> > As a mother, I always worry about food, clothing and shelter for my
>> children, but I cannot protect them from abductors, rapists or other
>> predators who should be shot after their fair trial. Of all of these
>
>Ignoring the rest of your post, and going off on a tangent - many polls
>have shown that during the course of a woman's lifetime in the U.S.,
>between 1/6 to 1/4 women experience rape, and the numbers for men are
>often much higher than anyone really recognizes - probably 1/6 to 1/5 of
>men (especially when you factor in the 15-20% of men in prisons who are
>sexually assaulted each year). Anyway, assuming that each victim is
>attacked by a person who is a serial rapist - who accumulates 50 victims,
>do you realize how many executions would be involved in getting rid of
>these people? 280 million people X 1/5 / 50 = 1,120,000 rapists.
We haven't quite gotten to the point of shooting "pedophiles," rapists, etc. as Catherine recommends, but we are getting there. According to the NYT article below, however, juries are said to be less likely than judges to subject sex offenders to indefinite custody via "civil commitment."
***** New York Times 22 April 2001
In Some States, Sex Offenders Serve More Than Their Time
By CAREY GOLDBERG
BROCKTON, Mass. - In 1997, Thomas Wilcox, a soft-spoken delivery truck driver, put his hand down the bike shorts of a 13-year-old girl he knew and molested her. He was convicted of child rape and served three years in prison. He spent them partly in the state treatment center for sex offenders and was scheduled to be released last summer.
Not so fast, Mr. Wilcox was told: Under a new Massachusetts law there was no guarantee that he would get out at all.
Enacted in recent years here and in 15 other states, "sexually violent predator" statutes say, in essence, that longer prison sentences and "Megan's Law" sex offender registries are not enough; society needs a way to keep potentially dangerous perverts off the streets after their sentences have been served.
And that way is a civil trial of the sort that Mr. Wilcox, 37, just went through, a hearing before a judge and jury to determine whether sexual predators are still dangerous and whether they should continue to be locked up and treated indefinitely.
"They're saying, `You have to serve until we think you can get out,' " Mr. Wilcox's sister, Vonita, complained.
As of last year, nearly 900 sex offenders were locked away for indefinite terms, or as the courts put it "from one day to life."
The laws have withstood major legal challenges, including arguments that locking up a criminal after he has served his sentence amounts to double jeopardy. The United States Supreme Court has upheld the laws twice, most recently in January.
But where such laws are in use, states are facing an equally great challenge: sheer cost, a cost that only goes up as the number of sex offenders committed in civil trials rises. Washington State, which passed the first of the laws in 1990, estimates that it costs up to $110,000 a year to hold and treat a sex offender, plus up to $70,000 for legal bills, because most can appeal each year for release.
California is planning to build a prison-and-treatment center for up to 1,500 sex offenders expected to cost more than $360 million, and Washington expects to pay about $81 million for a 400-bed center.
In New York, two bills on sexually violent predators are pending, and supporters recognize the potential price. "But it's something I think government is supposed to be there for," said Assemblyman David E. Seaman, a Republican who is sponsoring one of the measures. "We're not supposed to just blindly sentence somebody and then let that person out knowing the person is very likely to brutalize victims again. We've got to do something about that."
Cost is not the only problem. If Mr. Wilcox's trial in Superior Court here last week is any indication, sexually violent predator laws raise deeply troubling questions for many of the lawyers and psychologists involved with them. In particular: Can predictions of behavior be good enough to justify locking someone away?
As Michael Farrington, Mr. Wilcox's lawyer, told the jury in his closing argument, "This is a law that asks you to determine the future of a fellow human being based not on what he has done but on what you think he may do."
Jeanne Holmes, the assistant district attorney, countered: That prediction "also will decide whether or not the community, and the children in the community, are safe from Mr. Wilcox. The decision is not just about Mr. Wilcox, it is about the community as well." Besides, Ms. Holmes asked, isn't past behavior the best predictor of future behavior?
Mr. Wilcox's trial was one of the first to be held in Massachusetts as the new law finally took effect; it was passed in 1999 but stalled by months of court challenges. The proceedings lasted a week and focused mostly on whether the dire predictions being made about Mr. Wilcox were scientifically sound.
Mr. Wilcox's lawyer, Mr. Farrington, cited studies indicating that psychologists who tried to predict a patient's behavior based on their clinical judgment were wrong more often than they were right.
The correct approach, he argued, was to use new actuarial models that estimate the odds that a sex offender will commit new crimes based on facts about him. Studies have shown, for example, that chances of another assault rise if an offender has had multiple victims, has molested boys or has dropped out of treatment, among other things.
Ms. Holmes argued that top researchers in the field approved the use of clinical judgment; and in any case, she said, even using tests based on the actuarial models, Mr. Wilcox scored enough danger points to be considered high risk.
That depends, responded Dr. Daniel Kriegman, a psychologist testifying on Mr. Wilcox's side, on what you consider high risk. According to one actuarial model, he said, Mr. Wilcox had a 26 percent chance of committing another sex crime. If an airplane had even a 5 percent chance of crashing he would not get on it, he said, but whether 26 percent is high in this case was a "social decision."
The testimony highlighted a painful calculation: If 100 men like Mr. Wilcox are locked away, 74 of them could spend many years behind bars for no good reason at all. If the 100 are set free, it could produce 26 or more new victims. The field of sex offender risk assessment has made great strides in recent years, experts say, but not great enough to solve such a knotty problem.
Two theoretically neutral psychologists hired by the state to assess Mr. Wilcox and one hired by the prosecution all said they believed he was still sexually dangerous, though one acknowledged it was a difficult case.
Mr. Wilcox had been caught in a sex offense before, they pointed out. In 1984, he had a sexual encounter with a girl who, he found out later, was only 12 or 13, Mr. Wilcox told psychologists. She had looked much older, he told them. Because she had not resisted, he was put on probation for three years.
Put the 1997 and the 1984 crimes together, the prosecution psychologists said, and you get a pattern of pedophilia. The Massachusetts law allows for civil commitment of a sex offender who suffers from "a mental abnormality or personality disorder" - like pedophilia - that "makes him likely to engage in sexual offenses if not confined to a secure facility."
A psychologist speaking in Mr. Wilcox's defense pointed out that pedophilia refers to an attraction to prepubescent children, and it was not clear that either girl was prepubescent; 13-year-old girls may or may not be. He and Mr. Farrington also emphasized that Mr. Wilcox had voluntarily sought sex offender treatment while in prison, and had undergone about two years of it.
When Mr. Wilcox himself finally took the stand, he exuded misery and remorse; at times his voice was barely audible, and he occasionally wiped his eyes. He described the course of his life, his failed marriage, his moves from New York State to Virginia to Florida to Massachusetts, the birth of his daughter.
Had he learned anything? Mr. Farrington asked.
"Yes I have," he replied. He had learned, he said, about dealing with risky emotional states - anger, entitlement, rejection. He had learned how to share his feelings, ask for help, have positive people in his life.
"I've learned that every decision I make in my life" - he broke off and swiped his eyes - "I've learned that every decision that I make, no matter how small it is or what it's about, I have to reckon with how it will affect someone else, how it will affect people close to me. If I'm doing something, breaking laws or doing things inappropriate in society, how much pain they can cause other people."
The jury appeared convinced. After deliberating less than two hours, the predominantly white, predominantly female jury found that Mr. Wilcox was not sexually dangerous, and freed him to go face a parole violation in Florida.
"There was no way I saw him as a pedophile," said one juror, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Do I think he used bad judgment? Of course I do." But "he obviously seemed like he wanted to do better. He does not want this to happen again. I don't think he'll let it get to that point."
The evidence is only anecdotal, but lawyers and psychologists say it appears that juries are likelier than judges to let sex offenders out, during civil commitments and when offenders bring their yearly appeals for release from treatment centers.
Defense lawyers theorize that jurors are more willing to bet on an offender because their responsibility is shared. They say that judges, on the other hand, dread seeing their own pictures in the newspaper next to a picture of an offender they released who has now committed a horrible new crime.
There have been only a handful of civil commitment trials in Massachusetts, prosecutors say, and they have brought verdicts of both "dangerous" and "not dangerous." Dozens more are backed up in the courts.
Mr. Wilcox says he hopes to live in Fort Lauderdale with his younger sister, Vonita, who sat through his trial with visible distress as she heard psychologists describe her brother as too dangerous to set free.
"I do not condone any misconduct with children or teenagers; Tom knows how I feel about that," she said. " `You did this, you have to serve your time.' But what they're trying to do is wrong."
Given the costs and legal troubles of such civil commitments, some states are exploring alternatives, said Roxanne Lieb, director of the Washington State Institute for Public Policy, which tracks how sex predator laws play out there and around the country. Some states are trying longer terms of supervision for released sex offenders. Others have imposed tougher sentencing measures, particularly for repeat offenses.
Among the 900 or so sex predators who have been committed, many, it seems, may never get out. In a draft report on the laws' effects last year, Ms. Lieb and her co-author, Scott Matson, found that among the 121 sex offenders Washington had committed in the last 10 years, just five had been conditionally released.
The sexually violent predator laws are "one of the most extreme responses we've had in society to dealing with sex offenders," said Mr. Matson, a research associate at the Center for Sex Offender Management, a federally financed project that trains those who work with sex offenders.
But "you can't really say civil commitment laws are wrong and bad because there are those offenders that you know will reoffend," he said. "What to do with them I don't know and I don't think anybody knows. And this is the best solution that's come up so far." *****
When we hear words like "pedophile," "sexual predator," etc., we tend to imagine men who prey on prepubescent children, rape them, & even kill them. However, sex offenders who are labeled "pedophiles" & the like are more often men like Mr. Wilcox above, I think. Emotionally charged words are used to take away the rights of defendants & make criminal justice harsher to the working class. Recently enacted laws that target sex offenders & impose harsher penalties -- penalties that dog even those who have already served their sentences -- don't necessarily make a distinction between violent crimes & crimes like statutory rape, obscenity, prostitution, etc. (see for instance <http://detnews.com/1999/metro/9908/14/08140029.htm>; <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5319-2001Feb28.html>).
Yoshie