that?" she thought. "Who would ever think of sexually violating a child?"
The sheriff's office worked with a correctional facility in nearby St. Cloud to catalog recently released sex offenders and painstakingly created a database detailing where they lived to track them down for questioning.
By January 1990, the number of leads had dwindled and the FBI withdrew most of the agents it had assigned to investigate Jacob's abduction. Even so, his family remained hopeful. They poured their energy into keeping him in the public's awareness. It wasn't until about a year after his disappearance that Patty began to think beyond her immediate desperation to find her son and mustered some energy to try to help others.
She'd been ruminating about the database of local sex offenders the police had compiled, and how helpful they said such a resource would have been immediately after the abduction to enable them to quickly locate and rule out suspects. Patty felt certain that the database was a valuable law enforcement tool that shouldn't be filed away in some dusty cabinet. In fact, she thought there should be something similar for police to access wherever a child is abducted.
Around that time, Gov. Rudy Perpich asked Patty to serve on a task force examining the problem of child abduction and exploitation in Minnesota. Cordelia Anderson, an expert on child sexual abuse prevention, was appointed to the same task force and remembers feeling amazed at how Wetterling was able to separate her emotion from public policy decisions.
"Despite the extreme characteristics of Jacob's case, which play into the scariest stereotype and are very, very rare, she somehow quickly went to trying to educate herself," Anderson says.
Half a dozen states already had sex offender registries, and in accordance with one of the task force's recommendations, Wetterling helped craft legislation that would implement one in Minnesota based on what was working elsewhere. Accessible only to law enforcement, it would carefully distinguish between offenders based on the number of offenses, victim's age, degree of violence, and amenability to treatment. It wasn't long after the state law passed in 1991 that Wetterling turned her sights on implementing something similar on the federal level, with powerful allies including former U.S. Sen. David Durenberger.
Senator Durenberger was from St. Cloud, four miles from where the Wetterlings lived, so the abduction had struck close to home for him. It was a matter of days after hearing about it on the news that he had driven over to meet the family for the first time and offer whatever help he could.
"There's nothing like coming into the middle of a tragedy that doesn't have an easy answer," he recalled. "Everybody is going, 'What can we do?'"
Durenberger stayed in contact with the family, dropping by every so often to slip a supportive note in their mailbox, and he eventually led the effort to pass federal legislation requiring every state to maintain a sex offender registry accessible to law enforcement, and to regularly verify offenders' addresses for 10 years to life depending on the severity of their crimes.
- The online registry is nothing more than an online vigilante phone book that many have used to target ex-offenders, or their families, for harassment or worse, and is why the online registry needs to be taken offline and used by police only!
Although Durenberger was out of the Senate when the law finally passed in 1994, he regarded it as a victory.
"Patty started the movement," Durenberger says. "Just a few people had the nerve to get out ahead of the problem and try to come up with a solution that could apply across the country. This was happening one kid at a time, one family at a time. If it had a potential preventable cause, than we ought to deal with it legislatively if we could. That was the imperative."
- As Rahm Emanuel once put it, "You never want to let a good crisis go to waste!" And this is exactly what many politicians do to help them look good to the sheeple of the country.
At the time, registration wasn't seen as a panacea for the problem of sexual abuse, nor a scarlet letter to be pinned on all sex offenders. As far as Wetterling was concerned, the registry was just something that would make it easier for the police to locate former offenders.
"I think [she] intended for registration to fill a gap in public safety," Anderson says. "The whole movement to register juveniles or to lump all who commit any kind of offense into something they can never in their lifetime shake was not the intent. I don't think anybody foresaw that it would turn into what it's become."
In 2008, Wetterling received a missive in the mail. "My name is Ricky and I'm a 19-year-old Registered Sex Offender," it began:
"One night, when I was only 16, I met a girl at a teen club who told me she was almost 16, and we hit it off. She and I dated for a few weeks, but because of some issues at home, she ran away. The friend she was staying with told her to tell the police we had sex, and that she was too scared to go home because she was pregnant. When questioned by the police, I told the truth, I said "yes we had sex twice." The police informed me she was only 13. I was charged with two felony counts of Sexual Abuse 3rd degree and tried as an adult. Now because of the laws regarding the age of consent I am a Registered Sex Offender. Things for me, as well as my family, have changed dramatically and our lives have been shattered."
Wetterling was dumbfounded. She had never imagined her idea being used against someone like this.
"It just makes no sense to me," she says. "The design of the law was not to punish kids for being kids. He thought she was 16, and she lied."
- And yet that is exactly what it's doing!
Wetterling found herself questioning not only cases of juvenile sex offenders like Ricky, but also adults who had clearly committed harm but still didn't seem to warrant the kind of permanent pariah status that registration conferred.
One woman contacted Wetterling to share the story of her husband, a former alcohol abuser who had committed a sex crime when he was 19. He went to jail and afterward turned his life around, getting married and having two kids. The Adam Walsh Act retroactively forced him to register as a sex offender, ushering him into a deep depression. He could no longer sit with his own family at church or chaperone school field trips due to the law's provisions.
Wetterling also met a biochemist and college professor who had been caught molesting his stepdaughter. In addition to his prison sentence, he successfully completed treatment as well as a reunification program with his family and was judged rehabilitated by those who knew him. Yet the unforgiving rules of his status as a registered sex offender eventually pushed him into unemployment, homelessness, and a rootless life at the fringe of society.
She kept coming back to the same nagging feeling: These men were not the same as the man who abducted Jacob. These were not serial child abusers who had no capacity to change, and in a terrible twist, their status as sex offenders might actually make children less safe instead of more. Clogging the registries with so many people who don't represent a real ongoing threat could make it harder to discern those who actually do. Moreover, by perpetuating the stranger-danger myth, the laws could be lulling parents into a false sense of security, blinding them to the much more likely threat of sexual abuse by family and friends. Wetterling started feeling that sex offender laws had simply gone too far.
"We've caught a lot of people in the net who could have been helped," she says. "We've been elevating sex offender registration and community notification and punishment for 20-some years, and a wise and prudent thing would be to take a look at what's working. Instead we let our anger drive us."
To those who support the expansion of sex offender laws, Wetterling's concern for offenders can seem naive and misguided. After his daughter's rape and murder, Marc Klaas became a vocal supporter of stiffer penalties and stricter post-prison monitoring of offenders. He founded an organization, KlaasKids, whose mission is "to protect America's children from the predators who lurk in our shadows," according to its website, and endorses both Megan's Law and the Adam Walsh Act.
- And how many children has his organization saved?
"My feelings for Patty are very warm, but I think she's wrong," Klaas says. "I don't think the system is out to punish innocent people. These are people who've existed in anonymity for thousands of years and now we're finding out who they are, and they're whining about it."
- Because you are blinded by your hate and anger, of course you will disagree with her. What if your own son was slapped with the sex offender label?
Wetterling is quick to say that she still supports registries as a law enforcement tool and believes in civil commitment for some offenders who are truly too dangerous to live in society. Yet she has a fundamental disagreement with the other victims' families.
"We just view the problem differently," she says. "I have a tremendous amount of respect for what John and Reve Walsh have done, and I used to sit down with Marc Klaas to have a drink or six. We've undergone a shared experience, and I'm never going to tell a parent the way they're dealing with it is wrong or the way I'm dealing with it is right. I just think some of this really angry, punitive stuff is letting the bad guys win. They're building a world that isn't caring and believing in one another. That's not who I am."
Inside a hotel ballroom in downtown Atlanta a few years ago, Wetterling stood at a podium and held a crowd of 1,300 people at rapt attention. She cleared her throat and told the story she's told hundreds of times, the story of Jacob's abduction. She talked about her determination to help prevent child sexual abuse, not just punish it, and about her resistance to simplistic solutions to a complicated problem.
Among those listening to her address the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, a national organization dedicated to preventing sexual abuse, was Joan Tabachnick, a co-chair of the organization's prevention committee.
"I think almost everybody in that audience was in tears because of the vulnerability she's able to show, speaking about the horrific experience she's had, as well as how she's translated that into public policy," Tabachnick recalls. "It's amazingly courageous to ask what can we do to prevent this given that there are so many other parents who don't want anything to do with what she's saying."
Wetterling approaches the issue of sexual abuse prevention with the same sense of complexity and nuance that she brings to her understanding of who sex offenders are. To help keep them from reoffending, she believes we need to aid their success with housing, employment, counseling, and social support, all of which the current system does much to dissuade.
"There's a whole bunch else that needs to happen," Wetterling says. "We can't just keep locking them up, putting satellite monitoring on them, registering them for life. That doesn't change the problem."
Wetterling is also focused on primary prevention — that is, stopping abuse from happening in the first place. It's a bitter irony that almost all our public funds are funneled into punishing known sex offenders and virtually none are aimed at preventing sexual abuse from happening in the first place. Waiting until a child is harmed, hoping to find out about it, and then reacting with vengeance might satisfy the public's bloodlust and win points for politicians, but it's not a strategy that actually protects kids.
- What about educating the kids in schools about sexual abuse, and parents as well? I don't see many people talking about that, except maybe Erin Merryn.
Yet a growing number of clinicians, researchers, activists, and public health officials are turning their focus to primary prevention, which means examining risk factors, protective factors, and even the neurological origin of why some adults may be sexually drawn to children.
- This has been around since the dawn of time. People have weird fantasies! Just like those who are into S&M, bondage, homosexuality, etc.
For Wetterling, primary prevention also means taking a broad, holistic view of what's happening in our culture. She rues the effects of a porn-soaked, over-sexualized culture on young people and espouses teaching children about healthy relationships and appropriate behavior starting at an early age.
It's a testament to her preternatural faith in the power of prevention that she sees even her own son's abductor as someone whose vile behavior might have been averted. In 1999, on the 10th anniversary of Jacob's disappearance, Patty wrote an open letter to his kidnapper:
"I have found some comfort picturing you not as a mean old, ugly, bad guy, but at one time, you were an eleven year old boy," she wrote. "Someone's son...possibly someone's brother needing and hopefully sharing the love an 11-year-old boy deserves. If this love wasn't shared in your family, I'm sorry. Every child is entitled to the love and caring that family and friends provide."
She kept a list of questions she was desperate to ask next to the phone in case the abductor called: Why did you do it? Why Jacob? Where is he? But he never called.
Wetterling still harbors hope that Jacob is alive and will return to her someday. In the meantime, she spends her life thinking about what can be done to help children right now — those who might be victimized, as well as those who might grow up to become victimizers someday.
"We can spend the rest of our years talking about how to manage sex offenders," she says. "But wouldn't it be better if we could quit growing them? That's the bigger problem."
Monday, March 18, 2013
MA - Rep. James Arciero: All sex-offenders should be on registry
Labels: Grants , Massachusetts , MassHysteria , OnlineRegistry
03/18/2013
By Evan Lips
WESTFORD - It's no secret that knowledge is king, and state Rep. James Arciero is looking to crown the public with that power in the form of an online sex-offender registry that lists all perpetrators.
- This is just another politician who is exploiting fear, children and ex-offenders for his own gain, in our opinion. If he was truly wanting to "empower" the people, why doesn't he just push to put all ex-felons on an online shaming hit-list for all to see?
Currently, only information on Level 3 sex offenders is available to the public.
"I want citizens to be able to empower themselves," Arciero said Saturday.
It's not the first time the Westford Democrat has introduced a bill aimed at loosening the information laws related to low-level and mid-level sex offenders. Last spring, he found 36 co-sponsors willing to sign on to a bill that would have made information on Level 2 offenders available online.
That piece of legislation left the House Judiciary Committee in a favorable light. Now Arciero wants to give it more punch.
"I was always told that Level 1 offenders were not dangerous, but now my eyes are opened," he said, citing a recent Fox 25 special report showing that about 1,737 out of 2,693 Level 1 sex offenders in Massachusetts have committed crimes against children.
- So was that one time? And how old were they when the crime occurred? They don't tell you that for a reason. Many were probably children themselves, and they also don't tell you if it was a one time deal or if they went on to commit more related crimes.
Arciero said if the state adopts his proposal, it could also be in line to receive more than $600,000 annually in federal funding. States that elect to post all offender information online, in step with the federal Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, are eligible for grant money.
Arciero said the initial event that drove him to criticize current offender-information laws occurred in 2009. That was the year a 16-year-old girl living in his hometown of Westford was sexually assaulted by a man who had grown up in town, moved to Florida, then later moved back to Westford. His record in Florida was readily available for viewing, but not in Massachusetts.
"We were outraged," he recalled. "When neighbors Googled him, they found a boatload of information."
- So why don't they say what the crime was and if the person in question is a Tier 1, 2 or 3? That "boatload" of information could be for anything not related to the crime in question, but hey, that's politics!
In Massachusetts, information about Level 1 sex offenders is only available to law-enforcement agencies. For information on Level 2 offenders, residents can file an in-person information request via their local police department.
That's not enough for Arciero, who has found a staunch supporter in Chelmsford resident Laurie Myers.
Myers, a former rape-crisis counselor, founded the victims-advocate group Community VOICES (Facebook) in 2004.
"We need to give people every tool possible," Myers said Saturday. "We just want to make this information available to people who want it."
Arciero also has the backing of the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association and Gov. Deval Patrick, who filed his own piece of legislation last year demanding to bring the state into compliance with the Adam Walsh Act.
Chelmsford Police Chief James Murphy has said he supports giving the public access to all sex-offender information.
- So what about access to all ex-felon information?
Arciero also has support from the other side of the political aisle. Locally, Republican state Rep. Marc Lombardo of Billerica said Sunday there's no reason the information should not be public.
"It makes sense to ensure residents know who lives in their neighborhoods," he said. "If we can help kids in this state by putting this information online, I think it's the right thing to do."
- Like we said above, if you want to let residence know who lives in their neighborhoods, then why not put all criminal records online?
On Beacon Hill, the calls for posting sex-offender information grew louder after the December arrest of [name withheld], the Wakefield man charged with 100 counts of child sex abuse at the unlicensed day-care business operated by his wife. In 1989, [name withheld] was convicted of three counts of indecent assault and battery on a child under the age of 14, netting him Level 1 sex-offender status.
In Fitchburg, Democratic state Rep. Stephen DiNatale said Sunday he supports Arciero's proposal but added that sex-offender information must be constantly updated.
- So what if a vigilante throws a Molotov cocktail into the correct house? Vigilantism is a major problem across the country, and is exactly why this information should be taken offline and used by police only.
As a former training and community-services director for the Massachusetts Sex Offender Registry Board, DiNatale said that regardless of what happens with Arciero's bill, he's glad it has helped spur some dialogue on the issue.
He said he's certain that if Arciero's bill is signed into law, it will "definitely be appealed by some individual over the fact that the information is being actively disseminated."
Yet, Arciero pointed out that he's calling for the information to be available for those looking for it, not necessarily posted in public places, like the lobbies of police departments.
"It's a judgment call by the registry board if they are likely to re-offend," Arciero said. "I think citizens need to have information to make their own judgment calls."
- Then post all criminal information online! That or murderers, gang members, drug dealers / users, thieves, DUI offenders, corrupt politicians, etc, etc.
Saturday, March 9, 2013
AZ - Ariz. Couple Sues Walmart Over Kids' Bath Photos
Labels: Arizona , ChildPorn , CPS , MassHysteria , Photography , RegFraud , Video , WronglyAccused
This is what media hysteria and disinformation does, it makes everybody a suspect when it comes to sexual abuse. Think about this the next time you need photos developed. You might wind up on the sex offender shaming list.
03/09/2013
By Abby Ellin
In 2008, Lisa and Anthony "A.J." Demaree took their three young daughters on a trip to San Diego. They returned home to Arizona and brought photos of their then 5, 4 and 1 1/2 year old daughters to a local Walmart in Peoria to be developed.
That should have been that, except instead of receiving 144 happy familial memories, Walmart employees reported the Demarees to the Peoria Police Department on the suspicion that they had taken pornographic images of their children. The police, in turn, called in the Arizona Child Protective Services Agency, and the couple lost custody of their daughters for over a month.
They were shocked. "Some of the photos are bathtime photos," Lisa Demaree told ABC News at the time, "but there are a few after the bath. Three of the girls are naked, lying on a towel with their arms around each other, and we thought it was so cute."
A Maricopa County Superior Court judge ruled that the photographs were not, in fact, pornographic, and a medical exam revealed no signs of sexual abuse. The girls were returned to their parents.
But the damage had been done: The couple's named went on a central registry of sex offenders, and "We've missed a year of our children's lives as far as memories go," Demaree told ABC News.
- You see that? No conviction, no proof of child abuse, yet they were placed on the sex offender registry over allegations!
In 2009, the couple sued the city of Peoria and the State Attorney General's office for defamation. They also sued Walmart for failing to tell them that they had an "unsuitable print policy" and could turn over photos to law enforcement without the customer's knowledge.
A federal judge in Phoenix sided with Walmart, ruling that employees in Arizona cannot be held liable for reporting suspected child pornography. The Demarees appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, and on March 6 the court held a hearing before three judges.
"The photos involved were simple childhood nudity," the family's lawyer, Richard Treon, told ABC News. He argued that Walmart committed fraud on its customers by not disclosing that employees would look at their photographs. Nor did customers know that employees could take photos they found offensive to their boss, who could then call the police.
"In order to convict a person of a crime of sexual exploitation of a child, you have to show that the intent of the photographer was to sexually stimulate the viewer. All the experts agree that even police officers don't have the authority to make that decision," said Treon. "So, we argued that Walmart was negligent in setting up this program with untrained clerks and giving them tremendous power over the lives of their customers."
Walmart did not respond to an interview request from ABC News. But, according to Courthouse News the company's lawyer, Lawrence Kasten, argued that under Arizona statute employees who report child abuse without malice are immune from prosecution. He added that there was no indication of malice in this case.
"I fear that what may happen after this case is [that the] employee will sit there and say, boy, if I turn these over my employer is going to spend millions of dollars in legal fees, and I'm going to get hauled in front of a deposition for eight hours, [so] maybe I'll just stick them back in the envelope and not worry about them," he said. "Immunity is supposed to prevent exactly that from happening."
It's unknown when the appeals court will rule on the case against the city and Walmart.
Thursday, March 7, 2013
The solution to rape is to train men not to rape women?
Labels: FearMongering , Feminism , GunControl , MassHysteria , Rape , RegGunOffender , Video
What about women who rape men? Or women who rob, beat or commit other crimes against men? Men are not the only ones who commit crime! And they are not dogs that need to be trained! This is the same man hating mentality as this article. Man I cannot stand Feminazi's!
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
MO - House panel mulls voting for sex offenders (Misleading title as usual)
Labels: Disinformation , FearMongering , MassHysteria , Missouri , Voting
03/05/2013
By JORDAN SHAPIRO
JEFFERSON CITY (AP) - Registered sex offenders would be required to vote at their local county clerk's office under a bill heard Tuesday that's intended to keep them away from public polling booths at schools and other places where children might be present.
Sponsoring Rep. Tim Remole, R-Excello, told the House Elections Committee that the measure would protect children in schools, child care centers or churches from potentially being assaulted. The committee did not vote on the bill Tuesday.
- Come on, more fear mongering as usual! How many children are in schools during voting? And usually voting is done in the gym, etc, where many adults are present. This is pure nonsense!
Missouri has more than 16,000 registered sex offenders. They can vote after being paroled and completing the terms of their probation.
Current law prevents a registered sex offender from residing within 1,000 feet of a school or loitering within 500 feet of a school building. A spokeswoman for the Missouri Secretary of State's office said registered offenders are not allowed to violate the state's sex offender laws in order to vote.
- So going to vote is not exactly loitering now is it?
But Randolph County Clerk Will Ellis told the House committee that a registered sex offender voted at a school in his county last November. He said the legislation would remove a potential danger for children.
No one testified in opposition to the legislation. But the Missouri Association of County Clerks and Election Officials said the bill had some logistical issues. Association President Darryl Kempf said he would be required to spend money to turn his office into a polling place on Election Day.
Some House Elections Committee members said Missouri would also have to update its absentee voting laws to adopt Remole's plan. The measure would allow registered offenders to vote via absentee ballot if they are unable to cast their ballot at their county clerk's office. But Missouri currently only allows absentee ballots to be cast if people are not present in their home county or have a disability or religious objection that would prevent them from going to their polling place.
Friday, March 1, 2013
CA - California shows once again the sex offender laws are all about punishment, homelessness, joblessness and forced exile!
Labels: California , CrimeGovernment , Housing , MassHysteria , Politics , Residency , Video
This is yet more proof that the laws are all about punishment, forcing people into exile, homelessness and joblessness, due to their own mass hysteria. Nothing like exploiting children and the elderly for your own political campaign, but that's politics folks!
02/28/2013
By Angel Jennings
Using restrictions under state law, officials are building a small park in Harbor Gateway to force 33 offenders to move out of a nearby apartment building.
On a tiny sliver of land in Harbor Gateway, the city is beginning construction on what officials believe will be the smallest park in Los Angeles.
At one-fifth of an acre, the pocket park will barely have room for two jungle gyms, some benches and a brick wall.
But the enjoyment the park will give children is a secondary concern for officials. They are building the park for a different reason: to force 33 registered sex offenders to move out of a nearby apartment building.
State law prohibits sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a park or school. By building the park, officials said, they would effectively force the sex offenders to leave the neighborhood. This section of Harbor Gateway has one of the city's highest concentrations of registered sex offenders: 86 live in a 13-block area.
Los Angeles plans to build a total of three pocket parks with the intent of driving out registered sex offenders; two will be in Wilmington.
The action marks the latest campaign by local governments to drive sex offenders farther into the fringes of society. The state law already bans offenders from living in huge swaths of urban areas, pushing them into industrial districts and remote towns and into neighborhoods like Harbor Gateway that lack schools and parks.
Communities in Orange County have passed laws barring sex offenders from county parks and beaches. There is a new push at Los Angeles City Hall to ban offenders from living near day-care centers and locations that house after-school programs.
Backers of the park plan say it's a novel way to move out offenders while providing more recreation space.
"I want to do everything in my power to keep child sex offenders away from children," said City Councilman Joe Buscaino (Facebook, Google+), who represents the 15th District, which includes Wilmington and Harbor Gateway. "We have to look at some solutions and in comes the pocket park idea."
The effort, however, has others questioning whether these restrictions make communities safer and whether they infringe on the rights of offenders.
A California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation study released in October (PDF) showed that about 2% of convicted sex offenders are sent back to prison on a new sex-abuse offense. The study covered data from 2008.
"People are running around with hysteria when they don't know the facts," said Janice Bellucci, president of California Reform Sex Offender Laws, a nonprofit organization that advocates for the rights of those convicted of sex crimes. "I understand that sex offenders are not a popular part of society, but they have constitutional rights."
The restrictions on where offenders can live has resulted in a proliferation of group homes in acceptable areas that house large numbers of them. In Harbor Gateway, up to five offenders share one room, according to the National Sex Registry website.
On Flint Avenue in Wilmington, a former hotel has been converted into housing that caters to sex offenders. Young children often walk through the neighborhood on their way to a nearby elementary school. Some residents refer to the area as "pervert row." There have been several reports of indecent exposure, according to LAPD Officer Brian Cook.
See Also:
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
'They're Planting Stories in the Press': The Impact of Media Distortions on Sex Offender Law and Policy
Labels: CivilCommitment , Disinformation , GPS , MassHysteria , National , Punishment , Residency , SSRN , Study
Original Article
02/19/2013
Heather Cucolo
New York Law School
Michael L. Perlin
New York Law School
NYLS Legal Studies Research Paper No. 12/13 #55
NYLS Clinical Research Institute Paper No. # 33/ 2012
02/19/2013
Heather Cucolo
New York Law School
Michael L. Perlin
New York Law School
NYLS Legal Studies Research Paper No. 12/13 #55
NYLS Clinical Research Institute Paper No. # 33/ 2012
Abstract:
(View the PDF) Individuals classified as sexual predators are the pariahs of the community. Sex offenders are arguably the most despised members of our society and therefore warrant our harshest condemnation. Twenty individual states and the federal government have enacted laws confining individuals who have been adjudicated as “sexually violent predators” to civil commitment facilities post incarceration and/or conviction. Additionally, in many jurisdictions, offenders who are returned to the community are restricted and monitored under community notification, registration and residency limitations. Targeting, punishing and ostracizing these individuals has become an obsession in society, clearly evidenced in the constant push to enact even more restrictive legislation that breaches the boundaries of constitutional protections.
The advancement of technology and mass media communication have spawned a constant influx of information about sexual predators. News headlines and Internet webpages are dedicated to reporting on and highlighting sexual crimes and their infamous perpetrators. There is little disputing that the newest surge in legal attention and efforts to contain sexual predators stems from the mass dissemination of sexual offender media stories available to the general public. Thus, we cannot discuss our national obsession with sexual offenses and offenders without considering how the role of the media has framed our conceptualizations of offenders and influenced resulting legal decisions and legislation.
The public perception of what constitutes a “sex offender” is undoubtedly linked to the media’s portrayal of these types of heinous crimes. The media’s attention to high profile, violent sexual offenses has been shown to elicit a panic and fear of rampant sexual violence within our communities. This, in turn, places extreme public pressure on legislators to enact more repressive legislation and on judges to interpret such laws in ways that insure lengthier periods of incarceration for offenders. The media’s portrayal of a “largely ineffective” criminal justice system heightens fear; fictionalized portrayals of crime on television dramas may lead viewers to believe that “all offenders are `monsters’ to be feared.” The media, in short, shapes and produces the reality of crime, as it influences “factual perceptions of the world.” A “moral panic” has developed primarily due to the media’s depiction of a “sex offender” in the news and newspaper articles. As a result of the incessant media coverage, the general public has conceptualized what it believes to be the prototype of this “monstrous evil” – a male who violently attacks stranger young children .
This paper is not the first inquiry into the media’s influence on public perceptions and moral panic: the media’s influence on sex offender policy, legislation and public opinion has been highlighted in depth throughout much of the literature and academic writings. The other discussions have generally focused on the media’s role as a precursor to the enactment of sex offender legislation, the upholding of sex offender laws in the courts, and as a significant influence on the continuation of moral panic. But what has not been looked at significantly, is whether and how the media coverage and presentation of these issues has been transformed over the past two decades, and what effect, if any, this has had on public perception. What if the media has begun to shift away from simply highlighting and describing the feared beast and has begun to focus more on the problematic results of laws and legislation? Would that, in turn, have an effect on public perceptions and inevitably on the formation and enactment of laws and judicial decisions?
Slowly and somewhat recently, it appears that the tone of the media’s portrayal of sex offender issues has begun to shift. In addition to highlighting salient and horrific sexually violent offenses and contributing to community outrage, the mainstream media has increasingly begun to report on significant concerns surrounding the conceptualization, treatment and containment of the sex offender population. News articles – published in popular newspapers and media sites – more readily dedicate information to expressing expert opinions (that were previously embedded in articles dedicated solely to describing heinous crimes and community outrage), reporting on statistics that question the factual basis of our perceptions, questioning the efficacy of the laws designed to protect the community, and touching on the cost of human rights violations resulting from our laws.
This article will consider the role of the media in sex offender issues and further theorize whether the shift in media presentation has affected public perceptions of sex offenders and whether it has had any impact on recent legislation and the future enactment of sex offender laws. As part of this inquiry, we will employ the lens of therapeutic jurisprudence in an effort to assess the broader societal impact of these media depictions.
Part I will offer an overview of the major (media-centered) sex offender laws and legislation, focusing on the media accounts of the crimes upon which they were based. Part II will consider the impact of the media’s portrayal of offenders as the pariahs of society in the civil and criminal justice system; Part III will detail the proposed recent shift in media presentation and consider how, if at all, this shift has made an impact on new laws, legislation and court opinions. Part IV weighs these developments in the context of therapeutic jurisprudence, and considers its potential impact on dealing with the aftermath of the first decades of the media’s volatile influence on this area of law and policy. We conclude by offering several policy recommendations.
Subscribe to:
Posts
(
Atom
)