The tragedy of freeing sex offenders

9-15-2007 National:

On July 25, I asked in a column entitled, "Porn triggers acting out on victims? Really?" why the Federal Bureau of Prisons spiked its own sex-offender study at Butner prison in North Carolina.
The Butner study, as it turns out (newsflash!), found that criminal sex offenders tend to hide the extent of their crimes.

Moreover, although of 155 men arrested "just" for child pornography 40 (26 percent) admitted to being child molesters, it turns out that later, 132 men (85 percent) confessed to sexually abusing children – admitting to 1,777 young victims.

So, the Butner study finds the allegedly "benign" lust for child pornography correlates with a 85 percent probability of child sexual abuse. When Butner refused to release the study, lawyer Jan Larue noted, "Judith Simon Garrett, assistant general counsel at the BOP, is heavily involved in squelching the study." Garrett believes sex offenders deserve sexual media and wants to eliminate "restrictions on early release mechanisms."

Well, now, two months after the Butner report was leaked to the New York Times, FindLaw reports that U.S. District Court Judge W. Earl Britt has struck down a law aimed at holding sex offenders indefinitely in mental hospitals.

Coincidentally, it turns out the decision looks like it involves the release of five men identified as "sexually dangerous" at the home of the embargoed report: Butner prison.

The liberal judge is anxious to release all convicted sexual predators. He says the government must prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that each felon is "unlikely to refrain from sexually violent conduct in the future as a result of … [both] mental illness or abnormality such as pedophilia."

Holding some sex offenders at hospitals, known as civil commitment, was approved under a federal law signed in 2006. The legislation requires that the state prove "clear and convincing" evidence, (a lower standard than reasonable doubt) that a convicted sex offender is "sexually dangerous."

One wonders if the embargoed Butner report, proving massive sexual violence against children by their "residents," was hidden from the judge?

Was Judge Britt also ignorant of the June 1996 Government Accounting Office report "Sex Offender Treatment: Research Results Inconclusive About What Works to Reduce Recidivism"?

That [the 1996] GAO study of 500 sex offender therapy programs over a 50-year period cited no program that proved "beyond a reasonable doubt" that there was any "cure" for sex offenders. Nor was there "clear and convincing" evidence that sex offenders, as a class, can be "cured."

Moreover, a 2004 report on 724 Canadian sex offenders validated the U.S. GAO report. In "Jail Programs had Little Effect on Whether Freed Inmates Re-offended," roughly 22 percent of 724 treated and untreated sex offenders had been reconvicted of sex crimes within 12 years.

These data reflect only those predators caught for another sex crime within 12 years of release. Even this high rate of recidivism wildly understates re-offenses, since child molesters are commonly undetected despite assaulting scores of children for years.

Furthermore, unfortunately there is no way to tell who will re-offend.

Paroling sex offenders, treated or no, into our disordered sexually saturated environment is more dangerous than playing Russian roulette.

The odds are much better than 1 in 4 that a parolee will injure another innocent woman or child, versus 1 in 6 of injury from a single bullet in a six-bullet gun chamber.

We read daily of legislators, teachers, prosecutors, judges, doctors, ACLU lawyers, therapists, psychologists, priests and rabbis convicted of child sexual abuse and child pornography. With this in mind, why would the judge want to release sexual predators back into sexual cyberspace and Internet addiction, knowing that hundreds of parolees will assault thousands of additional victims?

Well, surely the judge has no fear of sexual assault on his own person. Nor can a judge be sued by victims or their families for paroling a sex offender who subsequently rapes and/or kills again – an all too common reality.

Judge Britt has temporarily suspended release of the sex offenders until the government decides to file a formal objection.

One wonders, if some special interest will spike the government's motion to stay. The U.S. attorney's office in Raleigh did not immediately return calls, said FindLaw. ..more.. by Judith Reisman