The Pedophile Next Door
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There were reasons to be suspicious of Jones—he was eighteen and only in the tenth grade; he'd written on his job application that he felt more comfortable with children than with adults—but he got the job. And initially, at least, his popularity with the kids gave his new employers few reasons to believe he was anything other than a good hire. When Jones quit school the following fall, a move that should have made him ineligible for YMCA employment, the organization not only kept him on but promoted him in the spring of 1990 to site supervisor at an after-school program held at Robert E. Lee Elementary School. For a period of about ten months, during which he became an increasingly fixated pedophile who, in his own estimation, was "completely out of control," the position placed Jones mostly alone and in charge of about eighteen elementary school-age kids. "At the Y," he said, "in front of parents even, I would have a kid on my lap, and I would get aroused. If the kid said anything, I'd just say, 'Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realize.'" He saved some of his most flagrant actions, however, for his babysitting jobs. "When I started babysitting, I had some shorts that were real easy to unsnap, and I wouldn't wear underwear," he said. "I wrestled with this one kid, and then I masturbated him and then I went and masturbated. I kept him quiet by telling him we could get in trouble." That was as far as he ever went as a babysitter, but he admitted that he had had darker thoughts every now and then: "Sometimes kidnapping would cross my mind, but I never went through with it."
In early 1991 Jones finally got a little too bold when he struck up a friendship with a woman who had a young son. "I'd bring my Nintendo over as a groomer [a toy or game that pedophiles employ to engage a child]," he said. "One time when he was taking a bath, I went in to look at him, but he covered up. I tried to tickle him and everything, and he pushed my hand away every time it touched his penis." The boy's grandmother worked at his school cafeteria, and she was familiar with the signs of sexual abuse. "One day," said Jones, "he was with her, and she patted him on the rear end as he walked by, and he pulled away. She asked him if someone had been touching him there who shouldn't have." A few days later, the police arrived at the East Dallas YMCA and arrested Jones. "What was going through my mind was that I didn't want the children to see me taken off like that," he said. "I lied to my mother about it. I told her that it was all a big misunderstanding."
It didn't look as though Jones stood much of a chance once he was caught, particularly when an increasing number of kids from the YMCA began to come forward with new allegations. Still, the mounting revelations presented an awkward predicament for the Dallas County DA's office. For one thing, the YMCA was a formidable civic icon in Dallas; dragging its good name through the headlines for months was a less than ideal scenario. What's more, though public sentiment about child sexual abuse tends to range from hysteria to extreme hysteria, it's not always easy to get an abuser convicted. Even when they choose to testify, children are not great witnesses.
Recognizing these factors, Jones's lawyer, Tom Pappas, seized the opportunity for his client to cut a deal. He persuaded Jones to confess to all the molestations he had committed while at the YMCA, a number that would eventually reach more than forty (the confessions would be confirmed by police polygraphs), as well as to plead guilty to seventeen counts of indecency and two charges of aggravated sexual assault involving victims unrelated to the YMCA. In return, he proposed that Jones plead out to a fifteen-year sentence and ten years of unadjudicated victims unrelated to the YMCA. In return, he proposed that Jones plead out to a fifteen-year sentence and ten years of unadjudicated probation, meaning that if he tripped up at all after he got out, a judge could revoke his probation and sentence him to life on the aggravated charges. Had the case gone to trial, Jones could very likely have spent the rest of his days behind bars. Instead, the deal was made, and he was shipped off to prison with a good chance of being out before the millennium.
THE SEX OFFENDER TREATMENT PROGRAM (SOTP) at the Goree Unit is a collection of drab offices and meeting rooms strung along a single prison wing that houses two hundred inmates—roughly half pedophiles and half rapists with adult victims. The SOTP began in Texas as a pilot program that treated about one hundred volunteer inmates in 1987. It was expanded beyond pilot status in 1996 and has come to include more than five hundred prisoners at three prison units. Inmates who are accepted into the program are split up into small therapeutic communities in which they work on their recovery. This includes developing and sharing their personal "layouts": exhaustively detailed descriptions of, among other things, their past crimes, their sexual fantasies, and their current sexual activity.
Like most such programs, the SOTP grew out of the cognitive-behavioral treatment revolution of the seventies, which was widely applied to alcoholics and drug addicts. The treatment model relies on the notion that, like alcoholism, deviant sexual acts resemble compulsive behaviors, which are based to some degree on thinking errors. For the alcoholic, it is the belief that he doesn't drink more than others; for the pedophile, it might be the belief that his assaults are an act of love. The theory is that once you can get a molester to comprehend fully his distorted thinking—through peer group confrontation, thorough confessions in the form of a layout, and exercises that teach victim empathy—he can begin to break down slowly his self-delusion, reprogram his arousal patterns, and change the way he behaves. According to some studies, this method can reduce the rate of repeat sex offenders by 50 percent or more.
Last spring, during one of several visits to the SOTP, I was invited to sit in on a lecture given by therapist Glenna Holloman. When I arrived, there were about twenty inmates in white jumpsuits sitting in rows inside a stuffy meeting room with an impossibly low ceiling. The lecture was about interpersonal relationships—what makes for healthy ones, what makes for pathological ones. Holloman, dressed casually in slacks and a blouse, stood behind a small desk at the front of the room and discussed the role of companionship, self-esteem, and boundaries in relationships. When she finished, she asked for responses from the group. A middle-aged black inmate offered that the problem that he'd always had in relating to others was that he'd been "looking for people to manipulate." Another explained, "You can commit, but the other person doesn't." "I had no idea why I did what I did," said a balding inmate with thick glasses. "I'd always felt it wasn't that bad. But when I had to say, 'I raped an eleven-year-old child' over and over, like I have to do in here, I learned where I'm at." Afterward, SOTP clinical director Judy Johnson explained to me how these confessions represented real therapeutic progress. "You are talking about men," she said, "who never learned to have empathy for others or that forcing yourself on someone sexually is not pleasant for them."
When Jones arrived in prison, he was a long way from experiencing such empathy. "I was still thinking that if it felt good, that made what I was doing right," he said. Initially, he was provided with few reasons to question the acts that had put him in prison. He wasn't required to see a therapist for his first year of incarceration. And though, for reasons of security, he was housed only with other sex offenders, he still lied about why he was there, a habit which only toughened his thick skin of denial. "If anyone asked," he said, "I'd tell them I was in for forgery or a burglary." Eventually Jones met with a prison psychiatrist, who recommended him for treatment, and he was accepted into the SOTP in 1992. His recovery did not come easy: He was kicked out of the program for having an affair with a fellow inmate and did not get back in until 1994. During this second stint, when Jones began to share the details of his crimes in group therapy, where he was required to refer to all of his offenses as rapes, he found it much more difficult to operate under his distorted worldview.
"I'd made friends with another guy in group," Jones said one morning at Goree. "We were real close, and I really had feelings for him. But he wouldn't talk to me after my layout. And when he told me what had happened to him, that he'd been raped for seven years and that he would put ammonia in his mouth to get the taste out, that really made me see that what I had done was hurtful. That slapped me in my face." Awakened, Jones began to commit himself to the next, and more difficult, level of sex offender treatment: working to alter the fantasies that lead to sexual abuse in the first place. In therapy sessions, SOTP inmates are taught to recognize when an aberrant sexual fantasy intrudes and then to reframe it as an appropriate fantasy. Therapists believe that if a sex offender is diligent about the exercise, he can theoretically brainwash himself into appropriate desires and curb the fantasies that provoked him into criminal behavior. "It's a lot easier said than done," conceded Johnson. "Particularly with a fixated pedophile, this is almost a true sexual orientation, and so it takes a lot of effort and even some luck for a person to actually change his arousal pattern."
At first, Jones tried only his own crude form of aversion therapy; he would imagine "scary, bad, disgusting thoughts" every time an inappropriate fantasy arose, picturing himself covered with roaches or snakes, for example, or on fire. But this part of his therapy became easier when he had "more than just imaginary bad stuff to work with," he said. "I had this close friend who'd been hurt by this thing that I had done to lots of boys." For the next three years, Jones struggled to reform his sexual deviancy, and his rehabilitation proceeded in a positive direction. He worked the long hours that the SOTP demands and felt as if he were changing for the first time in his life. By 1999, after earning enough time for good behavior, he was scheduled for mandatory early release. In October, the parole board approved, and he was transferred to the Way Back halfway house, in Dallas.
HOW DO WE PROTECT OURSELVES from a released pedophile? No one, it seems, has come up with a satisfactory answer. We tend to doubt, as we do with alcoholics and drug addicts, that a child molester's reformation will last once he's been removed from his therapeutic community. And with a pedophile, the stakes involved in a relapse are much higher than if some drunk falls off the wagon.
