by Sid Holt
• • •
If the sex-offender registry is a modern development, the impulse behind it—to prevent crimes by keeping tabs on “bad actors”—is not. In 1937, after the sexualized murders of several young girls in New York, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia called for the police to keep a secret list of “all known degenerates.” A decade later, California built the first database of sex offenders, for private use by the police. But the practice of regulation took off only in the 1990s, when a tragedy changed the public’s sense of the stakes involved.
One evening in 1989, in the quiet town of St. Joseph, Minnesota, Patty and Jerry Wetterling set out for dinner at a friend’s house, leaving their eleven-year-old son, Jacob, at home with two of his siblings and a friend. Just after sundown, three of them left on their bikes and scooters to rent movies. Returning home, the kids came upon a masked gunman, who grabbed Jacob and chased off the others with death threats. Frantic searches followed, to no avail. Investigators didn’t know the abductor’s motivation, but feared that it was sexual. Afterward, Patty Wetterling kept returning to the question of what might have helped the police find her son’s abductor during those critical early hours. Officials told her that what they needed was a unified database of local residents who had sex-crime convictions. Wetterling went on to fight for such a registry—first in Minnesota, and then nationally. In 1994, she helped win the first federal mandate that all states create a database of people convicted of violent sex crimes or crimes against children. It was known as the Jacob Wetterling Act. “Initially, this was supposed to be a private law-enforcement tool,” Patty Wetterling told me. “I was one of those people who thought, Once a sex offender, always a sex offender, and my view was: Lock ’em up and send ’em away, forever and ever.”
The act marked the first in a series of sex-registry laws, mostly named after nightmarish “stranger-danger” cases. Megan’s Law, passed in 1996, required that states make their registries accessible to the public. Jessica’s Law, and its variants, established long mandatory minimum sentences for first-time offenders convicted of sex crimes against children and stipulated that certain offenders be subject to lifetime electronic monitoring after their release. Particularly consequential was the crusade of John Walsh, the host of America’s Most Wanted and the father of a six-year-old boy who, in 1981, was abducted inside a shopping mall and beheaded. Walsh lobbied for the most sweeping set of changes to date: the Adam Walsh Act. It broadened the scope of the sex-offender registry, mandating the full disclosure of a former offender’s address, along with a photograph, and more; promulgated a form of indefinite detention, known as “civil commitment”; and, in a late addition to the bill, required that children as young as fourteen who had committed certain sex offenses be placed on the public registry. Jurisdictions that refused to comply would lose federal funds.
In 2005, Patty Wetterling traveled to Washington, D.C., with other grieving parents, to support an early version of the bill. “We will not tolerate sexual violence against our children,” she said at a press conference. An amendment adding certain juvenile offenders to the federal bill had been spurred by the devastating testimony of a teenager named Amie Zyla; at the age of eight, Zyla had been sexually abused by another youth, who had gone on to reoffend years later. “We cannot sit back and allow kids to continue to be hurt,” Zyla told Congress. “The simple truth is that juvenile sex offenders turn into adult predators.” On July 27, 2006, George W. Bush signed the Adam Walsh Act into law.
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Leah DuBuc was a gregarious child. Plump and pleasant-looking, with ginger hair and freckles, she took the crown at the Little Miss Summer pageant, in lakeside Pentwater, Michigan, belting out “You Are My Sunshine”; she brought the same gusto to gardening and tap-dance recitals. Leah’s troubles began when she was eight and her parents got divorced. Her father remarried and won custody of her and her little sister; her mom, mired in personal issues, was granted supervised visits with the girls at the local Dairy Queen. DuBuc was now sharing her old home with her stepmother and her four children—three boys and a girl.
“I’d never had brothers before, and I was curious,” DuBuc told me. One afternoon, after watching movies with her new step-siblings, ten-year-old Leah mimicked having sex with them—“like we’d seen in the movies,” she says—and then, by her account, exposed herself to the younger kids. It happened several more times, she said.
Later that year, DuBuc recounts, a law-enforcement officer visited her elementary-school class and told the students to inform a trusted adult if they had been subject to abuse. DuBuc remembers complaining to him about mistreatment at home; when authorities arrived to investigate, she says, they learned of her sexual misbehavior. According to another family member, however, one of DuBuc’s step-siblings talked about her actions to a therapist, who then alerted the authorities. (As is often true in such cases, the details may be impossible to establish definitively.)
Amid extensive therapeutic interventions, DuBuc was charged with eight counts of criminal sexual conduct, in the first and second degree. The prosecutor, Marilyn Bradford, insists, “There were a lot of scary things that happened to the victims in the case—ongoing things that happened to the little siblings.” But DuBuc’s court-appointed clinical social worker, Wendy Kunce, noted that at the time “there was a history of ‘charging large.’ ”
At the age of twelve, DuBuc arrived in juvenile court for a series of hearings. Her father, a mechanic, drove her to the courthouse, but he didn’t fully grasp the implication of the charges. (DuBuc’s interviews with authorities often occurred without the presence of a parent or a guardian.) Moments before stepping in front of a judge, DuBuc met with her court-appointed attorney, alone. She remembers giggling when she had to say the words “penis” and “vagina,” and when her fingerprints were taken, she told me, “I felt like I was in a movie.”
DuBuc recalls the court-appointed attorney explaining that if she pleaded guilty to two counts of criminal sexual conduct—a graver crime than the one that she says she committed, because it involved penetration—she’d be taken from her home. Given that she wanted to escape the difficult conditions there, she agreed. DuBuc’s investigating officer, Deputy Sheriff Mike Capra, told me, “I think she was hoping to make it easier on everybody by avoiding a long, drawn-out process and saying, ‘OK, I goofed up, I’m a kid, I’ll learn from it and move on.’ ”
In April, 1997, the judge ordered that DuBuc be sent to a residential juvenile-sex-offender treatment facility in Manteno, Illinois, called Indian Oaks Academy, where she stayed for nearly two years. An adult could have gone to prison for life, the judge warned, and, as she recalls it, proclaimed her a “lucky girl.”
• • •
She was the youngest child in her program at Indian Oaks, a facility surrounded by cornfields and a golf course. Many of the girls there were sixteen or seventeen, with histories of trauma that surfaced as rage. The older girls—Leah roomed with three others—verbally and physically abused one another, and occasionally her. A staffer sometimes sat on top of girls to restrain them, DuBuc recalls. “There was this padded room, and I’d take a book in there and read,” she told me. “I felt safe there.”
Five days a week, she went to sex-offender treatment with the girls from her unit. The program borrowed heavily from addiction theory. “Your identity is you’re a sex offender,” DuBuc recalls the girls being told. They’d never be cured, but they could learn to refrain from harming people in the future. To graduate, DuBuc would have to admit to acts that she says she never committed (such as the contested claims of penetration) but to which she’d pleaded guilty, under conditions that she has come to view as coercion. The daily treatment was exhausting, though she did have one therapist who seemed to believe in her. She was grateful, too, for a pastor who arrived one day, teaching the Gospel, and gave her a Bible. “From that point forward,” she recalls, “I had hope.”
What is available, too often, is a form of commercial tre
atment that can be abusive in its own right. In my interviews with registrants and their families, one question came up repeatedly: “Have you looked into the therapy industry?” Many treatment programs have dedicated, well-trained staff members who engage with families and seem to help children thrive. But some providers lack the resources that would allow them to separate offenders of various risk levels. And, in some parts of the country, I found a cottage industry of court-authorized but poorly regulated therapy providers subjecting kids and teens to widely debunked interventions or controversial invasive technologies. Juveniles undergoing treatment for sex offenses have been exposed to severe verbal abuse, beatings, and even sexual predation at residential facilities. Not a few people have been placed in dubious but costly treatment programs for actions that many believe should never have been criminalized in the first place. These experiences are hardly exclusive to juveniles; they extend to many youths over eighteen, whose journeys through the justice system can be equally alarming. The most surprising instances are known as the “Romeo and Juliet” cases, involving consensual sex between teens.
• • •
In July of 2003, not long after his senior year of high school, Anthony Metts got a summer job at the lakeside camp where he’d once been a camper. Metts, who grew up in Midland, Texas, was adopted; at school, where he was one of its few Mexican Americans, he’d been taunted for being a “wetback.” But things were different at the camp, and as a counselor he was in heaven. He ran archery sessions and visits to the Blob, the camp’s famous floating trampoline. Then, one afternoon, a Texas Ranger and a Midland cop arrived at the camp and asked to speak with him. After driving him to a local police station, the officers told him that they were investigating the illegal sale of items from a Midland Police Department evidence room, and an informant had tossed out his name as a potential source of information.
Officers noted that Metts had been keenly cooperative. But he knew nothing about the theft, which, it later emerged, had been perpetrated by a rogue employee of the police department. Eager to get a confession, and seemingly convinced of his association with the crime, the officers pressed him on another tip they’d heard: Hadn’t Metts been hanging out with younger girls the previous year? Was it possible that he’d had sex with them?
Metts told them that when he was eighteen he dated a girl who was three years younger. And he’d also had a brief sexual relationship with a girl more than three years younger, whom he met during his junior year of high school, when she was a freshman. Metts helped the officers proofread his statement, oblivious of its significance. When the officers turned the information over to the Midland District Attorney’s Office, the DA filed two felony indictments for sexual assault of a child, based on the age-of-consent laws in Texas at the time. (A third charge of sexual assault of a child was raised, then dropped.)
Consent was irrelevant—in fact, impossible—before the law. Not too far away, in the town of Caldwell, a young man had been convicted, at nineteen, for a consensual relationship with a girl who was four years younger, and who later became his wife. Metts’s case was messier; it involved more than one relationship, and he’d left a trail of adolescent misbehavior—speeding tickets, pot, and pranks. His lawyer told him that he would face life in prison if the case went to trial. He decided to take a plea deal: a suspended sentence and ten years of probation.
Metts, who was twenty-one by then, read the terms of his postplea life. For the next decade, he’d be barred from alcohol and the Internet; from entering the vicinity of schools, parks, bus stops, malls, and movie theatres; and from living within a thousand feet of a “child-safety zone.” A mugshot of his curly-haired, round-cheeked face would appear for life on the Texas sex-offender registry, beside the phrase “Sexual Assault of a Child.” And he would have to start sex-offender treatment.
The treatment plan was extensive. He was told to write up a detailed sexual history and then to discuss it with a room full of adults, some of whom had repeatedly committed child assaults. On his first day of class, he recalls, he entered a group circle beside a dentist who had violated several patients while they were under anesthesia. To graduate, he would have to narrate his “assaults” in detail: “How many buttons on her shirt did you unbutton?”
The plan also included a monthly polygraph ($150) and a computerized test that measured how long his eyes lingered on deviant imagery ($325). He would also have to submit to a “penile plethysmograph,” or PPG. According to documents produced by the state of Texas, the PPG—known jokingly to some patients as a “peter meter”—is “a sophisticated computerized instrument capable of measuring slight changes in the circumference of the penis.” A gauge is wrapped around the shaft of the penis, with wires hooked up to a laptop, while a client is presented with “sexually inappropriate” imagery and, often, “deviant” sexual audio. Metts would be billed around $200 per test.
In parts of the country, including New York, judges have banned the PPG; one federal ruling noted “the obviously substantial humiliation of having the size and rigidity of one’s penis measured and monitored by the government.” (The PPG was invented in the 1950s by a sexologist from Czechoslovakia and used by the Czech military to expose soldiers suspected of pretending to be gay in order to avoid service.) But Texas’s Council on Sex Offender Treatment says that the test is capable of “breaking through the offender’s denial,” helping to tailor treatments that can “address all of the offender’s sexual interests.”
When Metts balked at what felt to him like technological invasions—not least the prospect of having a stranger measure his penis—he was jailed for ten days. A new round of weekly therapy sessions (thirty dollars for group, and fifty dollars for one-on-one) then commenced.
When I reviewed half a dozen sex-offender-treatment workbooks, I found that most elicit a thorough sexual history. (“Describe and discuss, in detail, a repeated masturbatory fantasy.”) Then come the exercises. One workbook instructs patients to masturbate to an illicit scene then sniff an “ammonia inhalant” until their “state of sexual arousal is completely removed.” Another manual introduces children and teens to the practice of “aversive scenes.” Youths must masturbate to a deviant thought, then, at peak arousal, switch to an image of “something that you find disgusting … e.g. Brussels sprouts.” A third requires patients to imagine a “punishment scene,” conjuring up unbearable shame as a prophylactic, much as gay youths were once taught, in conversion therapy, to use the fear of familial judgment as a corrective.
Several scholars told me that the notion of shaming youths into compliance is itself a fantasy. In the journal Child Maltreatment, the pediatric psychologist Mark Chaffin describes polygraphs, masturbation logs, and other such methods as “coercive techniques of doubtful accuracy, untested benefit, and considerable potential for harm.” But therapeutic failures can be lucrative for providers: the longer someone stays in treatment, the longer the person provides a steady income.
“There’s an awful lot of money involved in prosecuting, locking up, treating, and registering these folks,” Phil Taylor, a former therapist for men convicted of sex offenses in Texas, told me. Under contract with the state, he spent some ten years treating hundreds of adults convicted of violent sex crimes, along with young adults who had had consensual relationships with other teens. A decade ago, in 2006, Taylor’s faith in the treatment protocols was shaken by new research. He renounced the field and began working for legislative reform of the registry. “It’s hard for people to change their minds when their livelihood depends upon this money stream,” he told me.
In Midland, Anthony Metts continued to struggle with treatment. He acknowledged that his behavior as a teen had been reckless. He told me, “Do I think I needed some sort of therapy? Yes. But do I think I needed sex-offender therapy? Hell, no.” Still, the rules left few options. Eventually, he agreed to acknowledge how he’d “groomed” his “victims”: in one case, they’d gone to dinner, a movie, and—for a Halloween date—to
a local haunted house.
His life, meanwhile, increasingly felt like a series of derailments. He had been fired from a job he loved at a local radio station when an advertiser learned of his status on the registry and protested. The best gig he could find was in Midland’s oil fields, working dispatch. His mother began to worry about whether he’d make it through a decade of probation. She recalled the judge’s warning, on the day that Metts took the plea: “It’s a good deal if you make it, or else it’s a pretty lousy deal if you don’t.”
• • •
At Indian Oaks, Leah DuBuc told me, “I did what I had to do to save my own skin.” She was released on a summer morning, and her father, who had divorced her stepmother, drove her to a campsite, where three of her childhood friends celebrated her return from “boarding school.” DuBuc flourished in high school. Her occasional check-ins with her probation officer weren’t onerous. Victoria was one of the few classmates who knew about her secret.
But, not long after DuBuc’s time at Indian Oaks, the Michigan legislature passed a new sex-offender law creating an online registry that was available to anyone with an Internet connection. DuBuc was required to register privately with the local authorities; when she was eighteen, her name and personal information would be made public online. The law set a mandatory minimum of twenty-five years on the registry—based on a template that was spreading across the country.
At first, the requirements were easily met. Each year, DuBuc’s dad would send in her latest weight, height, and address. In school, meanwhile, DuBuc earned a reputation as Little Miss Civics; she ran the Diversity Club and, after graduation, went to Guatemala with church friends to build an orphanage. But when she got Victoria’s call she learned that strangers could now map an easy route to her childhood home, using the state’s online sex-offender database. “This is where my life became a living hell all over again,” she later wrote.