Remember that when we talk about registering as a sex offender, it means you basically can't get a job, can't get an apartment, can't go to malls, parks or anywhere else children might be, and of course you can't have your own family...ever. You will also frequently have to pay hundreds of dollars a month to the state for electronic monitoring and other forms of supervision.
LINK
A few tidbits:
In Fayetteville, North Carolina, a sixteen-year-old girl faced multiple felony charges for “sexting” a picture of herself to her boyfriend. According to the county sheriff’s warrant, she was both the adult perpetrator of the crime at hand—“sexual exploitation of a minor”—and its child victim. Her boyfriend faced similar charges.
Josh Gravens, of Abilene, Texas, was sent away more than a decade ago at the age of thirteen. Gravens was twelve when his mother learned that he had inappropriately touched his eight-year-old sister on two occasions; she sought help from a Christian counselling center, and a staffer there was legally obliged to inform the police. Gravens was arrested, placed on the public registry, and sent to juvenile detention for nearly four years. Now, at twenty-nine, he’s become a leading figure in the movement to strike juveniles from the registry and to challenge broader restrictions that he believes are ineffectual. He has counselled more than a hundred youths who are on public registries, some as young as nine. He says that their experiences routinely mirror his own: “Homelessness; getting fired from jobs; taking jobs below minimum wage, with predatory employers; not being able to provide for your kids; losing your kids; relationship problems; deep inner problems connecting with people; deep depression and hopelessness; this fear of your own name; the terror of being Googled.”
Often, juvenile defendants aren’t seen as juveniles before the law. At the age of thirteen, Moroni Nuttall was charged as an adult, in Montana, for sexual misconduct with relatives; after pleading guilty, he was sentenced to forty years in prison, thirty-six of which were suspended, and placed on a lifetime sex-offender registry. In detention, the teen-ager was sexually assaulted and physically abused. Upon his release, his mother, Heidi, went online in search of guidance. “I’m trying to be hopeful,” she wrote on an online bulletin board, but “I wonder if he even stands a chance.”
What is available, too often, is a form of commercial treatment that can be abusive in its own right. In my interviews with registrants and their families, one question came up repeatedly: “Have you looked into the therapy industry?” Many treatment programs have dedicated, well-trained staff members who engage with families and seem to help children thrive. But some providers lack the resources that would allow them to separate offenders of various risk levels. And, in some parts of the country, I found a cottage industry of court-authorized but poorly regulated therapy providers subjecting kids and teens to widely debunked interventions or controversial invasive technologies. Juveniles undergoing treatment for sex offenses have been exposed to severe verbal abuse, beatings, and even sexual predation at residential facilities. Not a few people have been placed in dubious but costly treatment programs for actions that many believe should never have been criminalized in the first place. These experiences are hardly exclusive to juveniles; they extend to many youths over eighteen, whose journeys through the justice system can be equally alarming. The most surprising instances are known as the “Romeo and Juliet” cases, involving consensual sex between teens.
I'm certainly not opposed to protecting children from sexual predators, but many of the cases cited in the article sounded like the alleged "perps" were likely abuse victims themselves, and after the state got through with them they were certainly abuse victims. Imagine what it would be like to be treated as a complete outcast by society for life because of a bad decision you made when you were 10 or 11 years old when you were left unsupervised by a parent or caregiver.His lawyer told him that he would face life in prison if the case went to trial. He decided to take a plea deal: a suspended sentence and ten years of probation.
Metts, who was twenty-one by then, read the terms of his post-plea life. For the next decade, he’d be barred from alcohol and the Internet; from entering the vicinity of schools, parks, bus stops, malls, and movie theatres; and from living within a thousand feet of a “child-safety zone.” A mugshot of his curly-haired, round-cheeked face would appear for life on the Texas sex-offender registry, beside the phrase “Sexual Assault of a Child.” And he would have to start sex-offender treatment.
The treatment plan was extensive. He was told to write up a detailed sexual history, and then to discuss it with a room full of adults, some of whom had repeatedly committed child assaults. On his first day of class, he recalls, he entered a group circle beside a dentist who had violated several patients while they were under anesthesia. To graduate, he would have to narrate his “assaults” in detail: “How many buttons on her shirt did you unbutton?”
The plan also included a monthly polygraph (a hundred and fifty dollars) and a computerized test that measured how long his eyes lingered on deviant imagery (three hundred and twenty-five dollars). He would also have to submit to a “penile plethysmograph,” or PPG. According to documents produced by the state of Texas, the PPG—known jokingly to some patients as a “peter meter”—is “a sophisticated computerized instrument capable of measuring slight changes in the circumference of the penis.” A gauge is wrapped around the shaft of the penis, with wires hooked up to a laptop, while a client is presented with “sexually inappropriate” imagery and, often, “deviant” sexual audio. Metts would be billed around two hundred dollars per test.
I find it most heartbreaking that the sex offender tag means you can never have your own family. It just seems cruel to tell a person that they are not allowed to see their own children because of an offense they committed when they were in elementary school decades before, or because a 19 year old had a 17 year old girlfriend whom he later married. The husband in that marriage would still potentially never be allowed to be in the same room with his own children without strict state supervision, and he could never take his kids to school or attend any school event of any kind. No sex offenders allowed at those things.
Imagine how many of our own distant ancestors who married before both parties were 18 would have been subject to the penalties and punishments above.
And it's always worth considering the idea that maybe a lot of this stuff is really just a for-profit effort masquerading as a desire to protect children:
...or just plain old cruelty:“There’s an awful lot of money involved in prosecuting, locking up, treating, and registering these folks,” Phil Taylor, a former therapist for men convicted of sex offenses in Texas, told me. Under contract with the state, he spent some ten years treating hundreds of adults convicted of violent sex crimes, along with young adults who had had consensual relationships with other teens. A decade ago, in 2006, Taylor’s faith in the treatment protocols was shaken by new research. He renounced the field and began working for legislative reform of the registry. “It’s hard for people to change their minds when their livelihood depends upon this money stream,” he told me.
Throughout her first semester in college, she was dogged by fears of being outed. During winter break, her boyfriend invited her home to Brighton, Michigan. DuBuc agreed, but sheepishly explained that their first stop in town would have to be the police station. Her understanding was that she had to check in with local cops within forty-eight hours of arriving in a new town or face a felony charge.
Her boyfriend parked in the lot of the Brighton Police Post. “I’m here to fill out the paperwork,” DuBuc told the trooper at the front desk. “I’m a registered sex offender.”
“We don’t serve your kind here,” he replied. “You better leave before I take you out back and shoot you myself.”
