Who Is a Sex Offender?
You are not going to like this article. In fact, unless you are on the sex offender list or someone you care about is being forced to live with this stigma, chances are that you have almost no sympathy for those who have been found guilty of sex crimes. I would like to ask you to think about these people with an open mind. As the father of a daughter, I can tell you that I regularly checked the sex offender web sites to know which of my neighbors to worry about and I have read news articles about child abductions and rape and have felt the rush of adrenaline that would have led me to volunteer to be their executioner. That being said, I am aware that virtually all perpetrators were also victims as children but, clearly, the majority of victims do not grow up to be perpetrators. There is an ethical conversation to be had about pedophiles but that is not the point of this article.
The justice system is built to do, in a predictable and comprehensive way, what every Catholic priest does in a confessional, which is to make some discernment among sins. Someone who abducts and rapes a child is not the same as someone who exposes himself in public by urinating in a city park though you would be surprised by how often prosecutors try to convince judges to sentence the drunk frat boy in the park the same way that they sentence the pedophile who abducted and raped a child.
This morning I sat in a Federal courtroom with a large family as they watched their 29-year-old son face sentencing. “Paul” had been found guilty of having child pornography on his home computer and of having reposted some of it on a web based porn sharing site. He never had sexual contact with a child. He never produced child pornography; never bought any, or sold any. To outward appearances, he is a good guy. Paul is handsome, college educated, athletic, popular, and hard working. His immigrant parents and their large network of family and work associates all love him and have always thought well of him. What they did not know is that from the age of 12 he was watching porn on his computer. His parents didn’t know and his childhood curiosity did not recognize boundaries. So he watched videos and looked at pictures and felt sexually aroused by them though he never acted out the scenes he watched.
I have known men and women in business and a couple of my peers in ministry who had a porn addiction. None of them were rapists but it is also true that none of them were casual consumers of porn. The two pastors I know who were fired for having pornographic images on their church computers didn’t have a few dozen or even a few hundred pictures. They had thousands. In one case, he had tens of thousands of very explicit pornographic photos that might even make our new president’s wife blush.
Most addictions are expressions of an obsessive-compulsive behavior. Smokers rarely smoke once or twice a month. If that level of tobacco use were common, we would never talk about it. But someone who has an addiction is likely to act on that addiction daily, sometimes several times a day. A pornography addiction becomes, to the consumer, as casually and episodically a part of their day as smoking is for most nicotine addicts.
That level of consumption of pornography is going to be a problem for anyone, whether you are a priest or a bartender but if the porn involves children, it ceases to be simply a personal problem. Children cannot, in any way, be consenting to their exploitation. The demand, and the demand is epidemic, fuels the creation of more and more child pornography, which obviously means that more and more children are being irreparably harmed.
So, while owning and sharing child pornography is definitely a crime, it hardly seems to be comparable to child rape or to being a producer of kiddie porn. Like most men, I like to watch “action films” but no matter how many times I see the character, John Wick, shoot fifty to a hundred people in a 90 minute movie, I am not the slightest inclined to shoot anyone or to even buy a gun or associate with people who do own guns. Maybe I shouldn’t watch these movies and I am sure that many people who are more sensitive to the violence in our culture would say with certainty that guys like me shouldn’t watch action movies but you cannot say that we are anything like the people who go into a movie theater and shoot the patrons.
There are no “if’s” or “maybe’s” when it comes to child pornography. It is illegal to own it and it is morally reprehensible. It is bad for the people who get addicted to it and it is a million times worse for the victims who are coerced into producing it.
When Paul walked into the courtroom this morning he had already pled guilty and spent more than a year in a state prison. When he walked in front of the Federal judge to be sentenced, well, you decide, what should society demand of Paul? Should he be sentenced to a decade on parole and be restricted from ever owning a computer or being allowed to work around children? A lifetime on the sex offender list goes without saying; that will happen. But is society served by keeping this young man in a federal prison for more time?
Since he has shown no proclivity for actually becoming a pedophile and he can immediately return to work, contributing meaningfully to society as well as paying taxes, what advantage would we gain by spending $40,000 of tax money to keep in jail another year?
The prosecuting attorney asked for a sentence of fifteen years. The defense attorney asked for five years. The judge split the difference and sentenced Paul to eight years in prison. He will get credit for the year he has been in a state prison. He can get a year shaved off of his sentence by taking classes that amount to psychological treatment. This young man will be 35 years old before he will be out of prison and you and I will spend a quarter of a million dollars keeping him from working, preventing him from having contact with his family or starting a family of his own.
It a country that already has a virtual nation-within-a-nation in prison, over a million people being kept at tax-payer expense against their will for non-violent crimes, how can we keep adding people to our overcrowded prisons when locking them away is not a matter of reforming them, it is a matter of some kind of social revenge, a revenge that also punishes everyone who cares for him while it robs society of his contributions? Sadly, most of the victims of our out-of-control justice system that throws away human lives the way most of us toss out old newspapers and magazines, do not have family and friends who can make their unjust plight visible in the media. They suffer silently at the margins of society.
I’m writing about Paul because I know him. I know his family. I know how wrong this is and I am trying to make this story known in a society that has demonstrated repeatedly that this is one arena of crime for which it has almost no compassion. I’m just asking you to try to overcome your own prejudices so that you can care about a grave injustice even if it does not affect you personally.
Response to the article:
What decent human being with a heart, some life wisdom, and intelligence would disagree with the obvious point that the author is making?
Unfortunately, in America there has been a big shift in attitude towards “Hate your neighbor/fellow citizen” rather than “we are all brothers and sisters united as one” (you know, how every other country tends to view their fellow peers). Instead of putting ourselves into a situation, we immediately want to kill/castrate and ‘cheer on’ the death of an individual that was locked up in jail, regardless of the reason. It’s sickening, and unfortunately is happening much more often. The hatred between the Democrats and Republicans is a great media example of that these days.
In the comments section, I am not surprised to find most individuals using their hearts/emotions instead of their brains/intelligence. The remaining few people that aren’t jumping to emotionally-charged conclusions are hesitant about speaking up and agreeing with the author.
Let me ask you all this:
At what age did you learn that looking/possessing any pictures makes you a consumer that feeds a market? How old and what grade were you in?
Did you PAY for those pictures?
Did you reward the source in some non-monetary way that will signify that you are exchanging one thing for another? (you know, an actual ‘Marketplace’ because that is HOW markets work).
So how on Earth are you going to know, inherently (like you know that theft and violence is bad) that merely POSESSING a picture creates a ‘marketplace’ that hurts people?
So why are you expecting young adults to inherently just KNOW that they are ‘consumers’ in a ‘market’? These are the SAME so-called consumers that inherently know that Theft, Violence and Rape is bad, keep that in mind.. you know, these are often productive members of society that are good people without long criminal rap sheets. So you want these decent people, that generally understand Right from Wrong, to somehow know that they are causing so much harm by possessing images? They should JUST know this? They should know it’s a Criminal Felony with serious time and sex offender registration simply because it is made illegal just like many things are illegal in this country?
Did you know that collecting rainwater is a Felony too? Do you believe people that do it are intentionally wanting to commit a horrible crime?
You’re expecting people to just be born with this twisted logic?
Let’s be very honest with ourselves:
‘Children’ does not mean prepubescent little kids. It means anyone under age 18. Keep in mind the age of consent in some states has been as low as 14-15. So not ALL viewers were looking for little kids online. They could have easily been looking at legal ‘teen porn’ and then pushed their boundaries out of sheer human curiosity as well as just lack of education (which is non-existent on this topic in schools, unlike drug education that is mandatory).
Should we CASTRATE these people and hang them now? Let’s throw them in prison for years and take them away from their families, yes?
Many times, these people are forced to pay thousands or tens of thousands of dollars as compensation to the victim in one of the possessed images, yet this person has never even met or knew the victim or even thought of them as a ‘victim’. Is that not enough of a punishment to teach someone a lesson for a first offense?
Should we take years of their life away and punish their families too?
How about we place them all on GPS monitoring without any evidence of them being a threat to actual children? Let’s prohibit from traveling out of state for seeing their family, friends, for work. Let’s place a stigma on them because their GPS device will not allow them into some adult establishments now. It will also create an issue for their personal relationships and dating life because most humans associate GPS monitoring with ‘the worst of the worst’, because that only make sense. Try explaining to the average citizen why a GPS monitoring device should be placed on someone that had committed a non-contact offense on their computer. Good luck.
Do you know that pornography DE-SENSITIZES viewers as it rewires their brains? Do you realize that means that those viewers were not even looking at those images and looking at the ‘Under age 18 minors’ the same way as they view them in real life? Desensitization causes viewers to look at porn and not consider it as being ‘Reality’.
Can you imagine that someone that was charged with such a underage porn offense can still look at anyone underage age 18 and not think of them as a sex object, or even giving two thoughts about it aside from the innocent kids that these people are?
Does looking at images of the poor souls losing their lives due to terrorist acts directly create a demand and ‘market’ for terrorism? Yes, we are just talking about the mere Viewing of images that one may possess. Or does terrorism work based on possibly other mechanisms that are not related to merely looking at images of the said acts?
Are you aware that so many of these Underage Porn charges are based on people simply leaving their music/books/movie downloading programs running? They were downloading porn and some happened to be underage, and while this download happened, a State Police trooper could download this file from the individual now, because by default, whatever you download is automatically being made available to others, even without your consent or any proactive steps taken by you. Do you know this person will now be labeled as an underage porn distributor? Is that the type of person you think of when you imagine someone being charged with underage porn distribution?
Have you considered the reality that the ‘producer’ of the underage porn could be an adult or could be an underage minor that was just stupid enough to leave these files in their Documents folder that was inevitably shared? Or that they are not making the videos for others as a reward mechanism?
Have you considered that the person who is in possession of these images may have no idea, or could care less about who is connecting to their file program and downloading any media files from their computer?
Have you considered that without any PRO-ACTIVE steps taken by the possessor of the files, without any Communications with another individual, without any ‘status’ reward, without any MONETARY compensation at all, that this person will now be charged with distributing child pornography?
Do you finally understand how mis-understood such laws are because the crimes are not inherently classified as ‘criminal’ in our brains such as violence, theft and rape is?
So let me ask you this now:
WHY are we punishing people as if they committed heinous crimes?
If a person TRULY and pro-actively distributed underage porn for some clear reward or compensation, yes this should be a felony. THIS can be applied to the ‘creating a Marketplace’ argument.
However, to claim that everyone who possessed underage porn KNOWINGLY created a marketplace and victims, is absurd and goes beyond any human logic.
How can you commit a serious heinous crime without KNOWING inherently that is it a horrible crime?
Drugs, Violence, Theft. These are things we have INHERENTLY learned are bad and to avoid.
Possession of digital files was NEVER explained to anyone in school as to what harm it is causing.
So please stop passing out of control Laws that punish people as if they all knowingly committed a heinous crime! On top of that, you go on to place these public on a Sex Registry alongside serial rapists and child molesters. So that is what makes intelligent human beings feel safer with common sense feel safer?
You are punishing people that have had no scientifically established LINK to hands-on offenses. The one study of 155 individuals well over a decade ago that tried to be used for pushing harsher punishments was DE-BUNKED. There is absolutely NO statistical evidence showing a clear link of someone who had come in contact with underage porn that had gone on to commit any hands-on offenses. To the contrary, there was a large study done of two countries which showed quite the opposite link, that digital porn resulted in lower hands-on child offenses. This infamous study is cited in numerous articles online.
Let me be very clear:
No human being should ever KNOWINGLY support child abuse, child exploitation, or human trafficking!
But for anyone to try to ever present a fact-less, baseless, emotionally-driven argument that every underage porn possessor partakers in the above 3 horrible crimes, is Absurd, Un-American, Overzealous and just filled with hatred and zero understanding or compassion for people’s mistakes. The people that make this false link should be ashamed of themselves.
We the citizens and especially Politicians should not be setting the laws on punishment, as WE are not in the courtrooms hearing every single detail of these cases. Only a Judge should be allowed use their sole discretion to decide the appropriate punishment (sentence, probation, if GPS monitoring is needed, etc) based on a CASE-BY-CASE basis.
Now THAT is the right thing to do, for starters.
Instead of wasting money by throwing non-production, non-contact convicted citizens in jail, we should use some Common Sense: Invest in educating children from a young age on how to watch out for abuse, exploitation and also learn how serious underage pornography is as far as the effects it will have on them.
What we should NOT do is waste time treating these people like an immediate threat to society.
We do Not and should Not seriously punish people for crimes that we THINK they may commit. That is not how criminal justice works on this planet.
This man should have been placed on probation for 3 Years, monitoring of his online activities and gone through a sex rehabilitation and education program. Why was he being charged with a felony while someone who violently puts their hands on another human being is simply charged with a Misdemeanor? How does this make any sense?
These non-contact underage porn crimes are a mental health issue. Let’s stop treating them as if they are the same as Rape, Child molestation and other heinous acts. That is doing a disservice to our entire criminal justice system, the public and humanity.
ALL sex offenders, every type, have a recidivism rate amount 5.3% in the USA according to recent studies. This average includes the ‘worst of the worst’. Let’s stop referring to everyone in this category as a violent, malicious, heinous monster. This is not what America or the world needs. We should be leading by Example by creating laws that are based on facts, statistics, and empirical evidence, not just our emotions.
Thank you for your time in reading this. We can only hope that now people can look at this topic in a less biased, one-sided way.
Great article and follow up comment as well,
It’s crazy how someone like myself can be trapped in a crime like this. People just don’t understand how innocent peoples lives are ruined!!
I was 34 and was set up by a 17 year old girl who sent a email to my business email that contained 2 photos of her, 1 topless and 1 in underwear. This girl was a friend of my daughters and me and my family had no clue she had became attached to me. And she was a troubled child her mom had committed suicide when she was young and her real dad was a drunk. Me and my wife and daughter did everything for this girl and one day I went to her aunt who she was living with and told her some things I had found out through my daughter that this girl was doing skipping school etc. needless to say the very next week I received this blank subject email and as soon as I opened it I deleted it and asked the girl why she sent it her response was it was a accident it was suppose to go to her boyfriend. I told my wife about it we both agreed just let it go delete the email and move on.. well 3 months later the police show up at my house and confiscated all electronics in my house. And of course they saw the deleted email with forensics. When questioned I explained what happened and they saw the day I recieved it and the fact I deleted it.. but the problem was this girls uncle was a retired police officer and he was her current guardian and decided he and the crooked state attorney were gonna make a example out of me. The judge didn’t want the case he knew it was bs. The assigned a new judge I had multiple prosecutors because none of them wanted to charge me with the crime/ they all wanted to lower the charge and plead out to get it over. But the former cop and state attorney were not gonna alloy it.. I was forced into taking a plea because I was told a jury always takes the child’s side. I was told if I took it to trial and lost I would get 15 years in prison. So they offered me a plea of 18 months my family said take it so I could get home. I could not bond out because they hit me with a 250000 bond what a joke for a first time offender/ family man small business owner. Nothing more than a speeding ticket on my record. My case was so corrupted by the state attorney and ex police officer. It’s sad that this kinda stuff is allowed. I had no clue I plead to a lifetime of hell. I thought I would do my 18 months and get back to a normal life. I was never told I had to register for life. I went to there therapy they assigned.. I was told I’m the only person they ever knew of to finish this kind of therapy in a year. I completed the whole program took all there lie detector test. I proved I am not and never have been attracted to children. But I still have this burden for life. I can’t tell you how many times I have thought about finding the tallest bridge and just ending this mess.. but I don’t do it because I could never do that to my family. They stood by my side through all of this and they still stand by me and keep me going. But the outside world has no clue what these restrictions do to innocent people. Maybe one day in my lifetime I will be released to freedom again.