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Sunday, July 31, 2011

Ms. Magazine Spring 2011 Edition - Rape is Rape

   I was in Border Books yesterday because they are having a nationwide "Going Out of Business" sale and I love books, so I went to see what kind or bargains I could find. They had a big Gender Issues section, but I could not find one book on men of course. I did find Ms. Magazine's Spring 2011 edition with the headline screaming out - RAPE IS RAPE. Naturally I knew it was just another anti-male, propaganda filled, bullshit article by the famous, traditional family hating, man-hating, father-hating, lesbian loving Ms. Magazine. It was. Here's some tidbits from the article:

The 2007 Uniform Crime report listed 91,874 "forcible" rapes , and some believe the numbers are 24 TIMES HIGHER.
That would make the number of rapes in 2007 to be 2,204,976. Yeah right. Who exactly are the "some believe the numbers are 24 times higher" anyway? Gee, It couldn't be another feminist lie about men could it? Nah, Ms. Magazine would do that. Would they?

- When a city police department under reports rapes, however, there's a real consequence in terms of Federal funding.
Do they really think police departments under report rapes so they won't get TOO much Federal funding? Or is it that the cops don't make police reports on rapes that never happened, thus contradicting the number of rapes that feminists claim happen in this country.

- And that's why a change in the definition of rape would lead to better law enforcement response and could thus reduce dramatically the incidence of rape. 
The definition of rape to Ms. Magazine is when a woman claims rape, it's true because woman NEVER lie. Also, ALL men are rapists anyway.

- Advocates say funding is needed not just for local law enforcement but for umbrella agencies such as the Department of Justices Office of Violence Against Women....
Is there a Department of Justice Office of Violence Against Men? Why the Hell not?

- The FBI needs a MODERN definition of rape that reflects a POPULAR understanding of the crime and doesn't exclude the VAST MAJORITY of rapes. Rape is rape. Period.
What exactly is the modern and popular definition of rape? Anything that feminist say It is? Hasn't rape always been rape.

THE BULLSHIT NEVER ENDS


  

CA Prison Realignment

KQED Radio
California Prison Realignment

Download audio (MP3)


Kevork Djansezian/Getty
A California Department of Corrections officer speaks to inmates at Chino State Prison.
Beginning in October, California will reduce its prison population by moving thousands of low-level non-violent offenders to counties. The move comes on the heels of a court order to reduce the population of the state's overcrowded prisons. But are counties ready to take on these inmates?
Host: Scott Shafer
Guests:
  • David Kuge, chief probation officer with Kern County Probation
  • David Muhammad, chief probation officer for Alameda County
  • Jim Nielsen, California State assemblymember (R) and former chairman of the Board of Prison Terms
  • Joan Petersilia, criminologist and co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center
  • Matthew Cate, secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation

Is CA Reducing Inmate Population?

What state is doing to reduce number of inmates

Five years ago, a federal judge decided that substandard health care in California prisons was leading to the deaths of about 50 inmates a year. Two years ago, a federal court panel ordered the state to reduce its prison population to deal with the problem. And in May, the U.S. Supreme Court told the state that, yes, it has to comply with that order.
But California's prisons remain overcrowded.
The state recently filed a preliminary report with the courts spelling out how it intends to meet deadlines to reduce the number of prisoners from the current 143,500 to 110,000 by 2013.
The seven-page filing had some interesting nuggets. Among them:
-- The state won't meet the first deadline, Dec. 27, to reduce the prison population by 10,500 - but state officials think they'll have 8,700 fewer inmates by that time, and a month later will hit the 10,500 benchmark.
-- The state will put $5.1 billion this fiscal year toward Gov. Jerry Brown's centerpiece of the reduction plan, which is known in Capitol parlance as "realignment." In English, realignment means that beginning Oct. 1, low-level offenders will be sent to county jails instead of state prisons.
-- There are about 32,000 inmates in state prisons who would be eligible, under realignment rules, to be housed in local jails. That's roughly the same number of inmates by which the state needs to reduce its prison population.
We'll know more in the coming weeks, when the state files a final report with updated population figures.
Support for plan? Meanwhile, it looks like public support is there for Brown's realignment plan. A University of Southern California/Los Angeles Times poll released this month found that 79 percent of respondents favor keeping nonviolent offenders in local jails, while only 17 percent oppose it.
A strong majority, 69 percent, also said they support releasing low-level, nonviolent offenders from prison early, and 62 percent support reducing life sentences for people convicted of property crimes under the state's three-strikes law. The 1,507 registered voters who responded to the July 6-17 telephone poll also overwhelmingly support medical parole, a new law that allows inmates who are incapacitated due to illness or injuries to be released from prison early.
It's not likely these findings will push lawmakers to embrace criminal justice reforms. As we've noted in the past, Democrats and Republicans alike generally shy away from anything that makes them appear soft on crime.


Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/29/LV041KFULI.DTL#ixzz1TiMDKyIg

Saturday, July 30, 2011

Congress wants to Spy on EVERYONE'S Internet Usage

Congress wants to spy on everyone's Internet

Goodbye, civil liberties! The government is using a bill disguised as anti-child pornography legislation to allow them to start monitoring Web-usage of everyone.
The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 (H.R. 1981) is aiming to keep the Web safe for children, but in the process it will treat any user logging on to the Internet as a potential criminal.
Bill sponsor Lamar Smith, House judiciary committee chairman and Representative from Texas, says that pedophiles have been able to avoid prosecution in the past because vital records linking them to web usage were never required to be retained. Under H.R. 1981, Internet Service Providers would have to hold onto those records for 12 months.
Those records, however, won’t apply to just suspected child pornographers and pedophiles. Instead, ISPs will be doing data retention on all of their customers.
If passed, the bill will keep the names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers and temporarily-assigned IP addresses of everyone on the Internet on file for a full year.
Smith says that the law is similar to what telephone companies are currently required to do by keeping phone records of their customers. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), however, says it’s just an attempt to pry even deeper into the public lives of citizens.
“This is not about child porn. It never has been and never will be,” Issa said. “This is a convenient way for law enforcement to get what they couldn’t get in the PATRIOT Act.” Issa further added that he is “offended” that lawmakers would use the issue of child pornography to gain leverage in passing the law.
Fellow California Democratic Representative Zoe Lofgren shared the same sentiments as Issa. “This is among the most astounding increases in the power of the federal government to gain access to private information,” she said.
“The bill is mislabeled,” Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) tells CNET. "This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It's creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes."
Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) proposed an amendment to H.R. 1981 which would limit the data retention to only cases involving child pornography or terrorism. Despite that being why backers claim the bill exists, it ended up being withdrawn. When he tried another amendment to reduce the time that data is retained from one year to 180 days, it failed to win on the voting floor.
Rep. Smith responded that doing so could undermine current cases regarding other issues.
In a statement issued by the Center for Democracy & Technology out of Washington DC, the non-profit advocacy group says that the passing of H.R. 1981 would “fundamentally violate users’ rights to privacy and free expression.”
The CDT adds that telephone companies that offer Internet service to customers will be faced with an enormous burden of handling the request of data retention, which will be a costly mandate to wireless carriers.
“In other words, the data retention provisions in H.R. 1981 would threaten our civil liberties, create significant economic burdens for small businesses and wireless carriers, and put consumers at a greater risk for identity theft and other privacy invasions,” writes the DCT.
In addition to receiving backing from Rep. Smith, H.R. 1981 is also receiving praise from Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the National Center for Victims of Crime, the National Sheriff’s Association, the Major County Sheriff’s Association, the International Union of Police Associations and the Fraternal Order of Police.

Advice for Parolees Seeking Employment

From: Prison Movement  http://prisonmovement.wordpress.com/

Advise for Parolees Seeking Employment

By Johnny Street
July 29, 2011 Make no mistake, parole is technically a duration of a sentence served outside of an institution, not an ending or completion of your sentence. It is treated like a step towards being completely free from obligation to the Corrections Department, but all those parameters (checking in, pissing in a cup, paying restitution) are all part of your sentence. This is also where it is really easy to violate your sentence, and wind up back in prison or jail. A key aspect that would make someone violate their parole is destitution, and what a horrible time to be destitute. It is common knowledge that unemployment statistics are appalling. Depending on where you live, anywhere from 10% to 25% of a population is without work. This does not even factor in those who’s unemployment benefits have expired, or the ones who are under employed. We’ve all heard our own horror stories of downsizing, lay-offs, and the random doctor who has to bag groceries to supplement their income. With all sorts of people desperate for work, any work, the ones on parole are now even lower on the employment food chain. If you are in such a mess, I hope these ideas help. Landing employment could very well be what makes you complete your parole, and stay out of institutions.
  1. Start Looking For A Job Before Parole Is Granted. Inmates who are eligible for parole are notified before their hearing by a case manager.
  2. Get As Many Good Letters Of Recommendation As You Can. With virtually every new place of employment running background checks on you, it is almost futile to think they won’t find out if you’ve been recently incarcerated. Be honest. Your word will only be taken at face value by a prospective employer, but what will help is by getting a recommendation from a third party. This can be a former employer, a religious figure, or even your parole officer.
  3. Call Your Parole Officer. Part of a Parole Officers job description is helping a parolee find long term employment. Obviously this can vary.
  4. Utilize All Social Services And Job Placement Agencies. The US Department of Justice can help you locate employers who hire parolees in your area.
  5. If You Believe You Are Being Discriminated Against During Your Job Hunt, Contact The ACLU. This is a very large grey area. You can be denied employment for a number of reasons. Obviously employers cannot deny you employment based on race, sex, sexual preference, or religion- but they can as long as they don’t cite one of those as the reason for it. All the same, you as a parolee still have rights, and the ACLU can inform you of what rights you have and if you are, in fact, being discriminated against.
  6. Contact The Head Of Your Local Place Of Worship. Churches are very connected within a community, and they can possibly suggest employers who are sympathetic to your situation.
  7. Persistence, Perseverance, Patience. It is not uncommon for a parolee to look for work and have nothing come of it. Even day labor can deny you employment based on you having a record. We live in a very unforgiving time when it comes to people out of work, and how much more that is amplified when you have been incarcerated for however long. Keep in mind your first line of getting back on your feet is your Parole Officer.
It is a shame that the concept of incarceration impairs you from living a prosperous life. It’s as if not only it is a system set up to promote failure on the parolee’s part, but your struggle is in fact an undocumented part of your sentence as well. To the victims of a crime you committed, the “serves you right” mentality is common. Either that or the altruistic “I forgive you”. No matter what put you in the situation of being on parole- being a raw deal, a plea to a lesser charge, or on a very rare occurrence of the punishment actually fitting the crime, parole is a very real and savage step when it comes to sentence fulfillment. In this cruel era of economic depression, never has getting back on your feet been harder for the parolee.

Ten Myths About Sex Offenders

From: Reform Sex Offender Laws -  http://www.reformsexoffenderlaws.org/index.php

Ten Myths About Sex Offenders
[This document is an attempt to summarize an research report published by the National Council on Institutions and Alternatives (NCIA). The March 2007 report was called "Towards More Effective Sex Offense Legislation". This summary does not necessarily reflect the views of the NCIA itself.]
Recidivism is defined as repeat criminal behavior among offenders.
Of all crimes, sex offenders are widely believed to have the highest level of recidivism. However, treatment professionals and criminologists have known for some time that once sex offenders are caught, only a small minority of them will commit another sex crime. Although some pedophiles, before they are caught, have many victims, most have a single victim in or about their own family.
We all hope for the day when we can see fewer sex offenses and particularly fewer juvenile victims of such crimes. But so long as what we think we know about these types of crimes is based on myths and fear rather than facts, that day will never come. There are several myths that are widely believed that need to be debunked.
In recent years social scientists and criminologists have combed through an immense accumulation of data from hundreds of studies, which have tracked tens of thousands of individual sex offenders for long periods of time, some even for decades.
By 1994, 670 studies of sex offenders had been done and by the end of 2005 well over 700. Many of these studies have been systematized through a methodology called meta-analysis. The resulting data reveal that many common myths about sex offenders are simply false. We outline here some of them.
MYTH #1: "SEX OFFENDERS WILL ALWAYS KEEP OFFENDING."
Recently the Bureau of Justice Statistics published a study which tracked 9,700 sex offenders for three years, 2001-2004. Their findings concluded:

  • Only 5.3% of these people imprisoned for sex crimes were rearrested for a subsequent sex offense.
  • Where a child was involved, the rearrest rate dropped to 3.3%.
  • Between two adults, the sexual reoffense rate was 2.2%.

A more multifaceted meta-analysis was done in 2004 by the office of Canada's Solicitor General, Karl Hanson. This analysis involved 95 studies tracking 31,000 sex offenders. These studies had an average follow-up period of 5 years and found:

  • The recidivism rate for once-caught pedophiles was 12.7%.
  • The overall once caught recidivism rate (includes adult victims) was 13.7%.

Contrary to widespread public opinion, once-caught sex offenders have a very low recidivism rate. With or without treatment, more than 87% of the once-caught do not commit another sex crime. With treatment, the likelihood of re-offending is even lower.
In contrast, according to the 2004 U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics study, 69% of all other types of criminals go back to prison, and they do so within five years. Over a longer period of time, other FBI statistics show, about 74% of all other types of offenders return to prison.
When that figure is compared to only 2% to 13%, the recidivism rate for sex offenders in reality is only a tiny fraction of what it is for other types of crime. This is not what the public believes and certainly not what they have heard. As the trackings of tens of thousands clearly attest, most people learn from their mistakes,and sex offenders are no exception. Just getting caught changes the behavior of most individuals.
MYTH #2: "TREATMENT DOESN'T MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE."
The public has been told for years that treatment doesn't work, that "for sex offenders nothing works," but here too a myriad of major studies indicates otherwise:

  • The Campbell Collaboration analysis of 22,000 individuals found that treatment reduced recidivism by 37%.
  • Canada's Karl Hanson's 2000 analysis found a reduction of 41%.
  • Oshkosh Correctional's meta-analysis from 79 separate studies of over 11,000 sex offenders found that people who participated in treatment programs had a 59% rearrest reduction.
  • According to Alexander's 1998 study, "Men arrested for having sex with children are usually overcome with shame and remorse and they want to stop. Since 1943 those who were treated in jails, hospitals and outpatient clinics found their way back to prison at a rate that was approximately one-third of those who had no treatment."
  • By 2005, most all preventative programs showed that rearrest rates were being reduced by greater than half. With some of the latest deep aversion and victim empathy regimens, reductions were reported as high as 91%.
  • There is now a credible concurrence that "treatment works" and that new programs are becoming increasingly more successful.

For more detailed data, see Sex Offenses: Facts, Fictions and Policy Implications, January 2006, available on the NCIA web page at http://66.165.94.98/stories/Sex%20Offenders%20Report.pdf. See also an earlier article by Eric Lotke, Politics and Irrelevance: Community Notification Statutes, October 1997 available on the NCIA web page or at http://66.165.94.98/stoires/polnirr97.html. Professor Eric Lotke can be reached at (elotke@yahoo.com). NCIA's web page is http://www.reformsexoffenderlaws.org/materials/www.ncianet.org.
MYTH #3: "THE GREATEST THREAT TO OUR CHILDREN COMES FROM STRANGERS."

  • According to the most recent major study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (2004), where 9,700 sex offenders were tracked, only 7% of such crimes against children were perpetrated by strangers.
  • The majority (93%) of molestations of children are not committed by strangers but by people who are known and trusted within or about the family.
  • Throughout the last decade, other arrest studies have found similar results. Most sex offenses are committed by a family member or guardian/family member (often some parental substitute).
  • It may be a trusted uncle, father, stepfather, mother, family friend, a teacher, coach or a priest; but in almost all cases the culprit is not a stranger.

If we keep in mind that 93% of the culprits are family or known to the family, and that 87% of sex offenders who are caught do not re-offend, then it would seem that most registries or residency restrictions or tracking of individuals will be very close to a waste of time. Such procedures will not make our communities any safer. In fact, there's evidence such measures will do the opposite.
MYTH #4: "BANNING SEX OFFENDERS FROM PLACES WHERE CHILDREN CONGREGATE WILL SIGNIFICANTLY PROTECT OUR CHILDREN."
To claim school yards, daycare centers and other places where children congregate need legislation or Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) geo-fence to keep sex offenders away may sound sensible, but again the facts do not fit the reality.
The fact is that most sex offenses take place in or near one's home and that only 7% involve strangers. Furthermore, only a tiny percentage of sex offenders have any history of kidnapping or molesting children unknown to them.
Perhaps among the safest places for children to be are those where they are together in numbers. School personnel are paying more attention than ever before, and older kids are keeping more of a watchful eye. People --even kids-- look out for each other in public places.
Finally, making it difficult for sex offenders to find places to reside means that they will have a much harder time re-integrating themselves into society, which is what most of them want to do.
MYTH #5: "TOUGHER LEGISLATION IS THE ONLY SOLUTION."
In the U.S., our judges are learned and principled and render few decisions without due diligence. Very stiff punishments for child murderers are certainly called for, but punishment is just only when it is proportioned to the severity of the crime. Such judgments should remain in the courts, subject to very specific deliberations --they should not be rendered in the legislatures, where careful deliberation is impossible.
If legislation is based on the false premise that recidivism is inevitable rather than rare, and if blurs the line between sex offense and murder, then it will result in laws that promote public shaming and permanent exclusion. These laws presume and promote lifelong guilt, ruling out all hope of change. Thus they not only clearly violate the Constitution, but they actually encourage more of the very crimes we are trying to reduce.
If we truly want fewer victims, we should adopt a more holistic approach to reintegrating sex offenders back into society. The focus should shift from more and harsher punishment to the funding of good treatment programs. Although such a shift may have little current appeal among the public today, treatment is the only sure way that we will see fewer victims of these types of crime.
Given all the degrees that sexual offenses can take, one type of sentence does not fit all. What do you do with a 17-year-old who had sex with a 15-year-old? What do you do if he was 19? What if it was consensual? Does he get registered for a lifetime as a sex offender? What about an 8-year-old who plays doctor? What if he's 14? That fact is that nowadays even juvenile sex offenders are being branded for life.
MYTH #6: "THE ONLY WAY TO DEAL WITH THEM IS PUT THEM BEHIND BARS."
Today, with two and quarter million inmates, our country has more people in jails and prisons than it does in all our colleges and universities combined. When three-quarters of all offenders are going back to prison, just funding more prison cells isn't the answer.
If our goal were to mass produce criminals, we couldn't be doing a better job. Without treatment programs, our prisons have become huge breweries, woefully turning out more of the same product, each generation more hardened and more dangerous than the last. If ever we're to make our societies more just and our communities more secure, our goal must be to make some serious changes and not just keep doing more of the same.
If we got more serious about funding preventative programs, then our courts could establish good treatment programs that would start from the first day of a criminal's first conviction. The result would be many fewer victims of all sorts of crimes, including sexual abuse of children.
Presently there is little or no rehabilitation taking place in our prisons; there is just more and more fruitless incarceration. We need to wake up about what we are brewing and start legislating intelligently, so that offenders can really get rehabilitated and contribute constructively to society.
MYTH #7: "MANDATORY MINIMUM SENTENCES ARE EFFECTIVE AND WILL HELP PROTECT SOCIETY."
Although the public may believe that extremely stiff, mandatory minimum sentences and lock'em up strategies send a message that deters crime, history tells another story.
Criminologists point out that such laws, even when publicized, are not all that effective. Often, in the heat of actual violence, perpetrators do not even think about consequences. At such moments of blinding rage and confusion, there are generally few thoughts of penalties or sentences, severe or otherwise.
Conversely, we do know that extremely harsh mandatory sentences have prompted some of the very types of crime they are intended to stem. When a perpetrator is aware of particularly dire consequences if he's caught, that fear can lead him to cause even greater harm for the victim. A person facing a stiff sentence like a mandatory 25 years to life, or even a death sentence, may decide his chances are better if he eliminates the victim and any possible witness. What might have been a lesser crime then often gets even worse.
It may seem a paradox, but the stiffer the consequences, the more Jessicas, Megans and Polly Klaases will likely be the result. It is understandable that with such terrible murders come calls for tougher punishments. However, the problem with legislation launched in anger is that it invariably ends up punishing not only those who deserve punishment, but also those who do not.
MYTH #8: "SEX OFFENDER REGISTRIES ARE NECESSARY TO PROTECT SOCIETY."
Posting names, addresses and photographs on a Sex Offender Registry is not only a risk to those on the list; it can also lead to unintended, inappropriate and destructive consequences for the whole community.
Registries tend to treat all sex offenders the same way, without reference to the severity of their offense, their responsiveness to treatment, or current assessment of the risk they pose. It is seen by some as an opportunity to harass the offenders and even worse.
While it is certainly in order to professionally monitor and discipline sex offenders for various prudent periods, we must also try to be fair about how offenders are handled. Permanently branding them on registries or making targets of them with conspicuous tracking devices will only aggravate the problems, not solve them. Unfortunately, when a partially informed public is allowed and encouraged to become watchdogs, sex offenders face greater risk of confrontations by the public, due mainly to anger and hostility. Some people even feel that they have a warrant to harass offenders and make life miserable for them.
Since the start of Community Notification, there has been a growing number of serious beatings, not only of sex offenders, but sometimes of their family members or people with whom they live. Some confrontations have led to tragedies. Two sex offenders were murdered in Maine. In this case, the victims were no longer likely threats; one was simply a young man who at 17 had a 15-year-old girlfriend. Had their names, addresses and photographs not been on the state's registry, had the two been simply monitored by probation and treatment professionals, they would not have been spotlighted by some zealot who apparently thought he was doing the work of God.
A little wall sign at one of NCIA's clinics gets a lot of applause from those in treatment:
"Permanent brandings may be all right for cattle,
but they shouldn't be for people."
If we want to be humane, that sign is correct. If we want former offenders to regain their health and not be always on the run, we should not set them up to be stalked. Vengeful prescriptions that call only for more and more punishment will not produce a cure. Since so few of the once-caught remain a threat, there are smarter approaches than alarming communities with registries and turning all levels of former offenders over to the general public for surveillance.
MYTH #9: "TRACKING DEVICES ARE A PRACTICAL AND JUST MEANS FOR KEEPING SEX OFFENDERS UNDER SURVEILLANCE."
If we want fewer victims of sexual offenses, the primary goal should be to reintegrate former offenders peacefully back into society as law-abiding citizens. This cannot be done if we keep them in fear and on the run. Tracking devices that have to be worn conspicuously only make targets of the people we are trying to reintegrate into society.
When offenders are made to wear GPS bracelets, with one worn on the ankle and another on the wrist, they are big, bulky and hard to keep hidden. For anyone who has to wear them, they are a scarlet letter, a crippling stigma of shame.
If we want to keep sex-offenders on track, turning them into prey on registries or spotlighting them with bulky tracking bracelets on both arm and leg is not the answer. Making a dartboard of any human being is clearly more an act of revenge than an aid in stemming crime. The vigilante mentality is still strong in many places: one man on a sex offender registry found the severed head of his pet dog on the front porch of his house.
Sadly, the new legislation being created is aimed more at increasing punishment and appeasing the public than it is at actually making our communities safer. When the public is as misinformed and angry as they are, it is a perilous mistake to give them the addresses and photographs of all sex offenders, particularly without the background of their crimes or updated individual assessments of risk.
The monitoring of sex offenders will always be better handled by knowledgeable treatment professionals carefully coordinating their efforts with police and parole officers than by the varied mercies of an angry, upset and partially informed populace. If GPS devices need to be used, there now exist cellphones with GPS chips, which not only give the person^Òs precise location but allow immediate voice contact with the person.
Unless we want to go back two centuries to the ghoulish practices of Salem, we should not get caught up in the intoxications of revenge that only fuel harassment and witchhunts.
MYTH #10: "THE EXPERTS SAY THAT STRONG, REPRESSIVE MEASURES ARE NECESSARY TO KEEP SEX OFFENDERS FROM RE-OFFENDING."
Below are some revealing quotes from various experts and authors who have studied sex offender legislation and treatment.

  • Tom Masters, Program Director, Correctional Treatment Services at Oregon State Hospital:
    Unfortunately a lot of crime legislation is a function of politics and does not lead to rehabilitation or community safety.
  • Margaret Love, former Justice Department Pardon Attorney, writes:
    Mean spirited vengeful legislation is only an incitement to vigilante injustice masquerading as a responsible public safety measure.
  • In the June 2006 issue of National Wildlife, Richard Law summarizes some studies on how we in America have become so overcome by fear. Here are some excerpts:
    Fear is felt nearly intensely in suburban Overland Park, Kansas, as it is in urban Philadelphia. One suburban father told me, "I want to know where my kid is 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I want to know where that kid is. Which hours. Which square foot. Which telephone number.

    As a parent, I have felt that fear but consider the facts:

    • The number of abductions by strangers has been falling for years.
    • Most abductors are family members.
    • U.S. children are safer now than they have been since 1975.According to the 2005 Duke University Child Well Being Index, violent victimization of children has dropped by more than 38 percent.
    • A 1991 study found that in 1990, the radius within which children were allowed to roam on their own from home had shrunk to a ninth of what it had been in 1970.
    • What has increased is round-the-clock news coverage of a few tragedies, conditioning families to live in fear.
  • In her book, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), author Judith Levine wrote:
    All this rational talk may mean nothing to a parent. Out of 45 million, only nine children are raped and murdered: slim odds, sure, but if it happens to your baby, who cares about the statistics? Still, most parents manage to put irrational fears in perspective. Why, in spite of all information to the contrary, do Americans insist on believing that pedophiles are a major peril to their children?

    What do people fear so formidably? Our culture fears the pedophile, say some social critics, not because he is a deviant, but because he is ordinary. And I don't mean because he is the ice-cream man or Father Patrick. No, we fear him because he is us.
  • In his study The Culture of Child Molesting, the literary critic James Kincaid traced this terror back to the middle of the nineteenth century. Then, he said, Anglo-American culture conjured childhood innocence, defining it as a desire-less subjectivity, at the same time as it constructed a new ideal of the sexually desirable object. The two had identical attributes --softness, cuteness, docility, passivity-- and this simultaneous cultural invention has presented us with a wicked psychosocial problem ever since. We relish our erotic attraction to children, says Kincaid (witness the child beauty pageants in which JonBenet Ramsey was entered). But we also find that attraction abhorrent (witness the public shock and disgust at JonBonets "sexualization" in those pageants). So we project that eroticized desire outward, creating a monster to hate, hunt down and punish.



  • In the June 2, 2006, San Francisco Chronicle Mark Martin, Peter Firmrite and Greg Lucas wrote an article that made the following points:
    • Residency prohibitions on sex offenders have become increasingly popular across the country, despite any statistical evidence that they limit assaults on children. At least 18 states have some restrictions on where parolees live.
    • Niki Delson, a licensed clinical social worker who has worked for 30 years with sex offenders and their victims and who is chairwoman of the California Coalition on Sexual Offending, says: "Where someone lives has no relation to the commission of a crime". She calls residency requirements "a smoke screen that does little to help children".
    • Jill Levenson, a professor at Lynn University says: "Restricting where parolees live can actually do more harm than good. Such requirements tend to push them out of metropolitan areas where they are further away from job opportunities, families, treatment options and all the things we know that will reduce recidivism.
    • A review of residence restrictions Levenson published noted that both Minnesota and Colorado prison officials studied patterns of sex offenders on parole and found no correlation between new offenses the parolees committed and where they lived. Neither state adopted residency requirements.




  • Corwin Ritchie, Executive Director at the Iowa County Attorney's Association, stated:
    In 2002, Iowa enacted a law that prohibits sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school or daycare center. The law has overburdened law enforcement, has concentrated sex offenders in areas where they are allowed to live, and has led to an increase in the number of sex offenders who have stopped registering with local authorities and gone missing.

    I defy anyone to try and convince me, scientifically or logically, that those requirements have any affect at all. It makes great sense politically, but has no affect whatsoever on public safety.




  • James Poniewozik, staff writer for Time Magazine, wrote on October 16, 2006:
    Strangers make up 7% of child molesters; the vast majority are family members. But you wouldn't know it from watching TV. When stranger predators are everywhere on TV, it suggests that they are everywhere in the real world: in your school yard, roaming your street, and --especially-- climbing the DSL line into your kids' bedrooms like an ivied trellis.




  • Robert Freeman-Longo, former director of the Safer Society, stated:
    You ban somebody from the community, he has no friends, he feels bad about himself, and you reinforce the very problems that contribute to sex abuse behavior in the first place. You make him a worse sex offender.




CONCLUSION
Knowing of NCIA's work and having seen this report, author/researcher Henry Scammell volunteered the following:
The public has been misled into believing that sex offenders are aroundevery corner and that even those who have been caught will go on to offend forever. The first fear is irrational and the second is less true of sex offenses than of virtually any other type of crime. The only public policies with any hope of success are those based on reliable research instead of fears, and on scientific facts rather than easy political fixes fed by misconceptions.

Fear is a poor basis for public policy. It raises a nearly unbreachable barrier to the truth. And a policy that is based on the realities --of low recidivism, of responsiveness to treatment and of the relationship between the vast majority of offenders and their victims-- offers the only hope for reducing or eliminating one of our society^Òs saddest and most challenging problems.

If we keep in mind the reality that once a sex offender is caught, most of the problem ceases, that preventative programs can cure almost all the rest of the once caught, then clearly treatment must be the goal. When you hear a politician calling for tougher sentences and not backing it up with dollars for treatment programs, then he is looking for votes, not solutions.
The public's fear would not be so intense today if it were not being propelled by all the exaggerated and often totally false recidivism claims. There have been too many "scarathons" that claim that the boogeyman has become much larger than he really is. Even though the public imagines the molester-kidnapper is everywhere, that simply is not the case.
Because of all the clamor and panic, what criminologists and treatment scholars have learned to date has plainly not been heard by the public. Sadly, what has been spawned politically so far, such as sex registries and residency restrictions, are measures that will do nothing to make our communities safer, but in fact will do more harm.
If we want fewer sex offenders and fewer victims of these types of crime, we have got to be more levelheaded. We should see to it that the public and our legislators inform themselves better about these myths and learn to distinguish the reality from the many distorted ideas that are abroad.

Friday, July 29, 2011

CA RSO's on Parole Banned from State Fair

SACRAMENTO - The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's (CDCR) Division of Adult Parole Operations (DAPO) is again using its Global Positioning Satellite technology to increase security efforts at the California State Fair.
This multi-agency operation is a collaboration among the California Exposition and State Fair Police, the DAPO, the Sacramento Police Department, and the California Highway Patrol to ensure that sex-offender parolees, and GPS-monitored gang members comply with their terms of parole.
"For the third year in a row we have successfully kept prohibited sex-offender parolees out of the State Fair," DAPO Director Robert Ambroselli said. "Our agents are out there to keep the public safe, and this operation is helping us accomplish that mission."
Using state-of-the-art technology, DAPO established an electronic exclusion zone to alert on-site parole agents if a GPS-monitored sex offender parolee breaches the perimeter to enter the State Fair grounds. Approximately 20 DAPO agents are involved in the operation to help patrol the grounds during the fair's 18-day run.
"The highest priority for the California Exposition & State Fair is to provide a safe and fun environment for our State Fair guests," Police Chief Robert L. Craft said. "This law enforcement teamwork helps discourage the presence of criminal elements that may come to the State Fair only to prey on the public."
To date, during the 2011 California State Fair operation, surveillance activities have resulted in one GPS sex offender arrest, two additional GPS sex-offender parolee contacts escorted from the fair, and three at-large parolees arrested after citizen contacts with parole agents. Parole agents have worked in concert with the California State Fair Police to assist in gang GPS surveillance, non-parolee arrests, and in providing aid to fair patrons.
In 2010, there were a total of four arrests during the fair's run. One of the arrests occurred when a Sacramento County sex offender was too close to the State Fair perimeter and triggered an alert. The other arrests were of out-of-county parolees restricted from accessing the fairgrounds.
During the 2009 operation, five sex offenders were arrested for non-compliance after trying to enter the fair. Approximately 35 sex offenders on parole were arrested during compliance checks at six fairs throughout California.
California's Parole Division utilizes GPS technology daily to track and monitor sex offenders on parole. CDCR's use of technology and its partnerships with local law enforcement helps to improve public safety throughout the state.
Currently, there are approximately 1,750 GPS-monitored sex offenders in the DAPO's Region I, which stretches from Siskiyou County to Kern County. Region I also includes approximately 80 GPS-monitored gang members.
For more information about CDCR Parole and the GPS program, please visit this link: http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/Parole/index.html

Another Case of Romero And Juliet Branded for Life

Sex Offenders: Does Frank Rodriguez Belong on That List?

Why Taking Pictures of Your Kids at Park is now a Crime

From: A Motion for Innocence http://amotionforinnocence.blogspot.com/

‘Suspicious Man Photographing Kids’ Just Guy Taking Pics of Grandson

Watch out, residents of Pocatello, Idaho! A "suspicious man" driving a "tan/brown van" was seen at the local park, "taking pictures of children." Is he a pedophile? A murderer? A Satanist sex perv? He "ran off" when confronted by parents!
"If anyone has information about this man," Local News 8 reported on Tuesday, "police would like them to call police dispatch." Well! Someone did have information: The man himself, who "was at the park taking pictures of his grandson." Also, the whole "ran off when confronted" thing?
The man also said that he did not run away, but simply walked away from a woman who had gotten very close to him and was yelling at him. Manning said police are no longer worried about the man and he is not suspicious.

This is how LocalNews8 originally reported the story.
Pocatello Police are warning people of a suspicious man spotted taking pictures of children at Ammon Park.
Police say parents spotted the man photographing their kids, and when they confronted him the man ran off.
He is described as an older white man with white hair and a beard. He was wearing a western-style button-down shirt and blue jeans and was driving a tan/brown van.
If anyone has information about this man, police would like them to call police dispatch at 234-6100.
And this is how they explained it afterward in the updated version.
Lt. Paul Manning said the man in question called in the Pocatello Police Department himself, saying he was at the park taking pictures of his grandson. The man also said that he did not run away, but simply walked away from a woman who had gotten very close to him and was yelling at him. Manning said police are no longer worried about the man and he is not suspicious.
The hysteria of adults photographing children in public has reached epidemic proportions.
Earlier this week, we reported on a New York man who was threatened by a mom's boyfriend, then warned by cops not to take photos of the woman's kid, even though it was never proven that he had taken photos of her kid.
And before that, a pair of photographers were told they were not allowed to photograph children swimming in the frog pond at Boston Common, which Boston Common later apologized for on its Facebook page.
And earlier this year, New Jersey lawmakers tried to pass a law that would have made it illegal to photograph children in public without parental consent.
Last year in the United Kingdom, a man was accused of pedophilia for photographing his son in a mall.
In 2008, a UK man was called a "pervert" for photographing his own kids in a park.
If parents are so worried about pedophiles, then they should look within their own families or circle of friends, not the stranger with the camera.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

No Miniature Golf for Me - INSANE!

   Well, my nephew decided to stay another week. Which is great! He's 13 years old and full of energy. Keeping me, my brother, and his mom's brother busy. My P.O. came over while he was staying with me and said, "Who's the kid?". Said he's my nephew and that was pretty much that. I do not have the parole condition that makes it a parole violation to be around kids. I do have the parole conditions that state I can not live within 2,000 feet of a school, park, ect.... and that I am not allowed to enter parks, schools, arcades, the beach, ect.... I know it sounds crazy. I have never in my life harmed a kid. Just another example of the insanity of CA's Jessica's Law. My brother and my nephew are at miniature golf right now. Had to drop them off because It's just another place I am banned from. Like I'm some kind of Leper or something. But of course, my nephew is going to spend the night. Just does not make a lick of sense to me. My nephew is 13 years old and I suggested to my sister's daughter that my nephew can take the train or bus home. She flipped a wig. Hell, me and my brother used to hitchhike to the beach all alone in the 1970's when we were 13 years old. She said these are different times and kids get hurt now-a-days. I told her It's a bunch of crap and the media's have parents terrified. Oh well, it's time to pick up my brother and nephew. I had to bow out of this fun or I'd be sent back to prison. Jessica's Law Sucks!

Dutch Vigilantes


Home

Dutch vigilantes follow the American way

Published on : 22 July 2011 - 2:31pm | By John Tyler

"Cockroach!" "Pervert!" "Paedophile!" More than 50 people have gathered outside a house in the middle of a quiet residential street. Some are yelling insults, some are peering through the living room window. A man with a megaphone whips up the crowd. "If the government can’t - or doesn’t want to - protect our children, then we have to do it ourselves."
That night, a window was smashed, red paint, tomatoes and ammonia were thrown into the house, and the word 'Paedophile' was spray-painted in red letters outside.

This feels familiar. In my native United States, public sentiment against paedophiles and sex offenders can take extreme forms. A federal law requiring sex offenders to be publically registered almost encourages people to take the law into their own hands. Rehabilitation is widely believed to be impossible, and fear drives a fierce desire to protect children from perceived ‘monsters’.
In Texas and Missouri, judges have sentenced sex offenders to post signs outside their houses saying: ‘Danger: registered sex offender lives here’. A new law in Florida requires sex offenders to wear a GPS tracking device for the rest of their lives, even after serving time in prison. And in all 50 states, the public has the right to know where sex offenders live.
Acceptance
Now this mindset is gaining ground here in the Netherlands. The scene described above took place last weekend in Hengelo, a city not far from the German border. But unlike similar scenes in the US, the crowd was not pursuing a convicted sex offender. The resident of the house says he has never had a sexual relationship with a minor. So why is he being harassed?
Thirty-nine-year-old Marthijn Uittenbogaard is the treasurer and public face of the paedophile association Martijn. For the last 29 years, the group has been trying  to gain acceptance for paedophilia in Dutch society.
Unacceptable ideasThe crowd outside his house is after him because of his ideas, which can be shocking. In a recent interview in the newspaper nrc.next, he said:
"Parents treat their children like they own them. But they really belong to everyone… These days, children are way too overprotected. They go to school, play a sport or some other activity - everything is very organised and distant. It makes a paedophile relationship totally impossible."
Mr Uittenbogaard thinks all laws limiting sexuality should be abolished, and that children should be able to be sexual with anyone at any age. Needless to say, his ideas and those of his association have not been accepted by mainstream society.
Hardening attitudes
In its early years, paedophile organisation Martijn had some success in winning social acceptance. Prominent writers, politicians and other public figures openly supported paedophilia. A few prominent figures even admitted to being paedophiles. Justice Minister Korthals Altes submitted a law proposing to lower the age of sexual consent from 16 down to 12 years old. It didn’t pass.
Times have changed, and the organisation is now under fire. The Justice Department may be forced to bring charges against Martijn after it was revealed that eight current or former administrative officers had criminal records involving sex offences. The current chairman is in jail on charges of possession of child pornography.
Other developments have hardened the attitudes of an already sceptical Dutch public against the arguments for paedophilia. Revelations of widespread sexual abuse in the Catholic Church have angered many. So too has the case in Amsterdam in which at least 87 very young children were sexually abused by a day care employee and his life partner.
Rough justice
So now private citizens are increasingly taking matters into their own hands. In addition to the constant barrage of insults and threats directed at Mr Uitenbogaard in Hengelo, another member of Martijn was driven from his home in the northern province of Friesland. And a writer who merely supported Martijn’s right to free speech has also had the windows of his house smashed and ‘Paedophile’ painted on his front door in red letters.
That this country has not embraced Martijn’s view of the world is understandable. But the question is whether the Netherlands really wants to embrace the American example when it comes to vigilante justice.

A Letter from CA Prisoner Hunger Striker

Solitary Watch  http://solitarywatch.com/

The following letter was sent by a hunger striker at California Correctional Institution (CCI) Tehachapi, one of three state prison containing an all-solitary Security Housing Unit (SHU). The letter was written by an SHU inmate to his girlfriend, who forwarded it to Solitary Watch for publication. It is dated July 21, after the writer had been refusing food for three weeks.
I am glad the word is out, I’m just saddened that I don’t see anything on the news of our struggle. As far as we last heard it’s been like 12 prisons that are involved. Here there are a lot of people on strike — all races, Pelican Bay and Corcoran for sure.
As far as commissary, that’s a negative. It is CDC policy to search our cells and remove all store when hunger strikes begin, and they did so here.
All they do is weigh us and take our vitals (blood pressure, temp., and heart rate), but of course they weigh us in chains to weigh us down and they allow the c/o’s to operate the scale. I am at 171 on my last weigh-in, down from 185. They attempt to take my blood, which I refuse; I’m weak as it is, if I do that I’ll fall out.
They truly don’t care and they are perfectly content in watching us pass rather than admit fault and make changes to a policy that is brutal and baseless. I can’t take my medication anymore because I have to take it with food… I asked for help and they just ignored me.
They also took my shoes when I got here and my feet hurt. [*He had only been at CCI 2 weeks before the strike started, and he was never given any shoes!]
Help get the truth out there. I pray some attorneys get involved. Let them know the CDC is without truth and will lie to keep this issue from ever getting coverage. I am here validated for no actual action. This policy of validating people for no reason robs us of our lives, so we are on a hunger strike in which we could pass because in this environment we’ve already passed. This is not a life.
I have no food and no meds (that I can take). All they do is weigh me. They don’t treat us (example; Ensure, Gatorade, nutrients of some
sort). Nothing.
So I remain strong in the hopes that change will come. I get sad when I watch the news and they talk about stuff with no meaning and ignore us. I am an American citizen and when enemy combatants in Guantanamo Bay had a strike they covered it, all networks, beginning to end, but we are just forgotten.
Contact all media networks and let them know this is a peaceful protest and we have been given no other option for relief rather than to hunger strike in the hopes that someone, ANYONE, will care enough to step in and help us.
One might think that us as prisoners must be held under duress and extreme conditions in order to refuse the most basic necessity; food. I
choose to remain on strike for I have been robbed of my life, my ability to be a father to my son, a son to my parents, a lover to my love, a friend to friends, and to experience life in the minimum of its meaning.
I was sentenced to life in prison at 18 for an action I committed, but now I am validated for no actual action committed by me. And I’ll be held here in the SHU until I die or debrief. Just imagine if anyone out there could be put in jail just for someone’s accusation. It’s unheard of. But in here its common practice for we are forgotten. We are the tragic aftermath of an angry committee.
Some believe we don’t deserve common decency or compassion because we didn’t show any when we committed our crime. To those people I say, in life wrongs are committed. I don’t justify anything. But this country was founded on mass genocide and yet that is forgotten.
Now that civil rights have passed the oppression that must be has moved behind these walls of the new “concrete slave ship.”
I am only a man who prays that I will be judged by my actions and my disciplinary file, not by the words of faceless informants and a confidential file that I can’t see. We must defend ourselves against the unknown. It’s literally impossible.
My feet still walk the trail of tears. I am in my soul still a believer in justice and the good in people. I believe if society really knew what happened in here they’d be appalled.

The Bay Area and GPS for RSO's

If you live in The Bay Areaand what to know about GPS Tracking Devices for RSO's on parole, check out this site  http://informant.kalwnews.org/tag/gps/

Cops, courts and communities in the Bay Area.

 ABOUT THIS SITE

In recent years, San Francisco and Oakland have played host to public safety tragedies that have stoked local controversy and national attention. Often lost in the frenzy are the voices of those trying to chart a better future for our community. The Informant - a product of KALW News in San Francisco - will chronicle this battle for a safer Bay Area. Led by reporters Rina Palta and Ali Winston, we'll go deep into cops, courts and communities, giving you informed, intelligent, community-oriented news, conversation and analysis.

Friday, July 22, 2011

CA Prisoner Hunger Strikes Ends ?

California Prisoners End Hunger Strike

Care2.com (blog) - ‎12 hours ago‎
by Judy M. Prison officials announced Thursday that California inmates have ended the hunger strike that began three weeks ago at Pelican Bay State Prison in Del Norte County, near the California/Oregon border, as Care2′s Amelia Thomson DeVeaux ...

Dept of Corrections Says Hunger Strike at Pelican Bay Prison Over

KQED (blog) - Jon Brooks - ‎Jul 21, 2011‎
SACRAMENTO – Today, Matthew Cate, Secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), announced that inmates at Pelican Bay State Prison have ended their hunger strike. “Hunger strikes are a dangerous and ineffective way ...

Pelican Bay inmates said to end hunger strike

San Francisco Chronicle - Kevin Fagan, Henry K. Lee - ‎11 hours ago‎
SAN FRANCISCO -- Inmates have ended a three-week hunger strike in the high-security Pelican Bay State Prison in Del Norte County to protest conditions in isolation units at the facility and what they said were oppressive gang-security measures by ...

California: Hunger Strike Has Ended, State Says

New York Times - Ian Lovett - ‎13 hours ago‎
Inmates at Pelican Bay State Prison have ended their hunger strike, which began July 1, the State Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said Thursday. But a coalition of advocates supporting the hunger strikers said the ...

CA's Overcrowded Prisons

PBS Newshour

REPORT    AIR DATE: July 15, 2011

Calif. Faces Tough Choices on Overcrowded Prisons

SUMMARY

Spencer Michels reports from California on the state's effort to comply with a Supreme Court ruling to alleviate overcrowding in the state's prisons.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Democacy Now! on CA Prisoner Hunger Strike

Protests Grow in Solidarity with California Prisoners as Hunger Strikes Enter Third Week
by Democracy Now! 


Thousands of inmates in at least 13 prisons across California’s troubled prison system have been on hunger strike for almost two weeks. Many are protesting in solidarity with inmates held in Pelican Bay State Prison, California’s first super-maximum security prison, over what prisoners say are cruel and unusual conditions in "Secure Housing Units."
We play an audio statement from one of the Pelican Bay prisoners and speak to three guests: Dorsey Nunn, co-founder of "All of Us or None" and executive director of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, and one of the mediators between the prisoners on hunger strike and the California Department of Corrections; Molly Porzig, a member of the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity coalition and a spokesperson for Critical Resistance; and Desiree Lozoya, the niece of an inmate participating in the Pelican Bay Hunger Strike, who visited him last weekend.
Guests: Molly Porzig, a member of the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity coalition and a spokesperson for Critical Resistance.
Dorsey Nunn, co-founder of "All of Us or None." He is also the executive director of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children. Nunn was incarcerated from 1971 to 1982 in San Quentin Prison in California. He is one of the mediators between the prisoners on hunger strike and the California Department of Corrections.
Desiree Lozoya, is the niece of an inmate participating in the Pelican Bay hunger strike.
[includes rush transcript]

CA's Prison Guard Union

Police have a prominent role in society – the good, the bad, and the sometimes ugly. And one group of law enforcement officers also have a lot of political sway.
From Jerry Brown’s successful campaign for governor, to California’s Three Strikes Law, to the state’s Proposition 9, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) are a powerful lobbying group. They’re also known as the “prison guards union.” In 2010 alone, they spent over $1 million in lobbying political parties.
For more on the prison guards’ union, KALW’s criminal justice editor Rina Palta joined Hana Baba in the studio.
*     *     *
HANA BABA: Welcome, Rina.
RINA PALTA: Hi, Hana.
BABA: So, we’re talking about the correctional officers’ union, which is known as one of the most dominant political forces in the state. Where does this reputation come from?
PALTA: The CCPOA has really been a political powerhouse in the state for a long time. Part of the reason is they’re relatively large. The prison system is a big employer in the state, and working as a correctional officer requires you to join the union, so they’ve got something like 30,000 members. They’ve also had some very key victories in the political sphere. The union has been very successful in helping state politicians get elected – like Jerry Brown, former Governor Gray Davis, former State Senator John Burton. They’ve gotten ballot initiatives passed, like California’s Three Strikes Law and Marcy’s Law, which is also known as the Victims’ Bill of Rights. It’s hard to name all the campaigns the union has given money to, because the list just goes on and on. This is a group that’s considered essentially omnipotent in state politics.
BABA: How did they get to this point of being so powerful?
PALTA: They’re very politically savvy. The union, unlike many unions, has spread out their money among Democrats and Republicans. They’ve also managed to demonstrate that they actually make a difference in elections. University of Minnesota Assistant Professor Joshua Page recently published a book about the union and its history. I spoke with Page recently, and here’s what he had to say about how the union built its power.
JOSHUA PAGE: So what they would do is they would selectively go put a lot of money into, say, defeating a legislator. Which would spread the message for other political people, maybe aspiring politicians, that if you go against the union’s interests or what it was supporting, there was the potential that they would come after you or take you out electorally.
PALTA: And that way, Page says, they developed a reputation that’s actually bigger and grander than perhaps the power they actually have.
PAGE: I call this the specter of the CCPOA. And so they skillfully created this really powerful image to where, even if they weren’t behind things, or influencing, there was the perception that they were. And this had a real value to them, because just the threat that they’d oppose someone for office, for a warden or a ballot initiative, could be enough to make others change their behavior.
BABA: I’m wondering how the union is dealing with what many are calling a “prison crisis” in California. The Supreme Court has ordered the state to reduce its prison population. People are starting to get frustrated with the $10 billion-plus prison budget and public employee contracts. How is the union dealing with all of that?
PALTA: I ran that very question by JeVaugh Baker, a spokesman for CCPOA. I asked Baker to describe the union’s top priorities and here’s what he said.
JEVAUGH BAKER: I think that right now we have a system that rehabilitates in name only, and that’s something that the association would like to take a look at.
PALTA: Now, that’s not what you might have heard from the CCPOA a decade ago. It’s definitely a change in their rhetoric. These days, the CCPOA’s talking about rehabilitation programs, they’re talking about tackling prison overcrowding, they’re talking about reforming the system. There’s relatively little tough-on-crime talk coming out of the union leadership lately.
BABA: So is the union turning their political clout in a new direction?
PALTA: Well, the CCPOA has a sibling organization called Crime Victims United of California. Take a listen to an ad produced by them recently, and you’ll hear that they haven’t changed their tune at all.
NINA SALARNO-ASHFORD (from CVUC ad): Governor! Your parole policies are dangerous. Three officers killed by felons on parole since you took office. Thousands of parole violators left on the street…
PALTA: That’s Nina Salarno-Ashford in an ad produced by Crime Victims United of California, a victims rights group that pushes highly punitive policies in the name of serving victims of crime. Crime Victims United is a powerful political force in the state. And what Joshua Page does in his book is make a clear connection between this group and the CCPOA, which he says essentially helped build, fund, and sustain this political action group. And the CCPOA continues to support this group. Page says that while the CCPOA is talking reform, they have this other group, Crime Victims United, out there lobbying in Sacramento against reform.
PAGE: They still finance this victims’ rights group, Crime Victims United – which is the most influential crime victims’ group in the state, if not the country – that’s incredibly punitive and opposes all efforts to shorten or reduce prison sentences and parole terms. As long as the union is financing this group, basically giving it the tools to do what it can, this reform rhetoric ring hollow.
PALTA: So it’s hard to say where the union’s heart is. They seem to want some reform; they want less crowded, safer working conditions for their employees. But when it comes to changing sentencing laws, or really reforming the system, it’s still a mixed bag.
Joshua Page is the author of The Toughest Beat, a new book about the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. Rina Palta is KALW’s criminal justice editor. For more on the CCPOA and prison politics, visit our blog, The Informant.

Kids Horseplay = RSO for Life

2 N.J. teens labeled sex offenders for life after 'horseplay' incident

Published: Wednesday, July 20, 2011, 8:30 AM   
Judge-Victor-Ashrafi.JPGJudge Victor Ashrafi, pictured in this file photo from 2004, is one of the three New Jersey appeals court judges who ruled that two young teenagers must register as sex offenders under Megan's Law for an incident the teens described as "horseplay."
SOMERSET COUNTY — Call it bullying or call it horseplay. Either way, a state appellate court panel says roughhousing with a sexual connotation by a pair of 14-year-old Somerset County boys was a crime that requires them to register as sex offenders for the rest of their lives.
In a decision handed down Monday, the three-judge panel acknowledged the severity of its decision, but said it was bound to uphold the law.
"We are keenly aware that our decision may have profound lifelong ramifications for these two boys as well as others similarly situated," Judge Jose Fuentes wrote.
One of the boys, whose case went to trial, said he had sat on the faces of a pair of 12-year-old schoolmates with his bare buttocks in November 2008 "cause I thought it was funny and I was trying to get my friends to laugh," he told a family court judge.
But an act is considered criminal sexual contact if it is done for sexual gratification or to degrade or humiliate the victim, and punishable by lifetime registration — even for juveniles — under Megan’s Law, which requires a person convicted of a sex crime against a child to notify police of changes of address or employment.
The trial judge concluded the teenager intended to humiliate or degrade his victims and found him guilty of criminal sexual contact. The second teenager who was implicated pleaded guilty to criminal sexual contact, and received the same penalty.

A False Sense of Security

A false sense of security

Wednesday, July 20, 2011
By JOE PHALON
COLUMNIST

I would like to propose "Joe's Law." Actually it's self-extinguishing law, because Joe's Law would mandate that there be no more laws named after people.
The latest example is "Caylee's Law."
No one was more thunderstruck than I when the not-guilty verdict came down from the jury. The mob that staked out the courthouse for weeks called for the head of Casey Anthony, the mother accused in the death of her daughter Caylee. Failing that, they wanted a pound of flesh from the jury.
As likely as it is that a guilty person is walking free in this incident, the jury made the right call. The evidence presented to them clearly did not meet the guilty by a reasonable doubt threshold. Just as with O.J. Simpson in the 1990s, the jury felt that the prosecution did not prove its case.
It's easy to blame a jury when the prosecutors present a case with weak. As with Casey Anthony, it appears more than a few of her jurors "knew" she was guilty, but they wanted proof, and there was none. For Caylee, it may have been a lack of justice, but it would be wrong to call this a travesty of justice.
Within hours, Caylee's Law was proposed, which would require that missing children be reported within a defined time period. It make sense on the surface, but those requirements may not always be realistic.
Laws named after people are usually a bad idea. They are also understandable. But more often than not, such proposals are an emotional and visceral reaction to a horrible event, especially when a child is involved.
"Megan's Law" was probably the first and best known of the recent wave of eponymous laws. Born of frustration and anger that a convicted high-risk sex offender lived in under the radar in a residential area and then raped and murder a neighborhood child, it became the model for similar laws across the country, and a blueprint for laws that also originated with a horrific incident.
Because of its high profile, Megan's Law was subject to much legal scrutiny and emerged largely passing Constitutional muster. The lynch mobs that were predicted did not materialize. But there were some unintended consequences.
The law requires that a person found to have trafficked in child pornography be placed on the list. Last year in Passaic County prosecutors seemed to have no choice but to prosecute under Megan's Law a teenage girl who sent inappropriate photos she took of herself via her cell phone.
Really dumb thing for this girl to do? Of course. A crime on the level sexual assault? Hardly. And fortunately cooler heads prevailed.
And cooler heads should prevail in this case. Already a New Jersey version of Caylee's Law has been proposed. It's hard to say no to a law passed in response to a tragedy, but ramming through legislation without seriously thinking it through can have unexpected complications.
And too often they turn out to be "feel-good" laws, that in the end accomplish little. A false sense of security is as bad as no security.
E-mail: joe@jphalon.com.

National Catholic Reporter on RSO's

Reflections upon reflections on sex offenders


I really appreciate the thoughtful responses to my essay about Arthur. That brief bit took me about three weeks to write and I am grateful that you have read it so carefully. Your cautions to me about Arthur’s life as well as your recognition of his lack of opportunities and of his story in others you know are all important elements of the conversation.
In Missouri today there are 13,000 persons on the sex offender Internet list. They cannot live within 1,000 feet of schools, day care centers and parks. They must register quarterly and on their birthday, taking time off work to do this. Their work places are listed on the registry, making many employers reluctant to hire them and be listed on the Internet themselves.
Additionally, almost 700 persons are held in civil commitment. They served their full sentences and then they were taken to court by a team of prosecutors who only do this work. They have been adjudicated as a threat to public safety and they receive therapy and remain confined. I think three have been released since the program was begun some years ago.
And I have no clear idea how many are serving time in prison or waiting in jail for their trials. At least a thousand.
It is too many people. My common sense tells me something is wrong.
I too feel uneasy because I don’t understand some of my own sexual impulses and I know plenty of people with low impulse control and little self-insight. There is reason to be cautious. But I do not believe there are 15,000 dangerous sex offenders in Missouri.
A few of the people on the list urinated in a back alley, were caught on a surveillance video and charged with exposing themselves by a zealous prosecutor. Another small number had sex in a public place. That used to be a disturbing-the-peace misdemeanor; it is bad taste, not a threat to public safety. I know that a former prostitute, now in her 80s, is on the public registry. Some are Romeos, reported by the angry parents of their girlfriends. More troubling are incest and child pornography cases.
I suspect many are like Arthur, victims themselves as well as convicted offenders, living in the margins of society.
And finally there are the convicted predators: rapists, child molesters, kidnappers. Even there, I interviewed an inmate who had raped three women when he had gone on a robbery spree at age 14, invited by some older men and high on drugs. He served 30 years in prison before he was paroled. He is on the lifetime registry.
But the question is how to protect society without cruelly denying opportunity to thousands who have been swept up in the frenzy of titillating fear of sex offenders. I’m reminded of the witch hunts of 300 years ago.
For us Catholics, priest pedophiles have shaken us to the core. Our bishops failed to protect our children. And they are not giving us pastoral leadership now. So we are left to talk among ourselves. It is a tough topic that has been thrust upon us. And again, I am grateful for your thoughtful shared reflections.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Nephew to Stay With Me 4 a Week

   My nephew is going to be staying with me, my brother, and his mom's brother for a week. He'll be bouncing back and forth. I'm really excited. Haven't seen him since I went on the run in 2006 after Jessica's Law was passed by voters in California and then was sentenced to 4 years in prison for refusing to register. He's 13 years old and a really good kid. Gets good grades, is in the band , and plays football. As a matter of fact, right after this I'm taking him to some sporting goods shops to get a pair of football cleats. My brother and me are splitting the cost. I should be taking him to California's Great America or Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk (I loved those places as a kid in the 60's and 70's), but of course I'm banned from them now. I guess I could take him miniature golfing. Oh that's right, I'm banned from there too. Maybe Chuckie Cheese for some pizza and games? Nope - Banned. We could just go to a park and throw a football or Frisbee around. No that wouldn't work, I'd be arrested in record time. I've never harmed a kid in my life! Why the hell can't I go and have a good time like Uncle's and Nephew's are supposed to have? It's pure insanity! Since I was falsely accused in 1985 by a deranged, serial false accuser who accused me for a million dollar lawsuit I have never been accused of anything weird before or since. Oh well, what can I do. My brother and my other nephew can take him places I can't go. I'm glad my nephew came down. We're going to have fun!!! Screw Jessica's Law!!!