Too many tears in the good-on-paper Jessica's Law
Thank you so much for the editorial "Murphy's Law: Bad legislation comes back to haunt the author" (July 6, Page A-7). Jessica's Law is one of those feel-good laws that looks good on paper, but those of us who provide treatment realize it makes absolutely no sense.
For instance, Jessica's Law says that sex offenders cannot live within 2,000 feet of a school or a park, which means they cannot spend the night there, however, they can be there during the day. When are children in parks and schools?
Another issue related to Jessica's Law is rather than having offenders in treatment, ankle bracelets were placed on all parolees at the cost of $1,500 per unit, plus $150 per month monitoring fee, which squandered all the treatment funds. The problem with placing ankle bracelets on child molesters is that they do not go off when they are around a child. Given that 90 percent of molestations happen at home, all we will know is that the offender was home, but not that they are with or around a child.
In fact, there was a case in Washington where a sex offender murdered a 13-year-old girl while wearing an ankle bracelet. The probation officer's response was "we knew where he was, we did not know that he was with a child, or that he was murdering a child at the time."
In contrast, over the 30 years we have been providing treatment for sex offenders, we have a less than 1 percent reoffense rate among our offenders. For the very same amount of money the offenders could be in treatment rather than on an ankle bracelet.
The analogy would be something along the lines of if you had cancer and both treatments were the same cost, would you rather have the treatment where you have a 99 percent chance of the cancer going into remission or have the treatment that will simply tell you that the cancer is spreading?
The new blunder on the horizon is that offenders will have to take lie detector tests twice a year to monitor their treatment. In some instances it can be very helpful. Unfortunately, research has shown unless the lie detector administrator is very talented, the sex offender can pass the test. That means the treatment providers would be getting a false positive indicating that this person is absolutely honest and is not thinking about children or in any way going to act out again, which gives the offender a free pass to reoffend.
It is about time that we started talking to the people who have worked in the field over the past 30 years and look at what the research shows us is effective for sex offender treatment rather than doing knee-jerk, feel-good legislation which does not protect our children.
Again, thank you for your editorial that is starting to expose this ineffective use of government funds.
Johnson is clinical coordinator and owner of Child Sexual Abuse Treatment Services and sponsor of Parents United of Stanislaus Inc.
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