MA- Once-jailed sex offender offers his views

1-19-2009 Masachusetts:

When last I saw Joel Pentlarge, he was being ushered off to a treatment center for sexually-dangerous persons in Bridgewater. Pentlarge had argued that he was not such a person, but the Hampshire County jury that decided his fate thought otherwise.

That 2004 civil hearing was held at the request of the state under the terms of the legislation that allows criminal sex offenders to be committed for treatment even after they serve their sentences. Pentlarge had just finished up a 3½-year term at Norfolk State Prison on five counts of statutory rape.

Before he was charged with raping four teenage boys, Pentlarge was a town father of sorts in Ware. He served on the Conservation Commission and Zoning Board of Appeals, practiced law and owned several rental properties.

Although Pentlarge avoided a trial by pleading guilty in Hampshire Superior Court in 2000, court documents told tales of him plying boys with drugs and alcohol as a lead-in to sex. Much of this made it into print, and there was nowhere for Pentlarge to go but to jail.

I thought I recognized Pentlarge at the courthouse recently, but I had to look twice. He was in the clerk's office, tying up some loose ends in his case. I'd forgotten that he was set free a couple of years ago.

He seemed a bit taken aback when I introduced myself, but we agreed to talk and he told me his story.

Pentlarge, 58, has already had a pretty thorough public shaming, the final flourish coming at the hands of the sentencing judge who proclaimed him "a pervert, a charlatan, and a sexual predator." I advised him that if he went on the record I would have to revisit some of this. He understood. "I've become inured," he said.

The world now knows that Joel Pentlarge had a secret life behind his public persona. Both of those ended the moment he was arrested.

"It was virtually instantaneous," he said, "from the knock on the door."

Although he'd handled some minor criminal matters as a lawyer, Pentlarge never had a client who did prison time, so it was all new territory for him. They say people convicted of crimes like his don't fare well in prison. A recent example is John Geoghan, the defrocked priest-pedophile who was strangled to death by a fellow inmate at the Souza Baranowski Correctional Center in 2004.

Pentlarge had a different experience. "The others treated me decently," he said. "I believe that if John Geoghan had been sent to Norfolk instead of Souza Baranowski, he'd be alive today."

Pentlarge did not go gentle into that good night. He became a jailhouse lawyer, filing suit against the state Department of Corrections over what he considered price gouging at the prison canteen. He lost. The case still grates on him.

"The justice system does not treat prisoners equally," he said. "There's a different standard."

Prison life gave Pentlarge a new perspective on law and society, particularly the criminalization of drugs.

"Roughly 30 percent are there for drug offenses," he said. "They were among the easiest people to be with. They're there for private enterprise."

As Pentlarge describes it, Norfolk was a cakewalk compared to the Nemansket Correctional Center in Bridgewater, where he was sent for his civil commitment. The accommodations were less accommodating, the lifestyle more restrictive and the cellmates sketchier. The treatment, which did not come with any kind of therapist-patient confidentiality, was a no-win situation, he said.

"You have to admit to uncharged crimes. If you don't, you must be 'minimizing.' Nobody is ever deemed to have completed treatment."

In 2006, Pentlarge petitioned for another hearing. This one resulted in his release. Since then, he has been living in Boston with four gay men and battling bladder cancer. He still has some property in Ware and travels out here every so often to check on it.

As terms of his release, Pentlarge registered as a sex offender and avoids contact with minors. He is also ordered to stay away from his four victims, though he said one of them asked that the condition be revoked. Pentlarge remains friends with the man, now in his 30s, he said.

Because of his sex offender status, Pentlarge was denied a job with the state Committee for Public Counsel Services which provides legal counsel to indigent defendants in criminal cases. He volunteers at the Criminal Justice Policy Coalition, a Boston-based non-profit. Part of his personal mission is to seek more humane treatment for people like himself.

"There's an on-going hysteria about sex offenders," he said. "You end up with people who have no jobs. Sometimes they're homeless."

When I suggested that readers might not be inclined to show him much sympathy, Pentlarge said he is just trying to make the point that even sex offenders have rights.

"It's not a question of feeling sorry for me," he said. "It's a question of what will make it most possible to lead a law-abiding life." ..News Source.. by Fred Contrada is a staff writer with The Republican.