Life On the List

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5-31-2012 Texas:

A single mistake when he was 12 landed Josh Gravens on Texas’ sex offender list. He’s been paying for it ever since.

When Josh Gravens was 12 years old, he made a terrible mistake. He and his sister, who was 8, had sexual contact, twice. “Like, where my body part touched her body part,” he says. “It was never penetrative. Obviously, it couldn’t have been what they call consensual, but it was playing.”

Josh’s sister told their mother, who was alarmed. She wanted to ensure that, even if Josh’s intentions were only curious, he learned appropriate behavior right away. She called a Christian counseling center near their home in Abilene and described what happened. She was informed that, by law, the center had to report Josh to the police for sexual assault of a child.

The next day, Josh was arrested and sent into Texas’ juvenile justice system. He wouldn’t get out for three and a half years.

“My family didn’t want to press charges,” he says. “The state took up the case and pressed charges.” Josh and I met earlier this year at his older sister’s house in Plano, where he lives with his soft-spoken wife Nicole and their four children, two from Nicole’s first marriage and a toddler and infant with Josh. The three-bedroom house is neat but crowded, full of happy kids, two big dogs and a couple of turtles in terrariums.

“There was quite a bit of shock,” Josh says of his arrest. “My mother didn’t understand at the time that if the counselor felt there was a chance it could happen again or there was something going on, she was obligated to report it.”

That phone call, and the child’s choice that prompted it, unalterably changed the course of Josh’s life.

Today he is 25. He and his family are living with his older sister and her husband while Josh looks for work. He estimates that he’s applied for 250 positions since January, when the checks from his job at a Christmas tree lot started to bounce. He stays upbeat, though finding work is harder for him than for other people. Because of what he did when he was 12, Josh is a registered sex offender. He’ll remain on the list until he’s 31.

Unlike some states, Texas lists juveniles, and adults who committed their crimes as juveniles, on its public sex offender registry, a searchable website run by the Texas Department of Public Safety. The registry lists each offender’s name, birth date, current home address, current employer and work address, and any school being attended or occupational license held. Also listed are the offender’s sex, race, ethnicity, height, weight, hair color, eye color, shoe size and shoe width. The website keeps an up-to-date color photo of each offender. If Josh gets a haircut or grows a beard, he’s supposed to go back to the local DPS office and re-register to keep his image current.

The day before I first met Josh, two officers from the Plano Police Department had dropped by unannounced to make sure Josh really lives where his registration says he does. They also wanted to see his blue card, an ID card registered offenders are required to carry at all times. I asked Josh if he felt harassed by that. “You could,” he says, “if you weren’t used to it.”

Not only does Texas list juveniles, but it has no lower limit on the age of registerable children. Right now, Texas lists a 12-year-old. Twelve is too young to have a Facebook account, but with a quick search I can find this boy’s home address in a small town in Central Texas. He has brown hair and blue eyes, is 5 feet 2 inches and 102 pounds. His photograph shows flushed cheeks and a worried brow. No school is listed, perhaps because he is prohibited from attending school, as many sex offenders are. He moved here from North Carolina, where he was adjudicated for “indecent liberties between children.” He’ll be on the list until 2021.

Josh admitted what had happened with his younger sister from the beginning and was adjudicated for one count of aggravated sexual assault. (Any sexual assault against a child under 14 is considered aggravated.) In error, though, his DPS page also lists his youngest sister, age 6, as a second victim. Josh and his mother say Child Protective Services listed the second child on its original complaint, but the judge found the allegation lacked merit and struck it out. Josh says there was no such assault, he wasn’t adjudicated for it, never pled to it, but hasn’t had the money to petition to have it removed. (Despite all the public information about Josh available on the Internet, his court records, being those of a juvenile, are sealed. Josh’s story here is based on extensive interviews with him and his wife. Major points have been corroborated by family members.)

Josh says he never considered denying the abuse. “I thought it was so important that I never call my sister a liar,” he says, “which is what happens in a lot of cases, and [the victim] has to deal with it later on. I never wanted that to happen to my sister. I did value telling the truth more than freedom, I guess, because what’s the point of freedom when you have to live a lie?” ..For the remainder of this story: by Emily DePrang