The Pedophile Next Door
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In lieu of a good answer, there is a patchwork of stopgaps and regulations. Parolees are typically placed under house arrest or sometimes monitored by tracking devices. They are required to register with the state and county authorities, which place their names and addresses on a public Web site. They aren't allowed to be in the presence of a minor. In some places, local judges have proposed more severe standards, such as requiring pedophiles to place a sign in their front lawn identifying them as convicted sex offenders. In fifteen states, including Texas, officials have also explored ways to keep sex offenders off the street entirely. Under what is called a civil commitment, a pedophile who has served his sentence can be transferred to the state's mental health system for an indeterminate length of time—until officials there decide he's "better," in other words. And in Canada, a few jurisdictions have adopted a program known as Circles of Support and Accountability, in which sex offenders are matched up with a neighborhood or church-related support group that monitors their progress outside prison. Texas, however, is a long way from embracing any "Adopt your local pedophile" programs, and the cost of civil commitments is often prohibitive (there have been only 37 such cases here). So the most common way the state tries to protect society from repeat offenders is to create stringent conditions of parole, some of which, however justified, almost seem calculated to force them to fail.
Upon his release, Jones encountered such conditions. As you'd expect, he was forbidden to drink, use drugs, or go anywhere near children. He had to register with the state and the county. He had to visit with his parole officer twice a week. He had to continue to see a therapist, but he could not speak with anyone else about anything remotely regarding sex. Finally, on a regular basis, Jones had to take something called a penile plethysmograph, a test invented by the Czechs during World War II as a way to ferret out draftees who were trying to avoid service by claiming that they were gay. The procedure hasn't been modified much since. A flexible band filled with mercury is hooked up to a computer and then wrapped around a subject's penis. As the subject is shown a wide range of explicit sexual material, the computer measures even the slightest increases in the circumference of the band. The procedure is used somewhat like urinalysis for drug offenders; with a pedophile like Jones, frequent tests that involve images of prepubescent boys can indicate to therapists how successfully he has modified his sexual desires.
By the time Jones had to take his first plethysmograph, he was sure that he no longer harbored fantasies about children. Still, he wondered if being subjected to suggestive pictures of young kids might trip him up. Wasn't this, he thought, like asking him to relapse? But Jones did just fine on his first test. His arousal level for children was determined to be minimal.
Despite this apparent breakthrough, Jones didn't last long on the outside. Barely a week after he'd been freed, he was caught nude with another inmate in his room at the Way Back halfway house by his parole officer. It was a violation of the house's rules and, therefore, a violation of his probation. It was a strict standard, and though some might argue that his encounter with an age-appropriate partner was a sign of therapeutic success, others would point out that Jones's inability to keep his pants zipped for a week was a clear indication of the lack of control he had over his sex drive. Just like that, he was on his way back to the joint, this time to New Boston's Telford Unit, in northeast Texas, to serve the remaining five years of his sentence.
WHEN JONES RETURNED TO PRISON, getting therapy was no longer a matter of simply requesting it and following the rules. This was not because he didn't need, at a minimum, a refresher course; it was simply a matter of economics. The inmate population of sex offenders had increased by 30 percent in the past decade, while funding for the SOTP and other programs had remained roughly the same. In 1999, with space for only a few hundred in the treatment program, Johnson and her staff had to make it a hard-and-fast rule that no one got in unless he had just two years left on his sentence, yet even that didn't leave enough room for all the offenders who wanted treatment.
It was a practical solution, though not really the answer, said Johnson, particularly if you consider the effectiveness of therapy. Most research suggests that treated sex offenders re-offend about half as often as those who are not treated. The most recent tracking of SOTP inmates, done by the Criminal Justice Policy Council, reveals an even more impressive result: Only 2 percent of the inmates who have graduated from the program have gone on to commit sex crimes after their release, and they are 46 percent less likely to commit any type of other crime than inmates who are released without therapy. An exhaustive study of Alaska's SOTP program found that offenders who participated in the strictest regimen didn't recidivate at all. "It's increasingly clear that intensive treatment actually works in reducing the odds that a sex offender will re-offend," said Johnson. "Certainly what we've done is encouraging enough to invest more, not less." Johnson believes we'd be a lot better off if the most serious sex offenders received treatment for their entire sentences. To accomplish that, the state would need to increase the present SOTP budget of $1.6 million significantly.
So Jones waited his turn. Two and a half years later, he was still not back in therapy. It was around this time that I first contacted him. He told me that he was beginning to lose momentum in his recovery. "I am surrounded by a bunch of idiots on this farm who don't want to change their criminal behavior," he wrote to me from the Telford Unit in the late fall of 2002. "I want to be in an environment that encourages change." He went on to explain that he was technically eligible for the SOTP again but couldn't get prison authorities to move him to a unit that offered it.
Finally, in early 2003, Jones was transferred back to the SOTP at Goree. Soon thereafter, he began to ponder the ultimate step: castration. Voluntary orchiectomy was approved by the Texas Legislature in 1997 for sex offenders who have committed multiple offenses against children and who have exhibited a genuine and sane desire to have the procedure performed. Still, it is not something that many inmates or therapeutic personnel have embraced (only one sex offender has been castrated in Texas). One reason might be that, while it reduces sex drive, it does not make a man asexual. But if Jones had learned anything from his brief time as a free man, it was that he still needed help in keeping his own sex drive under control, and he was willing to accept any treatment that would increase his chances.
Upon his return to the SOTP, Jones also immersed himself with renewed vigor in his treatment. Each time I visited him over the next year, he seemed to have a little more insight into his behavior. He would constantly refer to "the way I used to be" in negative, condescending terms; he'd written to me, "I just know I've changed. I won't take people for granted or treat them as objects."
On one visit, Jones had just finished a detailed synopsis of one of his crimes, in which he not only had to describe what he had done in excruciating detail but also had to discuss what had been going through his mind at the time, why he thought he had done it, and what impact he thought it might have had on the victim. It is a horrifying document: Jones described how he had seduced a seven-year-old he was babysitting with a tickle game, then slowly but surely turned it into a forced fondling of the boy. When I read about how he had felt when he was abusing the boy—"I felt excited but discontent that I did not get to do all I wanted to do"—I felt sick to my stomach. But Jones also wrote about the consequences for his victim in a similarly frank and honest tone: "The child I victimized and his family have changed by him not trusting his mom or any adult. He might become rebellious. He is probably confused and feels like an outcast among his friends." For an offender who almost thirteen years ago thought he was doing his victims a favor by molesting them, it appeared that at least the cognitive part of the process was working.
By late last summer, Jones had reached another mandatory release date; his time served plus time earned for good behavior dictated that the system had to cut him loose. In a letter, he told me he was looking forward to being free, that he felt confident that he could live happily without relapsing by tending some land that his grandmother owns outside Dallas. He concluded by telling me that the next time I heard from him, he would be calling me from his new life there.
A few weeks later, I did receive another letter from Jones. He was back in Dallas, all right, shipped from the Goree Unit to the county jail on a bench warrant—a new indictment for an old allegation that had not been included in his confessions or his plea back in 1991. "They are trying to put a new charge on me so I won't get out," he wrote. "But there are no new charges out there. I told them everything in 1991." When I called the prosecutor, Patricia Hogue, she referred me to the public record in district court, which told me only that it was a charge of aggravated sexual assualt of a child, which could send Jones back to prison for life.
IN NOVEMBER I WENT TO VISIT JONES for the last time. He was still in the Dallas County jail on the indictment. "It's crazy," he said. "I feel like I'm moving backward, like everything's happening all over again." He was talking about the new charge, but he might as well have been talking about his recovery. He was no longer receiving therapy. His orchiectomy was on hold. And he was spending his days in the company of several hundred untreated sex offenders. Hearing him talk, looking less sure of himself than I had ever seen him, I wondered if his recovery was in jeopardy.
