This continues my look at the California Sex Offender Management Board’s Report. The text is here.
Don’t forget the page-numbering system: the first number is the Adobe browser number and the second is the page number of the actual text.
I’m going to deal with the remaining 3 Sections of the Executive Summary – 6, 7, and 8 – and conclude my CASOMB thoughts in this Post since there is now much to note in the recent oral arguments to the Supreme Court in the Comstock case and also a development in the Shanley ‘recovered memory’ case up in Massachusetts.
Section 6 deals with Housing. The Report (issued in January 2008, you will recall) reports in its Data review that as of December 9, 2007 there were 3,884 sex-offender parolees who fall under the Jessica’s Law strictures, and about 3,150 were in ‘compliant’ housing. The Jessica’s Law, as with so many of these SO-mania laws, has come under increasing challenge in the courts and if you keep up with such sites as Constitutionalfights on blogspot or any of its data and newsbrief oriented sister-sites there are now increasing numbers of comments from officials as to how much trouble this ill-considered law has created for the State agencies.
There has been (in January 2008, now 2 years ago) a quadrupling of the number of SOs who have declared themselves to be ‘transient’. The ‘easy’ and quite useful pro-mania response to that is that many SOs are trying to ‘slip through the cracks’ by claiming they can’t find housing. It is to the Report’s credit that it agrees as to the importance of housing since “supportive housing which has been developed in other states has shown a decrease in re-incarceration by as much as 50%” (21/15). And you can imagine that since SO’s are almost uniformly less likely to ‘recidivate’ than any other crime group, then that’s even better news.
The Report notes that there is no statewide organization assigned to oversee the whole matter (21/15). That’s a clear indicator that these mania-laws create not only a devil’s web of strictures and requirements for SOs and their families, but also that the laws almost automatically guarantee the necessity for either an exponential increase in administrative and enforcement work for existing state agencies (and bureaucracies) or for the creation of an entirely separate (think TSA-type entity) oversight and enforcement entity simply for sex-offenders (past, present, future, present but hiding among the ‘law-abiding’, past but hiding among the ‘rehabilitated’, future but hiding behind the annoying fact that they haven’t been caught at it yet).
Such a vision of agency (and bureaucracy) creation might have been sweet mother’s milk to any State in the happy times before the economy crashed.* But the lack of dollars (to say nothing of the implications that huge and unregulated entities - think of the ‘financial industry’ successfully managing or sustaining the economy, or TSA still unable to prevent whackery on aircraft) means that these ‘visions’ are about as actually workable as Hitler’s imagined ‘armies’ that would come to rescue him in Berlin as the whole thing caved in and the distance between the Western and Eastern fronts could be covered by a kid on a messenger bicycle within the course of a single day’s pedaling.
And as I’ve suggested in earlier CASOMB Posts, I think the State of California is starting to realize that.
As so often with this Report, it then goes on to point out a numbing and stunning reality that would undermine its can-do and ‘optimistic’ mindset: “Identifying safe and appropriate housing for convicted sex offenders has been a longstanding community challenge. Community members are generally reluctant to live next door to an offender or, often even in the same neighborhood. As a result, housing options are usually more limited for sex offenders than any other type of offender. Recent changes in state and federal statutes have rendered housing options even more limited. Many sex offenders have traditionally utilized the home of their families as transitional housing until they were able to secure a more independent living option” (21/15).
None of these facts should come as a surprise.
We knew as early as the New Jersey Megan’s Law, and the fatuous maunderings of the Poritz Decision in 1995, that the public was not simply going to accept philosophically and maturely the (alleged) presence in their midst of hordes of incorrigible stranger-sex offenders hunting their children in their very school-yards, back-yards and homes.
Rather, folks were going to quite rationally – presuming that they trusted and believed the Findings that legislators and courts and assorted garden-industry ‘experts’ assured them were true – imagine that the most effective solution for so awful a threat was to get rid of such persons – or suspected persons – without further ado.
So ‘housing’ was clearly going to be a problem, especially once the mania proceeded to its more advanced stages and began to impose residence restrictions on top of the lethal implications carried within the original Findings themselves.
I disagree with the cheerible if perhaps brave characterization of this housing problem as “a long-standing community challenge”. This is the equivalent of suggesting that fateful night that Titanic’s gaping hole in her hull merely presented an opportunity for new achievements in command excellence and ‘creativity’. Phooey. She was doomed the minute she finished running alongside the berg and the only thing left was to figure out how to reduce the casualty rate when she went down.
This “challenge” is insoluble, given the terms of the original Findings, and that reality should have been clear to any sober assessment as soon as these mania laws started coming out 20 years ago. And I am talking right here simply of the mechanical and tactical problems. The Constitutional problems and the general ‘polity’ problems (declaring any group of Citizens – even convicts or ex-cons – to be an eternal threat) were fatal from the get-go.
The Board – bless their good and competent intentions – is facing levels of difficulty far beyond the tactical administrative and bureaucratic and ‘public education’ issues. You cannot tell the public these ‘monsters’ are real and then say that there are ‘creative’ ways to educate yourself into not-fearing their very existence in your community. Yes, you can try to dial-back the mania, but a mania by its very nature exists in the realm of exaggeration – so to try to reduce the exaggeration threatens the very existence of the mania itself.
And in this situation, after all these years, you now have vested interests who want to see the mania continue, because they are making money or gaining ‘expert’ status from declaiming upon it.
And you also have the even more ominous death-grip on the mania exerted by all of those who have exposed themselves to embarrassment, opprobrium, or legal action (criminal as well as civil) for their role in foisting this mania on the public and against so many Citizens in the first place. We recall the original judges in the Salem Witch Trials who quietly destroyed the actual official court records and transcripts of the proceedings over which they themselves presided, in order to prevent their own embarrassment and prosecution once the madness began to subside. And all the Italian bureaucrats of the Mussolini era who in 1946 wanted pensions for their years of service although, come to think of it, they couldn’t quite recall what they were doing during the Mussolini years except ‘just following orders’ and ‘just doing their job’.
This is now the mess on top of the original mess that the country now faces.
So, yes, “housing options are limited”. Worse, the solution – working within the current and probably indispensable framework of the mania – seems to be ‘sex offender settlements’ of some sort, like leper colonies or ghettos. This is ‘progress’? This is ‘liberal’? Such are the dark alleys down which the Regulatory-Preventive state lead you.
It’s simply too too nice to observe that “recent changes in state and federal statutes have rendered housing options even more limited”.
It’s also something bordering on the lethally cynical to assuage concern by saying that “sex offenders have traditionally utilized the home of their families as transitional housing until they were able to secure a more independent living option”. There is no transition: given the framework of the mania, a ‘sex offender’ designation is going to guarantee a lifetime of unemployment or at best underemployment, and a disbarment from almost all useful civic participation. This is what you get when you try to ‘brand’ Citizens as incorrigible monsters and pretend that doing so won’t significantly derange the Constitutional vision and ethos of the country. Phooey.
Worse, among the ‘strengths’ in this Section the Board includes the assertion that “public support for housing restrictions is strong” (22/16). If it is “strong” then it is so because the public has been stampeded by the original Findings and framework of the mania itself: those official assertions that sex-offenders are incorrigible and monstrous recidivists. And the Report has already made mention of those (grossly inaccurate) public misconceptions – so the Report here undermines itself and approaches, alas, conceptual incoherence.
And this Section concludes with the observation that Jessica’s Law “does not identify who is responsible for enforcing residency restrictions after the sex offender is released from probation or parole, and provides no funding for it” (22/16). Which is another glaring example of the whacked-out legislative productions that result from mania-legislating: legislators simply keep piling on ‘popular’ restrictions with no thought as to how the laws are to be enforced (or how enforcement is going to be paid for) and often legislators will do all this law-making in secret, in closed session and backroom arrangements, so that there is almost no chance of any intelligent objection gaining any traction. This cannot end well.
Section 7 deals with Treatment. It notes that as of 2000, 39 of 50 states provided treatment within their prisons and that as of January 2008 California did not.
And now with the economic crisis, you can imagine that little money will be freed up by cash-strapped California for such ‘treatment’, even though it has those thousands of SOs incarcerated.
It is axiomatic in clinical treatment that you want to get at the problem as soon as possible, even in the carceral setting. A shrewd tactic of the mania is that ‘treatment’ is withheld until after the sentence is over (and for the most seriously in need, this means that civil commitment post-sentence is going to be the norm).
Worse is implied in the Report’s assertion that “sex offender treatment … [is carried out] with victim safety and reduction of recidivism being the main treatment goals” (23/17). The proper goal of all “treatment” is the improvement in the self and life-competence and functioning of the patient; in the carceral setting – and especially in these mania times when ‘sex offenders’ have become the ‘demon of choice’ for various politically popular groups – the treatment canons have been deranged in favor of ‘victims’. And of preventing ‘recidivism’ (which has always been low, regardless of ‘therapy’).
So the whole ‘treatment’ process is profoundly skewed, and ethically deranged, from the get-go.
Add to that the fact that in consequence of the mania, those incarcerated for a sex offense must ‘admit’ to their offenses and not be ‘in denial’ must ‘admit’ for the record, even if they are maintaining their not-guilty status (for purposes of appeal and so forth, if not also perhaps because they were innocent in the first place).
And that anything you say in a prison therapy session will be taken down and reviewed by prison legal staff (perhaps even referred to legal staff by the ‘therapist’) for possible further legal action.
Will this discourage ‘participation’ by SO inmates? All the more grist for the mania mill: SOs will be accused of refusing to be ‘rehabilitated’.
And on top of all that, there exist profound confusion and ignorance as to the dynamics of sex offenses (before you even get to the very real probability that there is no specific ‘sex offense’ diagnosis nor any specific ‘sex offense syndrome’ that can be identified and studied in order to formulate an effective therapeutic strategy).
The Report accurately goes on to note that certain methods – such as the cognitive-behavioral method – have proven to be of use in “reducing recidivism by as much as 40%” (23/17). First, I’m not sure this figure refers to SO recidivism or to general recidivism. Second, the Cognitive-Behavioral approach (“critically examining deviant thoughts and behaviors”) would be a sound approach when helping any offense-group, including bank-robbers and (excuse the snark) impetuous financial manipulators with high-paying Wall Street jobs.
And given the low recidivism among SOs generally, independent of whether ‘therapy’ was received or not, then who can tell just how much of the ‘recidivism’ has been reduced by the therapy and how much was reduced by the fact that the only common characteristic of ‘sex offenders’ appears to be that with a very few exceptions their ‘class’ of crime seems to have almost the lowest recidivism rate of any offense-group?
The Report goes on, striking a familiar note: “Collaboration between treatment providers, parole agents / probation officers, clinical polygraph examiners, and victim advocates are key elements necessary for the successful re-entry and continued supervision of sex offenders” (23/17).
Clearly, as I have said, this is not ‘therapy’ in quite the way the average person would understand it: the special space provided by therapist and patient in which a safe and private space is created in order to handle the most intimate and difficult and complex thoughts is not there. So you are essentially trying to fly at Warp Speed without creating the pre-requisite Warp Field. And any first-year cadet at Star-Fleet Academy can tell you what’s going to happen if you try it.
And once again, the role of ‘victim advocates’ in the therapeutic process: what competence or constructive input does a victim advocate (not even the actual specific victim of the individual undergoing therapy) bring to the process?
This skewing is continued: “In many cases, community safety and/or the safety of potential victims, as opposed to offender comfort, is the focus of sex offender treatment” (23/17). What is the actual meaning of this statement? First of all, there is that weasel-like “comfort” of the “offender”: so he doesn’t get a television or a nice chair to sit in during therapy sessions? That seems ridiculous, so let’s give the Board the benefit of the doubt that they don’t mean ‘comfort’ in any such obvious sense.
But then: what other sense is there? Unless ‘comfort’ is a code word, and the denial of it a code word for some other process that those who use it would rather not discuss (in public, at least). Does this statement mean that the best-benefit of the offender-as-patient is not the priority of the therapy, but rather “community safety” is the goal? But if the offender-patient is treated successfully, and thus his life is straightened out, then ‘community safety’ is automatically enhanced anyway, so this ‘priority’ of ‘community safety’ makes no sense and is not conceptually coherent here.
Unless the priority of ‘community safety’ means that the offender-as-patient is really and genuinely disregarded, in favor of the offender-as-demon, such that the nice thought of ‘therapy’ is mostly undermined to serve the wishes of the Regulatory and Preventive and mania objectives of the State, bolstered as it has been these past 30 years by the magical mantra of ‘victim safety’.
And ‘potential’ victim safety. Which means that the very real offender-as-patient takes a back seat to persons who do not exist and may never exist (given the commonly low recidivism rate of almost all types of sex-offenders). Which means he gets ‘supervision’ masquerading as ‘therapy’ so that some other influences may be placated and ulterior motives advanced. I will say this: when you’re trying to do therapy, and you run such a crooked regimen, and your ‘patient’ is smart enough to figure that out, then the chances of conducting a successful therapy are profoundly undermined. Your ethics – the professional and ethical integrity of your treatment regimen – and the chances of a successful therapeutic outcome are deeply intertwined.
Yes, I strongly support the outcome that the offender will be able to “monitor his own behavior” (23/17). But as you can see above, a treatment regimen so skewed as this stuff is will have a very poor chance of achieving such an objective. (In which case everybody can give thanks that SOs have such low recidivism rates as a matter of course in the first place – despite the crooked treatment regimens, SOs still don’t reoffend in great numbers.)
And lastly, I’d imagine that if you were going to try to impose your eternal-supervision model on all former offenders – including those who have long been out of ‘the system’ and are conducting offense-free lives – then you are not only taking on a huge additional State burden, but you are asking genuinely ‘free’ Citizens (I don’t use these as ‘scare quotes’ as the Report did snarkily in an earlier Section) to submit to all manner of possible situations in ‘therapy’ where almost anything can be interpreted as ‘fresh evidence’ and referred to the prosecutorial authorities. Give that scenario some thought.
Section 8, the final Section of this Executive Summary of the CASOMB Report, deals with Registration, Notification, and Post-Supervision Management of Sex Offenders.
The text helpfully explains the differences: “Although they are often confused, sex offender registration and community notification are two very distinct concepts.
Registration is the process by which a sex offender provides specified information about him or herself to a local law enforcement agency. The purpose of registration is to give law enforcement agencies a means to track sex offenders’ whereabouts when pertinent to an investigation of a new sex offense.
Community notification, sometimes called “Megan’s Law” because of the law that mandates this notification, is the process by which law enforcement agencies provide information to the public about specified sex offenders. The purpose of community notification is to give the public information about sex offenders so that they may protect themselves and their families.” (25/19).
Of course, it is now well-known that 90% of sex offenses are perpetrated by first-time offenders (yes, granted that the ‘theory’ would claim that they probably were doing it for quite some time and this is merely their ‘first time’ getting caught). So Registration only works for 10% of the SO ‘population’ even according to the official figures.
Secondly, the text repeats the old Megan’s Law justifications erected into public wisdom in the Poritz decision: the State (and now Feds) give the public information so that they can “protect themselves” – which, by the way, is what the State in its police authority is supposed to do, not the public; to give that power back to the public is a huge civic regression to the days before there was a State monopoly on ‘justice’ through its organized police forces. You head back into the dark swamps of vigilantism.
That’s why the Nazis wanted the Yellow Star for Jews (and other colored stars for other targeted groups): the authorities already had them ‘registered’; the Star was to invite the public to take action on its own. This is progress? This is ‘liberal’?
In its Summary of Strengths the text includes that “Public and law enforcement support for sex offender registration and notification is strong" (26/20). I don’t think this is accurate – certainly not now, if it ever was. A simple review of the news briefs on the Constitutionalfights site indicates that newsmedia (local, more than national) and law enforcement and prosecutorial agencies themselves are now raising an alarm.
And again, such a “strong” support is based on Findings and mania inaccuracies that even this Report admits are substantial and widespread.
And given the Adam Walsh Act mess – which I’m not sure the Board took into consideration when writing the Report – the number of ‘out of compliance’ offenders is automatically increased exponentially, but merely because of the technicalities of the AWA scheme.
And once again, the Report strikes that note: “The impact on victims of sex crimes from community notification efforts (passive and active) is unknown. To develop recommendations for ways in which the needs of sex crimes victims can be balanced with the public’s right to know about dangerous offenders in their communities, a study of sex crime victims is necessary” (26/20).
You will notice that in this statement the Report is still working on the old mania assumption that there are hordes of incorrigible recidivist sex offenders roaming loose, such that (equally questionable) “the public has a right to know”. As I’ve often said, it’s Constitutionally questionable whether the public has such a right, and it’s clearly untrue that such hordes are loose, and the offenders the public gets to ‘know’ are 9 times out of 10 not the ones who are going to offend.
You can see here, I think, just why the mania legislators have most often put these laws together in secret, or bypassed standard legislative procedures and standards: they can’t afford to have the conceptual incoherences at the base of this whole thing widely known or examined. If they had followed legislative public procedure, they could never have gotten the mania off the ground in the first place, or at least not so easily and with such wide-ranging results. Stampedes, famously, don’t work if you set up a lectern in front of the herd and explain why you need it to gallop off madly; you just get behind the critters and suddenly start screaming and shooting into the air.
And that doesn’t say much for official respect for the Citizenry.
There is an interesting twist: Notification means that folks so inclined might be able to put 2 and 2 together and figure out a particular web-sited offender’s victim. Also possible is that if that offender is somehow involved as a vigilante victim himself, or otherwise comes into the public eye, then information about the victim would be drawn up into the public eye. There’s no easy way around this – unless you pass laws to the effect that victims should never be mentioned, but that runs contrary to the whole dynamic of openness in public affairs, and once you start down that road …
The Section and the Summary concludes with an interesting observation: “The effectiveness of efforts to educate the community regarding the realities versus the myths about sex offenders and sex crimes is unknown. How informed is the community about sex offenders and sex crimes? Have they utilized the community efforts of the state and local agencies? Are local citizen groups involved in educating the community?” (27/21).
No, nobody does know about ‘educating the community’ efforts. The mania works best if the public simply gets the selected sensational bits released in the service of keeping the stampede going. And this would be most certainly true if, as the Report (to its great credit) wants to dispel the “myths” about sex offenders.
But of course, dispel the myths and dissolve the stampede and the mania. But then, maybe the Board and the State of California are trying to lay some groundwork for dialing-back the mania. But without upsetting those forces, groups, and interests who would themselves react in a stampede-like way if the mania were now called off. This is going to be hugely difficult to do: you can’t have it both ways: a mania and an accurately-informed public.
And, finally and in conclusion, given the Board’s ‘victim’ orientation in this whole thing, I’m a little nervous about “local citizen groups” who are going to “educate” the community. This might well turn out to be simply ‘victim groups’ putting forth a public version of the old Jerry Springer or Oprah shows, with lurid tales and tearful demands for vengeance – and that’s just going to be more of the same old mania manipulation.
So that’s my take on the CASOMB Report.
Overall, I’d say it’s a very worthwhile and interesting development, and remarkably revealing. But it has set itself – for whatever political considerations – an almost impossible task.
And it demonstrates to everybody willing to see, that there is no easy way to call off a huge public stampede once you’ve started one, and once the highest public authorities in the land have spent the best part of 20 years trying to keep it going and intensify it.
Such are the dangers of public manipulation and demagoguery on a massive, sustained, government-sponsored scale.
But the Germans of 1946 could have taught that lesson – and did.
But like Dick Cheney (pardon the political reference) when he was eligible for drafting into the Vietnam War, the government and certain political influence groups “had another agenda”.
And the band plays on.
NOTE
*Sad, I think, that while this country can no longer conceive of an agency for space exploration such as NASA was when it successfully carried through the moon landings, and while there are few industrial competences left, yet the ‘knowledge society’ could employ its resources in imagining a huge Sex Offender Management bureaucracy at State and Federal levels.
Showing posts with label CASOMB Report. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CASOMB Report. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
CASOMB 6
(My apologies: I put the Post dealing with "Section 5: Supervision" onto the site in 'draft' form and forgot to actually Post it. Here it is. I promise to keep better track of things!)
This continues my look at the California Sex Offender Management Board’s Report. The text is here.
Don’t forget the page-numbering system: the first number is the Adobe browser number and the second is the page number of the actual text.
Section 5 deals with Supervision.
In its Data points it gives a couple of interesting figures that you don’t often come across: “In 2006, 11,739 ‘tips’ were reported through the public reporting feature of the California Megan’s Law website” (19/13). You are welcome to do your own figuring as it might occur to you as to the proportional significance of this number of ‘tips’. For myself, I cannot forget the comments by former Gestapo and Stasi officers that they (especially the less-organized and less numerous Nazi Gestapo) could not keep up with all of the ‘tips’ they received from ‘concerned citizens’ who so very often were disgruntled neighbors, employment rivals, jealous or jilted lovers, or even relatives and family members – and I’m guessing verrrry few of those ‘tips’ were actually rooted in activities treasonous to the Nazi or East German state, but rather were the result of humans’ sad and lethal tendency to pick up whatever legal weapon the government might leave lying around in order to vent their various displeasures with others and with life.
And of course, in the sex-offense mania, the government has not inadvertently left such trip-wire, hair-trigger ‘weapons’ lying around, but rather has intentionally armed the public with them. It won’t end well.
Given the broad definitions of ‘suspicious’ or ‘indicator’ activity connected with ‘sex offenders’, then a review of the gist of these ‘tips’ would probably be most interesting.
Further, “In 2007 DOJ received 9,902 public referrals”. That’s the federal Department of Justice. And a surprisingly small number of referrals, when you think of it. Of course it’s possible most ‘tippers’ go to their State sites first.
As so often in this Report, refreshing comments are made, not the less impressive for the fact that in non-mania times they would merely seem to be common sense.
“Supervising sex offenders who have been released to the community is a task that must focus primarily on public safety. The main purposes of supervision include successful re-entry into the community, successful re-assimilation into the community, and helping in the groundwork and preparation for the parolee or probationer’s long term success as a viable and productive member of the community. All of these areas in combination reduce the likelihood of re-offense and help to alleviate public fear of sex offenders released back into the communities.” (19/13)
But as so often in this Report, its conflicted ‘constituencies’ result in disjointed or even incoherent commentary.
So for example here, the supervision of sex offenders should focus primarily on public safety: well sort of but no. The actual work – as the paragraph soon goes on to describe well enough – consists in a constructive supervision of the parolee or probationer in order to enhance every possibility that he can re-integrate into society (which, given the public’s hugely ill-informed presumptions about ‘sex offenders’ – courtesy of the legislatures themselves – is a whole lot harder than it would otherwise be).
So this ‘primary focus’ on public safety is, if it has any purpose at all, merely rhetorical and thus designed merely to ‘make the right noise’ for some unmentioned ‘constituency’. After all, the primary focus of a Fire Department is public safety, you could say – but that tells you nothing about how the Department works or should work.
But then, as noted above, the paragraph rehearses the assorted elements that any competent probation or parole officer must include in an effective re-integration plan. Well and good. But of course, we all know that the primary presumption of the mania from the get-go, and the presumption that purportedly grounds and justifies – so to speak – the entire mania scheme is that sex offenders are incorrigible and cannot ever control themselves or their ‘urges’. This, no doubt, was submerged beneath that “living as ‘free’ persons in the community” snark that the Report made in the previous Section.
If sex-offenders can be rehabilitated – and if every effort should be made to do so – then the whole justifying ground of the mania is undermined. (I can’t help recalling a remark by one Confederate general – Pat Cleburne, I think – later in the Civil War, when he heard that Richmond was going to permit the enlistment of blacks in its dwindling military forces; said the General: “If the Negro will make a good soldier, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong”. The General was far, far ahead of his time, yet his insight stands out for simple acuity and clarity.)
I am not nit-picking the Report here. I grasp the torturous situation this Board and the California legislators now find themselves in (not that it isn’t to great extent of their own making): you start a mania precisely by making the most outrageously extreme and inaccurate Findings, certifying them as true as best you in all your professional skill or august legislative authority can determine … and then when the money runs out (always so much more efficient a motivator than the more ‘abstract’ respect for Truth) you have to walk yourself and the whole herd that you’ve stampeded back from the cliff before everybody goes over the edge. John Wayne would never have let one of his herds get into such a frakkulous situation.
But the Report winds up the paragraph with a reaffirmation of the value of “reducing the likelihood of re-offense”, which is a good thing. Although it has to be noted that the Report has already admitted that sex-offenders almost universally have a lower rate of recidivism than any other crime-criminal group, so a great deal of the ‘work’ has already been done before the State even opens the office doors in the morning.
The Report goes on to note that 70-80% of the State’s sex offenders are not under parole or probationary supervision (in the actual text of the Report – rather than here in the Executive Summary – the Board makes that sound like a bad thing – as if hordes of unsupervised ‘sex offenders’ were out there roaming the State like the buffalo of yore).
Reference is made (20/16) to “the Containment Model” and I’d like to explain that. There is a diagram in the body of the Report at page 108/102. The Model envisions the Sex Offender as ‘contained’ through being surrounded by 4 containment-elements: law enforcement and supervision; the treatment provider; the polygraph examiner (more on that below, of course); and the victim advocate.
As I’ve been saying in this series of Posts, there is some very valid question as to what the victim advocate can do, except as a cats-paw for the prosecutory urge to make life as stringently difficult as possible for convicts and what used to be known quaintly as ‘ex cons’. (Although the financial crisis may open up some space between the dampdreams of prosecutors and the heretofore eager-to-please criminal-law productions of legislatures; in which case the ‘victim movement’ – a creature of the early-1980s government effort to have its own ‘human face’ in support of law-and-order – will become orphaned.)
And as is evident in this Report, there is a profound disconnect between ‘sex offenders’ as permanently dangerous and ‘ex-cons’; in the mania’s founding assumptive vision, there is no such thing as an ‘ex’ sex offender. If sex offenders can be rehabilitated (or all by themselves have a lower recidivism rate than just about every crime group but murderers) then the whole mania theory of sex offenders is wrong.
Further, there is this matter of the ‘polygraph examiner’: the Model calls for ‘evidence-based’ information as to the supervisee’s actual activities through the use of a polygraph to verify (or not) his required reports made to his therapist and/or parole officer.
There is a logic to this, human nature being what it is. But alas, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander: human nature being what it is, humans with great amounts of authority are also not to be easily and wholly trusted. That was a constitutive element of the Constitutional vision of checks-and-balances and also the protection of the Citizens from any excessive pretensions by the police power of the government. For the Framers, there was no ‘good’ victim and prosecutor and some ‘evil’ perp. There were Citizens – at times accused of this or that – and the police power of the government.
And if that sounds odd to you, then take a moment and reflect on just how far this country has fallen away from the Framers’ and the Constitutional vision in the past 30 years or so. *
And naturally, there is a huge question as to how ‘therapeutic’ it can be if the therapist is now bound to be an agent of the State. The military has been seeing this problem in a hellish way, as its own psychologists took part in torture, deploying their skills to help manipulate and discombobulate captives who were reputed to have ‘ticking bomb’ information (as in Fox’s show “24”). Surely, in the confinement or supervision setting, the fact that any comments made might be turned over by the ‘therapist’ to enforcement agents for further investigation and possible prosecution greatly undermines the integrity and efficacy of the therapy (though neatly bolstering mania-supporters’ assertion that sex offenders wickedly refuse rehabilitation).
Before there were ‘terrorists’, let’s not forget, there were ‘sex offenders’ – in case you ever wonder just how important all this is to anybody beyond the immediate SO community.
NOTE
*For that matter, if I might inject here a personal political observation, I find it increasingly ludicrous that a government that insists it and its agents must never be lied-to by citizens, then goes and starts a monstrously destructive series of military misadventures on the basis of what only somebody who still believes in the Easter Bunny can deny were outright, deliberate lies to The People and to the rest of the world – at the cost of untold numbers of lives and irretrievable fortune.
And should you encounter the attitude that it was all OK because the government meant well, then you can remind yourself that before there was the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan there was the sex offense mania.
Again, I mention this just in case you’re ever tempted to think that working to defuse the SO mania is sort of a far-from-the-mainstream little patch without any wider significance to the nation and to The People.
This continues my look at the California Sex Offender Management Board’s Report. The text is here.
Don’t forget the page-numbering system: the first number is the Adobe browser number and the second is the page number of the actual text.
Section 5 deals with Supervision.
In its Data points it gives a couple of interesting figures that you don’t often come across: “In 2006, 11,739 ‘tips’ were reported through the public reporting feature of the California Megan’s Law website” (19/13). You are welcome to do your own figuring as it might occur to you as to the proportional significance of this number of ‘tips’. For myself, I cannot forget the comments by former Gestapo and Stasi officers that they (especially the less-organized and less numerous Nazi Gestapo) could not keep up with all of the ‘tips’ they received from ‘concerned citizens’ who so very often were disgruntled neighbors, employment rivals, jealous or jilted lovers, or even relatives and family members – and I’m guessing verrrry few of those ‘tips’ were actually rooted in activities treasonous to the Nazi or East German state, but rather were the result of humans’ sad and lethal tendency to pick up whatever legal weapon the government might leave lying around in order to vent their various displeasures with others and with life.
And of course, in the sex-offense mania, the government has not inadvertently left such trip-wire, hair-trigger ‘weapons’ lying around, but rather has intentionally armed the public with them. It won’t end well.
Given the broad definitions of ‘suspicious’ or ‘indicator’ activity connected with ‘sex offenders’, then a review of the gist of these ‘tips’ would probably be most interesting.
Further, “In 2007 DOJ received 9,902 public referrals”. That’s the federal Department of Justice. And a surprisingly small number of referrals, when you think of it. Of course it’s possible most ‘tippers’ go to their State sites first.
As so often in this Report, refreshing comments are made, not the less impressive for the fact that in non-mania times they would merely seem to be common sense.
“Supervising sex offenders who have been released to the community is a task that must focus primarily on public safety. The main purposes of supervision include successful re-entry into the community, successful re-assimilation into the community, and helping in the groundwork and preparation for the parolee or probationer’s long term success as a viable and productive member of the community. All of these areas in combination reduce the likelihood of re-offense and help to alleviate public fear of sex offenders released back into the communities.” (19/13)
But as so often in this Report, its conflicted ‘constituencies’ result in disjointed or even incoherent commentary.
So for example here, the supervision of sex offenders should focus primarily on public safety: well sort of but no. The actual work – as the paragraph soon goes on to describe well enough – consists in a constructive supervision of the parolee or probationer in order to enhance every possibility that he can re-integrate into society (which, given the public’s hugely ill-informed presumptions about ‘sex offenders’ – courtesy of the legislatures themselves – is a whole lot harder than it would otherwise be).
So this ‘primary focus’ on public safety is, if it has any purpose at all, merely rhetorical and thus designed merely to ‘make the right noise’ for some unmentioned ‘constituency’. After all, the primary focus of a Fire Department is public safety, you could say – but that tells you nothing about how the Department works or should work.
But then, as noted above, the paragraph rehearses the assorted elements that any competent probation or parole officer must include in an effective re-integration plan. Well and good. But of course, we all know that the primary presumption of the mania from the get-go, and the presumption that purportedly grounds and justifies – so to speak – the entire mania scheme is that sex offenders are incorrigible and cannot ever control themselves or their ‘urges’. This, no doubt, was submerged beneath that “living as ‘free’ persons in the community” snark that the Report made in the previous Section.
If sex-offenders can be rehabilitated – and if every effort should be made to do so – then the whole justifying ground of the mania is undermined. (I can’t help recalling a remark by one Confederate general – Pat Cleburne, I think – later in the Civil War, when he heard that Richmond was going to permit the enlistment of blacks in its dwindling military forces; said the General: “If the Negro will make a good soldier, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong”. The General was far, far ahead of his time, yet his insight stands out for simple acuity and clarity.)
I am not nit-picking the Report here. I grasp the torturous situation this Board and the California legislators now find themselves in (not that it isn’t to great extent of their own making): you start a mania precisely by making the most outrageously extreme and inaccurate Findings, certifying them as true as best you in all your professional skill or august legislative authority can determine … and then when the money runs out (always so much more efficient a motivator than the more ‘abstract’ respect for Truth) you have to walk yourself and the whole herd that you’ve stampeded back from the cliff before everybody goes over the edge. John Wayne would never have let one of his herds get into such a frakkulous situation.
But the Report winds up the paragraph with a reaffirmation of the value of “reducing the likelihood of re-offense”, which is a good thing. Although it has to be noted that the Report has already admitted that sex-offenders almost universally have a lower rate of recidivism than any other crime-criminal group, so a great deal of the ‘work’ has already been done before the State even opens the office doors in the morning.
The Report goes on to note that 70-80% of the State’s sex offenders are not under parole or probationary supervision (in the actual text of the Report – rather than here in the Executive Summary – the Board makes that sound like a bad thing – as if hordes of unsupervised ‘sex offenders’ were out there roaming the State like the buffalo of yore).
Reference is made (20/16) to “the Containment Model” and I’d like to explain that. There is a diagram in the body of the Report at page 108/102. The Model envisions the Sex Offender as ‘contained’ through being surrounded by 4 containment-elements: law enforcement and supervision; the treatment provider; the polygraph examiner (more on that below, of course); and the victim advocate.
As I’ve been saying in this series of Posts, there is some very valid question as to what the victim advocate can do, except as a cats-paw for the prosecutory urge to make life as stringently difficult as possible for convicts and what used to be known quaintly as ‘ex cons’. (Although the financial crisis may open up some space between the dampdreams of prosecutors and the heretofore eager-to-please criminal-law productions of legislatures; in which case the ‘victim movement’ – a creature of the early-1980s government effort to have its own ‘human face’ in support of law-and-order – will become orphaned.)
And as is evident in this Report, there is a profound disconnect between ‘sex offenders’ as permanently dangerous and ‘ex-cons’; in the mania’s founding assumptive vision, there is no such thing as an ‘ex’ sex offender. If sex offenders can be rehabilitated (or all by themselves have a lower recidivism rate than just about every crime group but murderers) then the whole mania theory of sex offenders is wrong.
Further, there is this matter of the ‘polygraph examiner’: the Model calls for ‘evidence-based’ information as to the supervisee’s actual activities through the use of a polygraph to verify (or not) his required reports made to his therapist and/or parole officer.
There is a logic to this, human nature being what it is. But alas, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander: human nature being what it is, humans with great amounts of authority are also not to be easily and wholly trusted. That was a constitutive element of the Constitutional vision of checks-and-balances and also the protection of the Citizens from any excessive pretensions by the police power of the government. For the Framers, there was no ‘good’ victim and prosecutor and some ‘evil’ perp. There were Citizens – at times accused of this or that – and the police power of the government.
And if that sounds odd to you, then take a moment and reflect on just how far this country has fallen away from the Framers’ and the Constitutional vision in the past 30 years or so. *
And naturally, there is a huge question as to how ‘therapeutic’ it can be if the therapist is now bound to be an agent of the State. The military has been seeing this problem in a hellish way, as its own psychologists took part in torture, deploying their skills to help manipulate and discombobulate captives who were reputed to have ‘ticking bomb’ information (as in Fox’s show “24”). Surely, in the confinement or supervision setting, the fact that any comments made might be turned over by the ‘therapist’ to enforcement agents for further investigation and possible prosecution greatly undermines the integrity and efficacy of the therapy (though neatly bolstering mania-supporters’ assertion that sex offenders wickedly refuse rehabilitation).
Before there were ‘terrorists’, let’s not forget, there were ‘sex offenders’ – in case you ever wonder just how important all this is to anybody beyond the immediate SO community.
NOTE
*For that matter, if I might inject here a personal political observation, I find it increasingly ludicrous that a government that insists it and its agents must never be lied-to by citizens, then goes and starts a monstrously destructive series of military misadventures on the basis of what only somebody who still believes in the Easter Bunny can deny were outright, deliberate lies to The People and to the rest of the world – at the cost of untold numbers of lives and irretrievable fortune.
And should you encounter the attitude that it was all OK because the government meant well, then you can remind yourself that before there was the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan there was the sex offense mania.
Again, I mention this just in case you’re ever tempted to think that working to defuse the SO mania is sort of a far-from-the-mainstream little patch without any wider significance to the nation and to The People.
CASOMB 5
This continues my look at the California Sex Offender Management Board’s Report. The text is here.
Don’t forget the page-numbering system: the first number is the Adobe browser number and the second is the page number of the actual text.
Section 4 deals with Investigation and Prosecution. It mentions the Vertical Prosecution approach: that one prosecutor handles all phases and filings in a specific case, from beginning to end.
It recommends more funding for more thorough and intensive prosecutorial training throughout the state; this recommendation for more funding echoes throughout the Report (completed in January 2008). For any State in the Union the experiences of 2008 and the fiscal collapse would make the request for fine-tuning funding problematic now. And this problem is exacerbated by the unfunded mandates imposed by the Adam Walsh Act (should a State not be able to refuse the feds’ offer).
Respectably, it also recommends studies to determine if cases handled in the Vertical Prosecution mode are more effectively handled than those handled in the conventional way (assigning whichever ADA is available to whatever phase of whatever case is on the docket that day or that week). But again, these studies are going to cost money.
It also notes the need for “victim surveys of the impact of investigation techniques and/or prosecution management”. This – it is hoped – simply means that CASOMB wants to know what victims feel about their experiences as they follow their alleged assailant’s case through the legal system. I am hoping that it does not solicit the victims’ opinion of whether they think the court is being tough enough on the defendant.
But as in all of these Sections – and throughout the Report – you get the impression that there is much more concern for understanding or expressing the feelings of the victims rather than understanding very much concerning the accused or convicted sex offender.
“Management” in the sense it seems to be used here more closely resembles ‘animal husbandry’ or ‘wildlife management’ than it does even the modestly respectable sense of ‘clinical management’. And for the most part, the ‘management’ leans – in many places – towards keeping the offenders corralled in one form or another.
But not completely, and this is intriguing.
Immediately after the above recommendation, the Report says “We need to develop outcome studies on the effectiveness of various investigation and prosecution tools as well as methods of investigation and prosecution” (19/13). It’s always good to learn what works and what doesn’t. So long as you’ve got a sufficiently comprehensive understanding of what you mean by ‘works’: it’s not simply a matter of what ‘breaks down’ suspects more efficiently, nor simply what satisfies the murky desires and feelings of the victimized, but also a question of what respects the rights of the suspects/defendants.
And, for the assorted agency managers, it would also be important to fully understand the effect of ‘mania’-type enforcement practices on the enforcers themselves, especially over time.
And that would also go for the assorted therapeutic organizations – especially those involved from the first ‘report’ of the self-declared victim: it is a dangerous drug, a heady brew, that is released when a therapy ‘bond’ is instantaneously established between a too-often under-trained and inexperienced ‘service provider’ and an agitated client by simply agreeing ‘totally’ on the evil of the erstwhile perpetrator, known or unknown.
The old canard about the ‘prison doc’ who thought all cons were just misunderstood had some validity, but so does the less-Correct reality of agitated victim-patients and under-trained ‘therapists’ setting each other off like tuning forks, amplifying a reaction that needs to be much more carefully handled. There’s a lot more to therapeutic success than having the patient quickly declare that you’re wonderful for being in complete agreement.
But then the Report takes one much larger step in an impressive direction: “Research needs to be completed which will allow us to understand the newly created laws on sex offenders and/or the community, particularly to determine if new laws provide a deterrence for future criminal, sexual behavior” (19/13).
It’s not quibbling – I’m thinking – to point out that the grammar of that last sentence indicates that all sexual behavior is criminal. In conversation that might be considered a meaty Freudian slip, but since this is grammar – and they haven’t taught it for quite some time now – then perhaps this is just a grammatical mistake in trying to convey the idea that the Board is concerned only with that subset of sexual behavior that includes criminal elements.
More importantly, the Report is pointing out the need for more fact-based and evidence-based understanding of just what impact these laws do or do not have.
Now whether the intent of the Board is as broadly open-minded as its language indicates is another question, so this is no time to be popping any corks, but it’s a well-stated thought, especially in an official public Report.
Don’t forget the page-numbering system: the first number is the Adobe browser number and the second is the page number of the actual text.
Section 4 deals with Investigation and Prosecution. It mentions the Vertical Prosecution approach: that one prosecutor handles all phases and filings in a specific case, from beginning to end.
It recommends more funding for more thorough and intensive prosecutorial training throughout the state; this recommendation for more funding echoes throughout the Report (completed in January 2008). For any State in the Union the experiences of 2008 and the fiscal collapse would make the request for fine-tuning funding problematic now. And this problem is exacerbated by the unfunded mandates imposed by the Adam Walsh Act (should a State not be able to refuse the feds’ offer).
Respectably, it also recommends studies to determine if cases handled in the Vertical Prosecution mode are more effectively handled than those handled in the conventional way (assigning whichever ADA is available to whatever phase of whatever case is on the docket that day or that week). But again, these studies are going to cost money.
It also notes the need for “victim surveys of the impact of investigation techniques and/or prosecution management”. This – it is hoped – simply means that CASOMB wants to know what victims feel about their experiences as they follow their alleged assailant’s case through the legal system. I am hoping that it does not solicit the victims’ opinion of whether they think the court is being tough enough on the defendant.
But as in all of these Sections – and throughout the Report – you get the impression that there is much more concern for understanding or expressing the feelings of the victims rather than understanding very much concerning the accused or convicted sex offender.
“Management” in the sense it seems to be used here more closely resembles ‘animal husbandry’ or ‘wildlife management’ than it does even the modestly respectable sense of ‘clinical management’. And for the most part, the ‘management’ leans – in many places – towards keeping the offenders corralled in one form or another.
But not completely, and this is intriguing.
Immediately after the above recommendation, the Report says “We need to develop outcome studies on the effectiveness of various investigation and prosecution tools as well as methods of investigation and prosecution” (19/13). It’s always good to learn what works and what doesn’t. So long as you’ve got a sufficiently comprehensive understanding of what you mean by ‘works’: it’s not simply a matter of what ‘breaks down’ suspects more efficiently, nor simply what satisfies the murky desires and feelings of the victimized, but also a question of what respects the rights of the suspects/defendants.
And, for the assorted agency managers, it would also be important to fully understand the effect of ‘mania’-type enforcement practices on the enforcers themselves, especially over time.
And that would also go for the assorted therapeutic organizations – especially those involved from the first ‘report’ of the self-declared victim: it is a dangerous drug, a heady brew, that is released when a therapy ‘bond’ is instantaneously established between a too-often under-trained and inexperienced ‘service provider’ and an agitated client by simply agreeing ‘totally’ on the evil of the erstwhile perpetrator, known or unknown.
The old canard about the ‘prison doc’ who thought all cons were just misunderstood had some validity, but so does the less-Correct reality of agitated victim-patients and under-trained ‘therapists’ setting each other off like tuning forks, amplifying a reaction that needs to be much more carefully handled. There’s a lot more to therapeutic success than having the patient quickly declare that you’re wonderful for being in complete agreement.
But then the Report takes one much larger step in an impressive direction: “Research needs to be completed which will allow us to understand the newly created laws on sex offenders and/or the community, particularly to determine if new laws provide a deterrence for future criminal, sexual behavior” (19/13).
It’s not quibbling – I’m thinking – to point out that the grammar of that last sentence indicates that all sexual behavior is criminal. In conversation that might be considered a meaty Freudian slip, but since this is grammar – and they haven’t taught it for quite some time now – then perhaps this is just a grammatical mistake in trying to convey the idea that the Board is concerned only with that subset of sexual behavior that includes criminal elements.
More importantly, the Report is pointing out the need for more fact-based and evidence-based understanding of just what impact these laws do or do not have.
Now whether the intent of the Board is as broadly open-minded as its language indicates is another question, so this is no time to be popping any corks, but it’s a well-stated thought, especially in an official public Report.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
CASOMB 4
This continues my look at the California Sex Offender Management Board’s Report. The text is here.
Don’t forget the page-numbering system: the first number is the Adobe browser number and the second is the page number of the actual text.
Section 3 deals with Sex Offender Recidivism and it is here that the Report, I would say, makes its most worthwhile contribution to accuracy and sanity.
This Section of the Executive Summary begins, as always, with “Data”, and they are striking (15/9). “3.55% of sex offenders on parole [in California] had committed new sex offenses by the time of the conclusion of their three-year parole period”. This is a thought-provoking number, and in light of what usually passes for recidivism figures it’s stunning. I could only wish that “committed” had been more precisely broken down into ‘charged with’ or ‘convicted of’, but that doesn’t detract substantially from the 3.55 figure.
Further, “A ten-year follow-up study of 879 sex offenders in the state of Ohio reported that when using sex offense conviction as the outcome measurement, of 34% of sex offenders who have re-offended, only 8% were re-committed for a new sex crime, plus 3% for a technical violation judged to be related to the new sex crime, while the other 22% re-offended for non-sexual offenses”. And this figure also stuns, in a good way.
It’s heartening to see that the Report penetrates to the factual-heart of the matter by focusing on ‘sex offense conviction’ as the standard of measurement, rather than on the less informative ‘arrest’ or ‘charged with’. And the figure is 8%: that’s a pretty decent re-offense rate compared to all other types of crime (and criminal offender).
Additionally, there was another 3% re-confined for “technical violation”: again, this is an excellent distinction to make, since “technical violations” are simply a violation of those myriad residence and other ‘regulatory’ and ‘non-punitive’ restrictions that have been larded on like frosting over the course of the years since the mid-1990s, and especially since the Supreme Court cleared the way for intensified mania with its Smith v. Doe decision in 2003. You may recall one fellow who was re-arrested because in moving from one house to another in order to comply with the latest residency restriction, he spent a night in a motel and was then arrested when he went to register his new address, because he hadn’t ‘registered’ the motel address (for the one night he spent there).
In order to ‘keep the numbers up’ the mania usually doesn’t make this distinction, which in this case would have yielded a ‘recidivism’ rate of 11% (and every little bit helps in a mania).
And you cannot help but imagine that even for former sex offenders who commit further non-sexual crimes, there is no small possibility that a former offender who is faced with the daunting challenge of trying to rebuild a life having been ‘tagged’ by the sex offense mania cannot manage to hold everything together. I’m going to think that a percentage of that 22% who committed further, non-sexual crimes were under the intense and continually intensifying pressures imposed by restrictions of all sorts, imposed now even by towns and municipalities.
And of course, the Adam Walsh Act is going to increase the ‘technical offenses’ exponentially since a long-ago convicted sex-offender may now be liable for registration under a direct Federal requirement, even though his State doesn’t require his registration. I recall a recent court decision (valid, if I recall correctly, only in that Federal District or Appellate region) that makes AWA registration mandatory even if the State in which the ‘eligible’ offender resides has not yet (and may never) adopt and accept AWA.
The Report states with laudable directness: “Solid information about the recidivism of sex offenders is one of the key building blocks for good policy and effective practice in sex offender management. If it were not for the concern that an identified sex offender may offend again in the future and create another victim, the questions about how to best manage sex offenders living in California communities would not be of such intense interest” (15/9).
Well yes, yes, and yes.
The lack of solid information – or even the desire for it – has done a great deal to impeach the credibility not only of sex offense legislation but even of the legislators (and jurists) who create and uphold the matrix of mania law. Yes, the AWA – after a decade or more of sex-offense law – finally calls for ‘study’, but only ‘study’ about the effects of the law, not about the validity of the Findings upon which AWA and the entire matrix of mania law rest.
And as even this Section has just revealed in its ‘Data’, recidivism is stunningly low, especially if that excellent distinction is made between a ‘new’ sex offense, a ‘technical’ violation, and conviction for unrelated and non-sexual offenses.
And of course, since almost 90% of reported sex offenses are committed by ‘first offenders’, who by definition are unknown to the system, then ‘management’ is only going to affect 10% of offenders. And while you can then say that over time more and more offenders will be ‘identified and tagged’, it’s clearly going to take a lot of time and a lot of money, and all of those resources poured into an almost chaotically mis-conceptualized and wrongly conceived quasi-phenomenon.
BUT THEN the Report goes on to assert, and rightly so, that if it weren’t for the danger of recidivism, then the post-confinement and supervision of sex-offenders would – nicely put – “not be of such intense interest”. And how! The entire public sex-offense anxiety that fuels the mania would lose its ‘grounding’, such as it is. (Of course that’s not to say that the sex offense mania would then disappear overnight; let’s face it: the effects of almost 2 decades of government-supported media sensationalism, even though based on shocking inaccuracies, are not going to go away overnight.)
Tactfully, the Report reasons rightly that if the citizens know the ‘likelihood’ of an offender re-offending then that ‘knowledge’ “can drive many decisions”. But of course, such knowledge really is ‘knowledge’: there’s no way of knowing because a) you can never really know the future with any human being, and b) because the ‘sex offense’ problem at its very core is such a primal hash of exaggeration, untruth, and anxiety-fueled imagination and speculation. (I wonder when somebody is going to get around to the very real problem of how to manage and rehabilitate ‘the public’ after all these years of being soused with all this mania madness.)
Especially since many of those “decisions” are not simply government or public policy and law decisions, but rather private citizens’ decisions made under the deforming pressure of the mania: to avoid ‘sex offenders’ and their families, to get ‘them’ out of the neighborhood, and so on.
The Report veers back a bit, though acceptably, by stating that “knowing what interventions might actually reduce the chances that a sex offender will re-offend is also extremely important”. Which is technically and procedurally true. But since the phenomenon of ‘sex offense’ is so conceptually confused, then it is going to be extremely difficult to come up with rational and effective responses, whether through public policy and law or through therapeutic treatment.
Indeed, reflecting that hash, most citizens simply take the low road and quietly decide to simply ‘avoid’ and ‘get rid of’ sex-offenders (and often their families) as decisively and simply as possible (which usually includes ‘as primitively as possible’, and that is one of the lethal consequences of this mania for public and civic and societal life in this country). Let’s not forget: the instances of violence against sex-offenders and even their families are grossly under-reported; and this is especially true if you include the emotional violence of rejection, obloquy, and verbal harassment, let alone more formal consequences such as being fired from a job or rejected by a potential employer.
The Report continues (15/9): “Existing data indicates that the majority of sex offenders do not re-offend sexually over time (Harris & Hanson, 2004)" [italics mine]. It goes on (16/10): “Additionally, research studies over the past two decades have consistently indicated that recidivism rates for sex offenders are, in reality, lower than the re-offense rates for most other types of offenders”[italics mine].
This, and several other studies quoted in this Section, clearly establish – in the Report’s estimation – that the already-acknowledged key factor of ‘recidivism’ is very low among ‘sex offenders’. This is remarkable because it would seem that the Report is clearly undermining the entire purpose of CASOMB’s existence. And you don’t often find that in public documents, especially government-established Boards created for the purpose of ‘dealing with’ this or that problem.
Of course, the SO community can only give thanks and take heart that this Report is willing to use its authority and status to stand up for some truth and accuracy in this entire mania area.
But what is going on here?
I think that – government being what it is – no Board would take such a position unless it had the quiet and prior approval of crucial elements within the government (in this case, of the State). And this is especially true when the Board is so clearly weighted in a certain direction by the appointment of prestigious victim-advocacy types as Chair and Co-Chair.
Which leads me to conclude that while making all the necessary noises to maintain its creds among the ‘victim community’, this Board, with the tacit approval of a grievously cash-strapped State government and many of the Agencies involved, is trying to dial back the mania to a level where there is at least some modest hope of sustaining a ‘management’ program at all.
In other words, I think that what you can see here is a real attempt to dial-back the mania, by embracing actual and factual and evidence-based knowledge and information (precisely the tack NOT taken for the past 20 or so years by governments, legislatures, too many courts, the media, and the panoply of ‘organizations’ – volunteer or for profit – that have grown up around this monstrous thing).
And when I say that I am not belittling the Report. I think it represents a very significant development: government – surely under the unspinnable pressure of serious cash shortfalls – is starting to reach out for genuinely accurate information in order to get some control over the wildly unbalanced dynamics spiraling - expsensively - out of control.
Yes, genuinely accurate information will have that marvelous effect of keeping things from spinning wildly and madly off into crazy directions; that, I would say, is why such information was avoided by ‘advocates’ and enablers and instigators of this thing from the get-go.
And yes, it would be nice to think that ‘truth’ is so widely prized among Us that a simple desire for it would have kept things on the straight and narrow. But human nature is human nature and consequently life is what it is. It has taken a good rap on the snout from implacable fiscal realities to start the correction process. But so it was with the Salem Witch Trials, where the government in Boston – fearful for its reputation back in London – saw the medieval outbreak of judicial blood-shedding in Salem as being far too dangerous to be permitted to continue. And the mania subsided.
And I will also add that there had always been, even in Salem, a number of folks who had never accepted the validity of the witchcraft mania and its ‘trials’. And that very few citizens objected once they had calmed down – and began gingerly conducting public affairs in that ‘morning after’ mode so often seen on New Year’s day as last night’s party-goers start to sober up and try to make their way along snowy paths to carry on the normal affairs of life, studiously avoiding the mess and wreck that they had caused the night before when they were in 'party mode'.
Among “Gaps” requiring attention in the State, the Report (16/10) especially notes that “the operational definition of ‘sex offender recidivism’ used in any future California recidivism studies needs to be standardized to improve the accuracy and comparability of the data”. Well, yes indeed! And that would be a requirement in any Introductory course in Statistics and Research in any college in the country. But it’s a clear indication of just how far off balance this entire mania has been from the get-go that such a simple, almost elementary, requirement was ignored, and indeed purposely and repeatedly violated.
(Which I would say leads to a handy Rule of Thumb for Citizens: any ‘progress’ or ‘reform’ which requires the suspension or violation of elementary procedures for establishing truth must be considered with a verrrry skeptical and gimlet eye. Because such violations are the clear warning signs of developing public mania, not only among the Citizens but among the agencies and branches of government themselves.)
But just so you don’t go popping any corks, the Report then asserts that “Little is known about the extent to which recidivism rates climb after the period of formal supervision and control under the authority of the criminal justice system (parole and probation) ends …”(16/10). Well, it is already established that 90% of sex offenses are committed by first timers, so there may be that 10% - roughly – who re-offend.
Although you then have to consider just what ‘offense’ they commit, since as is well established, there are now a whole lotta things that are swept up into the definition of ‘sex offense’ and ‘sexual assault’ and ‘molestation’, far beyond what one might imagine in ‘rape’, ‘attempted rape’, and crimes against ‘children’. *
But then the Report sounds something of the old music: those sex offenders no longer under the authority of the criminal justice system are described in the text as “simply living in the community as “free” citizens” ... [air quotes in the text itself].
And this, I think, is revealing, and unhappily so. The Report indulges in the old but ominous implication that former sex-offenders are somehow still dangerous, that they are only diabolically and evilly mimicking the appearance of a decent citizen, and that they – though former offenders, and perhaps for decades – have no right to be or to be considered “free”. I don’t think it’s hard to see just what a grossly inaccurate but also Constitutionally lethal and toxic dynamic this represents, fracturing the civic polity and society, and creating the beginnings of what Giorgio Agamben calls homo sacer**, the individual who by government declaration is subject to the laws but no longer protected by them.
So this Section gives the SO community cause for substantive hope, although it also reminds everybody just what lethal stakes are still involved in this mania.
NOTES
*In the past two days I read a news story about a police officer who was arrested for burning the pelvic area of a female toddler, somehow related to him, with a hot iron. He was arrested for rape of a child, if I recall correctly. It seems to me that such a shocking and reprehensible act has little to do with ‘sex’ and much more to do with a violent and aggressive assaultiveness – whatever its causes – in the perpetrator. That such a crime is primarily considered as a ‘sex offense against a child’ strikes me as being conceptually a misclassification (although as a prosecutorial strategy, given the stringencies of child-sex-offense laws, a shrewder charging-decision).
**See my Post of 12/31/09, “Carl Schmitt and Sex Offenses” on this site.
Don’t forget the page-numbering system: the first number is the Adobe browser number and the second is the page number of the actual text.
Section 3 deals with Sex Offender Recidivism and it is here that the Report, I would say, makes its most worthwhile contribution to accuracy and sanity.
This Section of the Executive Summary begins, as always, with “Data”, and they are striking (15/9). “3.55% of sex offenders on parole [in California] had committed new sex offenses by the time of the conclusion of their three-year parole period”. This is a thought-provoking number, and in light of what usually passes for recidivism figures it’s stunning. I could only wish that “committed” had been more precisely broken down into ‘charged with’ or ‘convicted of’, but that doesn’t detract substantially from the 3.55 figure.
Further, “A ten-year follow-up study of 879 sex offenders in the state of Ohio reported that when using sex offense conviction as the outcome measurement, of 34% of sex offenders who have re-offended, only 8% were re-committed for a new sex crime, plus 3% for a technical violation judged to be related to the new sex crime, while the other 22% re-offended for non-sexual offenses”. And this figure also stuns, in a good way.
It’s heartening to see that the Report penetrates to the factual-heart of the matter by focusing on ‘sex offense conviction’ as the standard of measurement, rather than on the less informative ‘arrest’ or ‘charged with’. And the figure is 8%: that’s a pretty decent re-offense rate compared to all other types of crime (and criminal offender).
Additionally, there was another 3% re-confined for “technical violation”: again, this is an excellent distinction to make, since “technical violations” are simply a violation of those myriad residence and other ‘regulatory’ and ‘non-punitive’ restrictions that have been larded on like frosting over the course of the years since the mid-1990s, and especially since the Supreme Court cleared the way for intensified mania with its Smith v. Doe decision in 2003. You may recall one fellow who was re-arrested because in moving from one house to another in order to comply with the latest residency restriction, he spent a night in a motel and was then arrested when he went to register his new address, because he hadn’t ‘registered’ the motel address (for the one night he spent there).
In order to ‘keep the numbers up’ the mania usually doesn’t make this distinction, which in this case would have yielded a ‘recidivism’ rate of 11% (and every little bit helps in a mania).
And you cannot help but imagine that even for former sex offenders who commit further non-sexual crimes, there is no small possibility that a former offender who is faced with the daunting challenge of trying to rebuild a life having been ‘tagged’ by the sex offense mania cannot manage to hold everything together. I’m going to think that a percentage of that 22% who committed further, non-sexual crimes were under the intense and continually intensifying pressures imposed by restrictions of all sorts, imposed now even by towns and municipalities.
And of course, the Adam Walsh Act is going to increase the ‘technical offenses’ exponentially since a long-ago convicted sex-offender may now be liable for registration under a direct Federal requirement, even though his State doesn’t require his registration. I recall a recent court decision (valid, if I recall correctly, only in that Federal District or Appellate region) that makes AWA registration mandatory even if the State in which the ‘eligible’ offender resides has not yet (and may never) adopt and accept AWA.
The Report states with laudable directness: “Solid information about the recidivism of sex offenders is one of the key building blocks for good policy and effective practice in sex offender management. If it were not for the concern that an identified sex offender may offend again in the future and create another victim, the questions about how to best manage sex offenders living in California communities would not be of such intense interest” (15/9).
Well yes, yes, and yes.
The lack of solid information – or even the desire for it – has done a great deal to impeach the credibility not only of sex offense legislation but even of the legislators (and jurists) who create and uphold the matrix of mania law. Yes, the AWA – after a decade or more of sex-offense law – finally calls for ‘study’, but only ‘study’ about the effects of the law, not about the validity of the Findings upon which AWA and the entire matrix of mania law rest.
And as even this Section has just revealed in its ‘Data’, recidivism is stunningly low, especially if that excellent distinction is made between a ‘new’ sex offense, a ‘technical’ violation, and conviction for unrelated and non-sexual offenses.
And of course, since almost 90% of reported sex offenses are committed by ‘first offenders’, who by definition are unknown to the system, then ‘management’ is only going to affect 10% of offenders. And while you can then say that over time more and more offenders will be ‘identified and tagged’, it’s clearly going to take a lot of time and a lot of money, and all of those resources poured into an almost chaotically mis-conceptualized and wrongly conceived quasi-phenomenon.
BUT THEN the Report goes on to assert, and rightly so, that if it weren’t for the danger of recidivism, then the post-confinement and supervision of sex-offenders would – nicely put – “not be of such intense interest”. And how! The entire public sex-offense anxiety that fuels the mania would lose its ‘grounding’, such as it is. (Of course that’s not to say that the sex offense mania would then disappear overnight; let’s face it: the effects of almost 2 decades of government-supported media sensationalism, even though based on shocking inaccuracies, are not going to go away overnight.)
Tactfully, the Report reasons rightly that if the citizens know the ‘likelihood’ of an offender re-offending then that ‘knowledge’ “can drive many decisions”. But of course, such knowledge really is ‘knowledge’: there’s no way of knowing because a) you can never really know the future with any human being, and b) because the ‘sex offense’ problem at its very core is such a primal hash of exaggeration, untruth, and anxiety-fueled imagination and speculation. (I wonder when somebody is going to get around to the very real problem of how to manage and rehabilitate ‘the public’ after all these years of being soused with all this mania madness.)
Especially since many of those “decisions” are not simply government or public policy and law decisions, but rather private citizens’ decisions made under the deforming pressure of the mania: to avoid ‘sex offenders’ and their families, to get ‘them’ out of the neighborhood, and so on.
The Report veers back a bit, though acceptably, by stating that “knowing what interventions might actually reduce the chances that a sex offender will re-offend is also extremely important”. Which is technically and procedurally true. But since the phenomenon of ‘sex offense’ is so conceptually confused, then it is going to be extremely difficult to come up with rational and effective responses, whether through public policy and law or through therapeutic treatment.
Indeed, reflecting that hash, most citizens simply take the low road and quietly decide to simply ‘avoid’ and ‘get rid of’ sex-offenders (and often their families) as decisively and simply as possible (which usually includes ‘as primitively as possible’, and that is one of the lethal consequences of this mania for public and civic and societal life in this country). Let’s not forget: the instances of violence against sex-offenders and even their families are grossly under-reported; and this is especially true if you include the emotional violence of rejection, obloquy, and verbal harassment, let alone more formal consequences such as being fired from a job or rejected by a potential employer.
The Report continues (15/9): “Existing data indicates that the majority of sex offenders do not re-offend sexually over time (Harris & Hanson, 2004)" [italics mine]. It goes on (16/10): “Additionally, research studies over the past two decades have consistently indicated that recidivism rates for sex offenders are, in reality, lower than the re-offense rates for most other types of offenders”[italics mine].
This, and several other studies quoted in this Section, clearly establish – in the Report’s estimation – that the already-acknowledged key factor of ‘recidivism’ is very low among ‘sex offenders’. This is remarkable because it would seem that the Report is clearly undermining the entire purpose of CASOMB’s existence. And you don’t often find that in public documents, especially government-established Boards created for the purpose of ‘dealing with’ this or that problem.
Of course, the SO community can only give thanks and take heart that this Report is willing to use its authority and status to stand up for some truth and accuracy in this entire mania area.
But what is going on here?
I think that – government being what it is – no Board would take such a position unless it had the quiet and prior approval of crucial elements within the government (in this case, of the State). And this is especially true when the Board is so clearly weighted in a certain direction by the appointment of prestigious victim-advocacy types as Chair and Co-Chair.
Which leads me to conclude that while making all the necessary noises to maintain its creds among the ‘victim community’, this Board, with the tacit approval of a grievously cash-strapped State government and many of the Agencies involved, is trying to dial back the mania to a level where there is at least some modest hope of sustaining a ‘management’ program at all.
In other words, I think that what you can see here is a real attempt to dial-back the mania, by embracing actual and factual and evidence-based knowledge and information (precisely the tack NOT taken for the past 20 or so years by governments, legislatures, too many courts, the media, and the panoply of ‘organizations’ – volunteer or for profit – that have grown up around this monstrous thing).
And when I say that I am not belittling the Report. I think it represents a very significant development: government – surely under the unspinnable pressure of serious cash shortfalls – is starting to reach out for genuinely accurate information in order to get some control over the wildly unbalanced dynamics spiraling - expsensively - out of control.
Yes, genuinely accurate information will have that marvelous effect of keeping things from spinning wildly and madly off into crazy directions; that, I would say, is why such information was avoided by ‘advocates’ and enablers and instigators of this thing from the get-go.
And yes, it would be nice to think that ‘truth’ is so widely prized among Us that a simple desire for it would have kept things on the straight and narrow. But human nature is human nature and consequently life is what it is. It has taken a good rap on the snout from implacable fiscal realities to start the correction process. But so it was with the Salem Witch Trials, where the government in Boston – fearful for its reputation back in London – saw the medieval outbreak of judicial blood-shedding in Salem as being far too dangerous to be permitted to continue. And the mania subsided.
And I will also add that there had always been, even in Salem, a number of folks who had never accepted the validity of the witchcraft mania and its ‘trials’. And that very few citizens objected once they had calmed down – and began gingerly conducting public affairs in that ‘morning after’ mode so often seen on New Year’s day as last night’s party-goers start to sober up and try to make their way along snowy paths to carry on the normal affairs of life, studiously avoiding the mess and wreck that they had caused the night before when they were in 'party mode'.
Among “Gaps” requiring attention in the State, the Report (16/10) especially notes that “the operational definition of ‘sex offender recidivism’ used in any future California recidivism studies needs to be standardized to improve the accuracy and comparability of the data”. Well, yes indeed! And that would be a requirement in any Introductory course in Statistics and Research in any college in the country. But it’s a clear indication of just how far off balance this entire mania has been from the get-go that such a simple, almost elementary, requirement was ignored, and indeed purposely and repeatedly violated.
(Which I would say leads to a handy Rule of Thumb for Citizens: any ‘progress’ or ‘reform’ which requires the suspension or violation of elementary procedures for establishing truth must be considered with a verrrry skeptical and gimlet eye. Because such violations are the clear warning signs of developing public mania, not only among the Citizens but among the agencies and branches of government themselves.)
But just so you don’t go popping any corks, the Report then asserts that “Little is known about the extent to which recidivism rates climb after the period of formal supervision and control under the authority of the criminal justice system (parole and probation) ends …”(16/10). Well, it is already established that 90% of sex offenses are committed by first timers, so there may be that 10% - roughly – who re-offend.
Although you then have to consider just what ‘offense’ they commit, since as is well established, there are now a whole lotta things that are swept up into the definition of ‘sex offense’ and ‘sexual assault’ and ‘molestation’, far beyond what one might imagine in ‘rape’, ‘attempted rape’, and crimes against ‘children’. *
But then the Report sounds something of the old music: those sex offenders no longer under the authority of the criminal justice system are described in the text as “simply living in the community as “free” citizens” ... [air quotes in the text itself].
And this, I think, is revealing, and unhappily so. The Report indulges in the old but ominous implication that former sex-offenders are somehow still dangerous, that they are only diabolically and evilly mimicking the appearance of a decent citizen, and that they – though former offenders, and perhaps for decades – have no right to be or to be considered “free”. I don’t think it’s hard to see just what a grossly inaccurate but also Constitutionally lethal and toxic dynamic this represents, fracturing the civic polity and society, and creating the beginnings of what Giorgio Agamben calls homo sacer**, the individual who by government declaration is subject to the laws but no longer protected by them.
So this Section gives the SO community cause for substantive hope, although it also reminds everybody just what lethal stakes are still involved in this mania.
NOTES
*In the past two days I read a news story about a police officer who was arrested for burning the pelvic area of a female toddler, somehow related to him, with a hot iron. He was arrested for rape of a child, if I recall correctly. It seems to me that such a shocking and reprehensible act has little to do with ‘sex’ and much more to do with a violent and aggressive assaultiveness – whatever its causes – in the perpetrator. That such a crime is primarily considered as a ‘sex offense against a child’ strikes me as being conceptually a misclassification (although as a prosecutorial strategy, given the stringencies of child-sex-offense laws, a shrewder charging-decision).
**See my Post of 12/31/09, “Carl Schmitt and Sex Offenses” on this site.
CASOMB 3
This continues my look at the California Sex Offender Management Board’s Report. The text is here.
Don’t forget the page-numbering system: the first number is the Adobe browser number and the second is the page number of the actual text.
Section 2 (12/6) deals with the Numbers and Distribution of Offenders. It begins with some numbers. There are 61,710 registered sex offenders (RSOs) in California; and another 23,469 who have been convicted in California but reside elsewhere. There are 22,474 sex-offenders in custody within the State prison system. There are about 725 civil committeds, although only 20-30% of those are taking specific sex-offender therapy, the remainder perhaps taking general rehabilitation and vocational courses.
That’s a lot of sex-offender prosecutions. It occurs to me that if sex offenses are under-reported by at least a factor of 10, then there are half-a-million to three-quarters of a million actual sex-offenders loose in the State – surely enough to keep any advocacy in business for quite a long time, by the way.
I’m not sure but I would say that of that 70% of civil-committeds, a notable fraction don’t take the sex-offender therapy classes and programs for a variety of reasons besides the rote pop-psychological accusation that they are ‘in denial’ about their crimes and actions: if you have maintained your innocence in court filings, then you probably aren’t allowed into the programs, and you couldn’t very well volunteer for a program that required you to ‘come out of denial’ and admit to everything. Further, the stigma of sex-offending in the carceral setting (and I would surely include a State hospital for the criminally insane – as they used to call them – a carceral setting) is such, especially for one convicted of offenses against a ‘child’*, that many incarcerated convictees may well judge discretion to be the better part of valor.
But this Report keeps popping up with interesting and useful stuff – which you don’t often see. In its Recommendations it notes (14/8) that “the ‘metrics’ used to classify sex offenders, sex offenses, recidivism, and similar important dimensions are not consistent across systems making it hard to reach and state clear conclusions”.
And how! One of the very significant enablers of this entire mania has been the sloppy (if not also treacherous) misuse of terminology and definitions – e.g. ‘sex offenders’ and ‘sex offenders against children’, the very definitions of ‘child’ and ‘juvenile , and the impossibly overbroad definitions of ‘sexual assault’ and the impossibly vague definition of ‘molesting’).
You wonder though, if that’s the way the Regulatory and Preventive state wants it.
In that regard, I want to share here a thought that has come to me recently. I wonder if assorted ‘thinkers’ with Beltway connections have reasoned (as it were) thusly: since the Family and Parenthood and Maturity have all been greatly weakened as a result of certain widespread ‘liberations’ in the past few decades, then a whole lotta kids are going to wind up growing up without much parental (especially paternal and ‘male’) influence to help Shape them and prepare them for maturity and a life in society. And therefore, the State will have to Regulate these kids and Prevent them from committing crimes; the State will have to step in and step up to replace the formative influences formerly imbued by parents who could impart a culture-wide tradition of personal and social maturity.
If that thought is even partly true, then we are all in a heepa trubble. First of all, there are visions of acres of infant boy-children in diapers laid out on long tables in Mussolini’s State-run facilities, where the State could ensure that Italian boy-children grew up to be good Fascists and soldiers. Although I not only disagree with Musso’s plans to turn them into soldiers, but I really don’t want the government taking infants even if it only wants to turn them into computer programmers or ‘knowledge workers’ or for that matter Latin and Philosophy professors.
Governments aren’t good at this sort of stuff, a perennial truth ignored by decades of eager ‘revolutionaries’ who figured that in the wake of assorted ‘liberations’ and ‘empowerments’ the State could take the kids.
But it’s also essential to realize that there is a ‘window’ in which the young human is open to – and desperately in need of – the type of sustained care and growth-nurture that only parents can give. And unless the government is going to take over raising kids when they’re infants, then by the time Regulation and Prevention kicks in it will be wayyyyyyy too late. You kind of want to build the aircraft properly while it’s in the factory, because once it’s at 35,000 feet and has ‘souls’ aboard, you really can’t be pulling up the floorboards or ripping the wings off to angle them differently, no matter how much the aircraft may need such rework.
This would also add a new context for the sex-offense mania: it is only the first phase of a move toward a Regulatory and Preventive state made necessary by the abandonment of long-established (and – it has to be said – rather successful) traditional means of imparting to children necessary emotional, psychological, and moral competences essential to social and individual maturity. This will become even more necessary as cohorts of children grow into child-making adulthood having been themselves deprived of such formative essentials in their own childhood.
Like the various ‘wars’ in which this country is now engaged, many of these ‘liberations’ have proven to have hugely negative – though hardly unforeseeable – downsides.
In my next Post I will deal with Section 3 – Sex Offender Recidivism, where things get really interesting.
NOTES
*You might profitably spend a few moments wondering if your fellow inmates and incarcerees will adhere to a ‘broad’ or ‘narrow’ definition of ‘child’, since that would surely govern their general assessment of your suitability for their companionship, and perhaps for recognizing any extended lease you might have on life.
Don’t forget the page-numbering system: the first number is the Adobe browser number and the second is the page number of the actual text.
Section 2 (12/6) deals with the Numbers and Distribution of Offenders. It begins with some numbers. There are 61,710 registered sex offenders (RSOs) in California; and another 23,469 who have been convicted in California but reside elsewhere. There are 22,474 sex-offenders in custody within the State prison system. There are about 725 civil committeds, although only 20-30% of those are taking specific sex-offender therapy, the remainder perhaps taking general rehabilitation and vocational courses.
That’s a lot of sex-offender prosecutions. It occurs to me that if sex offenses are under-reported by at least a factor of 10, then there are half-a-million to three-quarters of a million actual sex-offenders loose in the State – surely enough to keep any advocacy in business for quite a long time, by the way.
I’m not sure but I would say that of that 70% of civil-committeds, a notable fraction don’t take the sex-offender therapy classes and programs for a variety of reasons besides the rote pop-psychological accusation that they are ‘in denial’ about their crimes and actions: if you have maintained your innocence in court filings, then you probably aren’t allowed into the programs, and you couldn’t very well volunteer for a program that required you to ‘come out of denial’ and admit to everything. Further, the stigma of sex-offending in the carceral setting (and I would surely include a State hospital for the criminally insane – as they used to call them – a carceral setting) is such, especially for one convicted of offenses against a ‘child’*, that many incarcerated convictees may well judge discretion to be the better part of valor.
But this Report keeps popping up with interesting and useful stuff – which you don’t often see. In its Recommendations it notes (14/8) that “the ‘metrics’ used to classify sex offenders, sex offenses, recidivism, and similar important dimensions are not consistent across systems making it hard to reach and state clear conclusions”.
And how! One of the very significant enablers of this entire mania has been the sloppy (if not also treacherous) misuse of terminology and definitions – e.g. ‘sex offenders’ and ‘sex offenders against children’, the very definitions of ‘child’ and ‘juvenile , and the impossibly overbroad definitions of ‘sexual assault’ and the impossibly vague definition of ‘molesting’).
You wonder though, if that’s the way the Regulatory and Preventive state wants it.
In that regard, I want to share here a thought that has come to me recently. I wonder if assorted ‘thinkers’ with Beltway connections have reasoned (as it were) thusly: since the Family and Parenthood and Maturity have all been greatly weakened as a result of certain widespread ‘liberations’ in the past few decades, then a whole lotta kids are going to wind up growing up without much parental (especially paternal and ‘male’) influence to help Shape them and prepare them for maturity and a life in society. And therefore, the State will have to Regulate these kids and Prevent them from committing crimes; the State will have to step in and step up to replace the formative influences formerly imbued by parents who could impart a culture-wide tradition of personal and social maturity.
If that thought is even partly true, then we are all in a heepa trubble. First of all, there are visions of acres of infant boy-children in diapers laid out on long tables in Mussolini’s State-run facilities, where the State could ensure that Italian boy-children grew up to be good Fascists and soldiers. Although I not only disagree with Musso’s plans to turn them into soldiers, but I really don’t want the government taking infants even if it only wants to turn them into computer programmers or ‘knowledge workers’ or for that matter Latin and Philosophy professors.
Governments aren’t good at this sort of stuff, a perennial truth ignored by decades of eager ‘revolutionaries’ who figured that in the wake of assorted ‘liberations’ and ‘empowerments’ the State could take the kids.
But it’s also essential to realize that there is a ‘window’ in which the young human is open to – and desperately in need of – the type of sustained care and growth-nurture that only parents can give. And unless the government is going to take over raising kids when they’re infants, then by the time Regulation and Prevention kicks in it will be wayyyyyyy too late. You kind of want to build the aircraft properly while it’s in the factory, because once it’s at 35,000 feet and has ‘souls’ aboard, you really can’t be pulling up the floorboards or ripping the wings off to angle them differently, no matter how much the aircraft may need such rework.
This would also add a new context for the sex-offense mania: it is only the first phase of a move toward a Regulatory and Preventive state made necessary by the abandonment of long-established (and – it has to be said – rather successful) traditional means of imparting to children necessary emotional, psychological, and moral competences essential to social and individual maturity. This will become even more necessary as cohorts of children grow into child-making adulthood having been themselves deprived of such formative essentials in their own childhood.
Like the various ‘wars’ in which this country is now engaged, many of these ‘liberations’ have proven to have hugely negative – though hardly unforeseeable – downsides.
In my next Post I will deal with Section 3 – Sex Offender Recidivism, where things get really interesting.
NOTES
*You might profitably spend a few moments wondering if your fellow inmates and incarcerees will adhere to a ‘broad’ or ‘narrow’ definition of ‘child’, since that would surely govern their general assessment of your suitability for their companionship, and perhaps for recognizing any extended lease you might have on life.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
CASOMB 2
This continues my look at the California Sex Offender Management Board’s Report. The text is here.
Don’t forget the page-numbering system: the first number is the Adobe browser number and the second is the page number of the actual text.
Section 1 deals with the Prevalence of Sexual Assault and Services for Victims. The Executive Summary bullets several statistics. The first stat is that 1 out of every 6 US women and 1 out of every 33 US males have been the victims of completed or attempted sexual assault.
That’s a little fresh. Naturally, in this type of thing you always have to keep a wary eye on definitions: what is defined as ‘sexual assault’ for the purposes of compiling this statistic? This is especially true when you are reading stats that have strong ‘advocacy’ connections (and this Report is from a Board whose Chair and Vice-Chair are from victim-type volunteer advocacy organizations).
When you think of the term ‘sexual assault’ in terms of males … this assertion makes you wonder: are there actually that many males being raped or attempted to be raped in this country? Almost one out of every thirty-three? But of course, this simply makes more clear the too-little appreciated fact that ‘sexual assault’ is defined verrrry broadly; we’ve sort of gotten used to this when thinking of female victims and accept it now as part of the wallpaper of our modern American reality, but as soon as you imagine it applying to males in such huge proportions, it parts the ‘fog of advocacy stats’ (if I may).
And of course, this has implications for the consequences of such acts. If sexual assault is very broadly defined – to include one’s ‘package’ (or some female private part) being grabbed or touched, say for example, then just how disastrous are the consequences for a life over the long term? I am not saying that there are no consequences whatsoever; I am simply following up this statistic for its implications. Every human act that involves another human being has consequences, when you get right down to it. So too every criminal act; but perspective is necessary or else an exaggerated view of consequences will provide the ongoing emergency that justifies a police state (as I said in my recent Post on Carl Schmitt).
And 9 of every 10 sexual assaults are committed by persons known to the victim – which undermines the clearly misguided (but tactically useful) focus on ‘stranger-danger’ in the sex-offender mania.
And 67% of sexual assaults are against “juveniles” – and again definitions are vital here: the term is extensive enough to cover infants and graduating high-school football players and even military enlistees.
The Report continues on 11/5: “In studies of the victims of sexual assaults to date, the effects of victims have been described as profound”. As I said in the previous Post, this is a very elastic and complex area. Far too often, those ‘effects’ are primarily comprised of anecdotal victim self-reports; while they may be valid, they are hardly sufficient for diagnostic conclusions, and – human nature being what it is – their accuracy is highly open to further investigation (which so often is not done for fear of ‘re-victimizing’ the victim. You can’t get serious objective scientific research done this way.
Now it is certainly true that the younger or more fragile the victim, the more intense and extensive the possibility of damage, emotionally and psychologically. But we have to recall that scientific meta-study of a decade ago, that merely reported that in its comprehensive view of already-published research, nobody had been able to actually establish long-lasting harmful effects on the scale that the sex-offense movement presumes – and that for the first time in US history Congress responded directly and immediately by passing a Resolution condemning the Report and implying verrrrry clearly that any scientist who wanted to keep getting government funding for research had better not come up with any more such ‘results’. This disturbing event assumes an even more vivid hue when we recall the stunningly inaccurate quality of Congressional ‘Findings’ that have provided the pretext (not to say justification) for the entire matrix of sex-offender mania laws.
Further, the damaging consequences that the Report names – an increased likelihood for Major Depressive Episodes and attempts at suicide – are notoriously difficult to isolate as being caused by any single incident (although it is not impossible that such might happen). Large numbers of Americans are technically suffering from depression and undergo a Major Depressive Episode (although ‘Episode’ itself indicates a temporary condition).
And thus the Report’s immediate conclusion – that “The significance and scope of sexual assault is a major criminal justice issue with an impact on wider society” (11/5) – is demonstrably based on some sketchy ‘science’ indeed, and yet the conclusion is so sweeping and ominous in its scope, extending to a Public Health as well as Criminal Justice ‘emergency’.
Further, the Report quickly adds that “in light of the potentially deep and lasting impacts of a sexual assault, supportive services and resources for victims are essential”. So this bit of mushy science grounds not only the sex-offender mania but also the victim movement.
Further, the Report immediately adds that “victim service providers can assist with the development of offender supervision practices, community education plans, and other victim-responsive practices that can improve the effectiveness of public safety and management practices”. Again I note that this seems to be a victim-oriented approach, and not an offender-rehabilitation approach; which is what it is, surely, but is it really going to help get offenders rehabilitated.
And beyond that there is the queasy reality that – human nature being what it is – most victims and perhaps most of their victim-service providers (VSPs) are going to be more interested in punishment – revenge, even – than in offender rehabilitation and re-introduction into society. Surely this Report thus far seems to lean in that direction. Its concern, in its own words, is to valorize “victim-responsive practices”. So you wind up with a Regulatory-Preventive dynamic that bonds with a revenge dynamic, on top of the usual prosecutorial 'war' dynamic ... you see what sort of Storm is going to brew.
And just what useful input can VSPs have in the formulation of policies to manage – let alone rehabilitate – offenders? VSPs are not competent in the psychology of rehabilitation and therapy, not in the administrative complexities of public policy management. What do they bring to the table here? As I said, the likelihood is strong that their input will be in their own condition as victims and in ensuring that the offender is not treated ‘too gently’ or ‘let off too easily’, and they will set that bar very low, I imagine.
But again, this is a public Board and the politics of the whole thing have to be taken into consideration. Since the victim ‘constituency’ wants a place at the table, then the pols will provide it, if only to look good and – if I may – shut them up.
But I am hoping that the Board will still find its way – intentionally or otherwise – to some actually efficacious insights.
In its overview of the Pluses and Minuses of the current situation in California, the Board notes as a Minus “the lack of a statewide strategic plan for victim assistance resulting in inadequate planning for victim services and fragmented funding” and “a lack of funding for a victim advocate as part of the Vertical Prosecution team”. (Vertical Prosecution refers to the practice of assigning one prosecutor to handle a sex-offense case from beginning to end, rather than a bunch of different prosecutors taking bits and pieces of the case depending on who’s got a free slot in his/her court schedule.)
Again, this starts to sound like the Report is being used to make a case for more victim-advocacy funding rather than conducting a full and in-depth study of sex-offender treatment and post-release planning. Which from a bureaucratic point of view is a very common gambit, but it’s important to bring that little bit of reality to the surface.
In my next Post I’ll continue through the Sections of the Executive Summary.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
CALIFORNIA SEX OFFENDER MANGAGEMENT BOARD REPORT
Under the heading of the short Post “Report on Low Sex Offender Recidivism”, dated Monday, December 14, 2009, on the always-informative Constitutional Fights site, a link is provided to the 225 page Report of the above-named Board.
The pdf text of this Report is here (you need Adobe to open it).
I’ve read it and it is worth the look. What I’d like to do in a series of Posts is to give you what strike me as the interesting elements and points contained in it, along with (as always) my thoughts.
In this and follow-on Posts I’m going to tackle the 25-page Executive Summary, and then each of the 8 Sections.
Please note: As always with this type of formatted document, there are two systems of pagination: the page number according to the Adobe program and the page number in the actual text of the document. In this document, there is a difference of 6 in the numbering. Thus, for example, page 15 in the Adobe system is actually page 9 of the actual document’s numbering. So I will give two page numbers: 15/9, for example. I hope this doesn’t put you off; it’s easy to get used to and the document, as always, is an interesting read.
The Executive Summary begins on page 8/2.
It opens with “Sexual assault continues to bring tremendous and long-lasting suffering into the lives of its victims, and the communities in which they live.” Again, as so often, we see here the emphasis on the consequences of sexual assault. I do not and do not intend to minimize or deny or – certainly – make light of any suffering that any victim of any crime suffers (I once was held at shotgun point in an armed robbery, lying on the floor and wondering …).
But there is a great deal of difficulty in determining just what the long-lasting consequences of any particular crime (let alone type of crime) are, since the information is largely based on the victim’s own self-reports, which are technically termed ‘anecdotal’ and cannot form the basis for a competent diagnostic conclusion as to the assertion: Symptom B was directly caused by Crime A and would never have come into existence without the perpetration of Crime A.
Of course, a very broad view would be that any perpetrator is responsible for any unhappy developments in the life of a victim, but on that broad assertion then nobody convicted of any crime would ever be ‘safe’ to release back into the community. So there is a lot of ‘open water’, a lot of uncharted conceptual space, in this type of assertion.
The Report continues immediately: “The mandate of the California Sex Offender Management Board (CASOMB) is to play a key role in reducing sexual victimization in our state, particularly that perpetrated by individuals who have already been identified as sexual offenders. Consequently, every effort of CASOMB must be informed by a clear perspective on the experiences of victims – viewed individually as well as collectively.” (This entire sentence is printed in Bold in the text.)
This is a thought-provoking, not to say odd, statement. You would think that the prime task of a ‘sex offender management board’ would be to somehow help the sex-offender get better and get re-adjusted. But instead, here the angle of approach is through ‘victimization’. We recall Aya Gruber’s point, echoed by Wayne A. Logan, that the ‘victim’ movement was from its inception in the first Reagan administration a stalking-horse or cat’s-paw for prosecutorial and government efforts to recapture ‘sympathy’ which in the Sixties had gravitated to the ‘defendant’.
Against this burden of sympathy for the ‘defendant’ – long established in American culture (the Constitution itself was one long exercise in curbing and fencing-in government police power) – the ‘victim’ would be ‘the human face’ behind which and on whose behalf the government police power would capture the weight of public sympathy and approval. As we now see, there are no ‘defendants’ any longer; there are ‘perpetrators’ and – even more ominously – ‘offenders’, up to and including that most ‘evil’ type, the ‘sex offender’.
Further, the Report clearly limits itself for all practical purposes to those who have already committed or have been convicted of sex-offenses. And yet I clearly recall recent studies indicating that up to 90% of sex-offenses are committed by ‘first-time’ offenders, so at the very outset the Board limits itself to only 10% of sex-offenders.
Finally, and without any logical connection to the foregoing sentences, the Report inserts the victims as the essential and primary focus from which ‘management’ must take its cue. But this seems to be a curious and glaring disconnect: if you want to manage sex-offenders, then their treatment and post-release future lives must be the key focus; the emphasis on the ‘past’ act, and on the feelings of a person whose only competence is in having been the object of the act, don’t logically bear much relevant weight. (And again, I am not attempting to minimize or deny genuine painful consequences here.)
The Report then acknowledges its mandate bestowed by a recently-passed California law, noting that “it was necessary to understand the current state of practice. The safety of the public, victims and those who could be potentially victimized depends on the deployment of public safety strategies that are effective and achievable”.
Again this victims and victimization emphasis. And there is no ‘therapeutic’ element here at all; it’s all about “public safety strategies”. But I chose to accentuate the positive, that heartening last phrase about needing to figure out just what “strategies” are “effective and achievable” – which inserts a note of objective and evidence-based thinking that you don’t often see in public sex-offense documents.
The Report immediately proceeds (8/2) to assert that “[T]he reality of having so many jurisdictions, laws, systems, agencies and perspectives directly involved in the management of California’s sex offenders results in a very complex web of policies and practices that defy ready simplification. It is precisely this complexity – at least in part – that has created the need for instituting a Sex Offender Management Board as a locus of cohesive information and integrated expertise”.
It is heartening to see that the ‘complexity’ is acknowledged. I myself would want to say that the ‘complexity’ is the result of a horrible hash of grossly inaccurate if not malevolently wrong assumptions about sex-offenders and offenses, hasty and ill-considered legislation that seems to receive little mature deliberation and analysis or any concern as to consequences (intended, unintended, constructive or destructive), and an overall stampede effect among far too many legislators, jurists, the media, and the public. There is – not to make light – a Keystone Kops aspect to all of this mania, with much running around, lots of vivid smashing and crashing, and little effective achievement.
But this is a State Board erected for the purposes of working within the general parameters of an existing legislative vision, so how much can you reasonably expect?
But again, the Report immediately repeats – is this becoming a mantra? – that ‘This report represents the CASOMB’s first step towards the board’s vision to decrease sexual
victimization and increase community safety”. [Bold is in the text itself.] I begin to wonder if the Board might be making the necessary kow-tows to the relevant gods before striking out in some fresh direction.
The Report (9/3) then discusses briefly the composition of its membership, 17 members: “Each member represents a constituency with a central role in the promotion of public safety
and the management of California’s sex offenders”. Among these, the Chair and Vice-Chair are both from what appear to be volunteer against-sexual-assault types of coalitions, a judge and several prosecutorial reps from DA offices and the Attorney General’s office, State Department of Mental Health, a public defender, and State Corrections, Parole and police officers. Those ‘coalition’ types – the Chair and Vice-Chair – may be the ‘victim’ connection, and it clearly is significant.
The Report also notes the passage of the State’s Jessica’s Law in late 2006 (which among other things reduced to one from two the number of victims required before a person could be declared a Sexually Violent Predator, thereby greatly increasing the scope of civil-commitment and other burdens). The Report makes no mention of the Adam Walsh Act, which will certainly increase the number of potential Registrants and turn a number of otherwise well-returned former offenders into non-compliant Registry status.
With page 10/4 the Report proceeds to its Overview of its 8 Sections.
I’ll deal with them in follow-on Posts shortly.
The pdf text of this Report is here (you need Adobe to open it).
I’ve read it and it is worth the look. What I’d like to do in a series of Posts is to give you what strike me as the interesting elements and points contained in it, along with (as always) my thoughts.
In this and follow-on Posts I’m going to tackle the 25-page Executive Summary, and then each of the 8 Sections.
Please note: As always with this type of formatted document, there are two systems of pagination: the page number according to the Adobe program and the page number in the actual text of the document. In this document, there is a difference of 6 in the numbering. Thus, for example, page 15 in the Adobe system is actually page 9 of the actual document’s numbering. So I will give two page numbers: 15/9, for example. I hope this doesn’t put you off; it’s easy to get used to and the document, as always, is an interesting read.
The Executive Summary begins on page 8/2.
It opens with “Sexual assault continues to bring tremendous and long-lasting suffering into the lives of its victims, and the communities in which they live.” Again, as so often, we see here the emphasis on the consequences of sexual assault. I do not and do not intend to minimize or deny or – certainly – make light of any suffering that any victim of any crime suffers (I once was held at shotgun point in an armed robbery, lying on the floor and wondering …).
But there is a great deal of difficulty in determining just what the long-lasting consequences of any particular crime (let alone type of crime) are, since the information is largely based on the victim’s own self-reports, which are technically termed ‘anecdotal’ and cannot form the basis for a competent diagnostic conclusion as to the assertion: Symptom B was directly caused by Crime A and would never have come into existence without the perpetration of Crime A.
Of course, a very broad view would be that any perpetrator is responsible for any unhappy developments in the life of a victim, but on that broad assertion then nobody convicted of any crime would ever be ‘safe’ to release back into the community. So there is a lot of ‘open water’, a lot of uncharted conceptual space, in this type of assertion.
The Report continues immediately: “The mandate of the California Sex Offender Management Board (CASOMB) is to play a key role in reducing sexual victimization in our state, particularly that perpetrated by individuals who have already been identified as sexual offenders. Consequently, every effort of CASOMB must be informed by a clear perspective on the experiences of victims – viewed individually as well as collectively.” (This entire sentence is printed in Bold in the text.)
This is a thought-provoking, not to say odd, statement. You would think that the prime task of a ‘sex offender management board’ would be to somehow help the sex-offender get better and get re-adjusted. But instead, here the angle of approach is through ‘victimization’. We recall Aya Gruber’s point, echoed by Wayne A. Logan, that the ‘victim’ movement was from its inception in the first Reagan administration a stalking-horse or cat’s-paw for prosecutorial and government efforts to recapture ‘sympathy’ which in the Sixties had gravitated to the ‘defendant’.
Against this burden of sympathy for the ‘defendant’ – long established in American culture (the Constitution itself was one long exercise in curbing and fencing-in government police power) – the ‘victim’ would be ‘the human face’ behind which and on whose behalf the government police power would capture the weight of public sympathy and approval. As we now see, there are no ‘defendants’ any longer; there are ‘perpetrators’ and – even more ominously – ‘offenders’, up to and including that most ‘evil’ type, the ‘sex offender’.
Further, the Report clearly limits itself for all practical purposes to those who have already committed or have been convicted of sex-offenses. And yet I clearly recall recent studies indicating that up to 90% of sex-offenses are committed by ‘first-time’ offenders, so at the very outset the Board limits itself to only 10% of sex-offenders.
Finally, and without any logical connection to the foregoing sentences, the Report inserts the victims as the essential and primary focus from which ‘management’ must take its cue. But this seems to be a curious and glaring disconnect: if you want to manage sex-offenders, then their treatment and post-release future lives must be the key focus; the emphasis on the ‘past’ act, and on the feelings of a person whose only competence is in having been the object of the act, don’t logically bear much relevant weight. (And again, I am not attempting to minimize or deny genuine painful consequences here.)
The Report then acknowledges its mandate bestowed by a recently-passed California law, noting that “it was necessary to understand the current state of practice. The safety of the public, victims and those who could be potentially victimized depends on the deployment of public safety strategies that are effective and achievable”.
Again this victims and victimization emphasis. And there is no ‘therapeutic’ element here at all; it’s all about “public safety strategies”. But I chose to accentuate the positive, that heartening last phrase about needing to figure out just what “strategies” are “effective and achievable” – which inserts a note of objective and evidence-based thinking that you don’t often see in public sex-offense documents.
The Report immediately proceeds (8/2) to assert that “[T]he reality of having so many jurisdictions, laws, systems, agencies and perspectives directly involved in the management of California’s sex offenders results in a very complex web of policies and practices that defy ready simplification. It is precisely this complexity – at least in part – that has created the need for instituting a Sex Offender Management Board as a locus of cohesive information and integrated expertise”.
It is heartening to see that the ‘complexity’ is acknowledged. I myself would want to say that the ‘complexity’ is the result of a horrible hash of grossly inaccurate if not malevolently wrong assumptions about sex-offenders and offenses, hasty and ill-considered legislation that seems to receive little mature deliberation and analysis or any concern as to consequences (intended, unintended, constructive or destructive), and an overall stampede effect among far too many legislators, jurists, the media, and the public. There is – not to make light – a Keystone Kops aspect to all of this mania, with much running around, lots of vivid smashing and crashing, and little effective achievement.
But this is a State Board erected for the purposes of working within the general parameters of an existing legislative vision, so how much can you reasonably expect?
But again, the Report immediately repeats – is this becoming a mantra? – that ‘This report represents the CASOMB’s first step towards the board’s vision to decrease sexual
victimization and increase community safety”. [Bold is in the text itself.] I begin to wonder if the Board might be making the necessary kow-tows to the relevant gods before striking out in some fresh direction.
The Report (9/3) then discusses briefly the composition of its membership, 17 members: “Each member represents a constituency with a central role in the promotion of public safety
and the management of California’s sex offenders”. Among these, the Chair and Vice-Chair are both from what appear to be volunteer against-sexual-assault types of coalitions, a judge and several prosecutorial reps from DA offices and the Attorney General’s office, State Department of Mental Health, a public defender, and State Corrections, Parole and police officers. Those ‘coalition’ types – the Chair and Vice-Chair – may be the ‘victim’ connection, and it clearly is significant.
The Report also notes the passage of the State’s Jessica’s Law in late 2006 (which among other things reduced to one from two the number of victims required before a person could be declared a Sexually Violent Predator, thereby greatly increasing the scope of civil-commitment and other burdens). The Report makes no mention of the Adam Walsh Act, which will certainly increase the number of potential Registrants and turn a number of otherwise well-returned former offenders into non-compliant Registry status.
With page 10/4 the Report proceeds to its Overview of its 8 Sections.
I’ll deal with them in follow-on Posts shortly.
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