Massachusetts News 
By Paul Moreno 

July 2--"It’s about time you woke up down there in Massachusetts," says Katherine Prudhomme, a New Hampshire woman who organized a petition drive to get officials to explain the case of Scott Selinger, a man who was arrested for molesting a boy, was freed on $5,000 bail and then kidnapped six-year old Mark DeVoe in Derry, New Hampshire. 

Prudhomme describes herself as a "political refugee from Massachusetts" who shares the concern of many people who live in New Hampshire but work and pay taxes in Massachusetts. She is exasperated with the political culture of the Bay State, and of "judges who are so open-minded that their brains are falling out," she told Massachusetts News. 

"Where were the people of Peabody," she wonders, saying that the citizens of Massachusetts have lost the habit of local self-government and civic control. 

Selinger faces charges in both New Hampshire and Massachusetts. In Massachusetts, the Essex County District Attorney had asked for bail of $100,000 but the judge reduced it to $5,000. The DA’s office did not respond to an inquiry from Massachusetts News about whether it filed the necessary 58A Petition to allow the court to determine if Selinger was dangerous. 

The case in Derry was just one of several recent incidents in which accused or convicted sex offenders were arrested for committing more sex crimes against children while out on bail, parole or probation. 

• In June 1999, George Roy was charged with sexual assault of a four-year old girl in Springfield. Roy had been given a two-year suspended sentence with probation in 1991, but never registered as a sex offender, although he had been registered to vote all the while. 

• In June 1999, Michael Vick, a Lynn man with a history of convictions for breaking and entering and sex offenses was arrested for molesting a four-month old boy in Revere. A judge had lowered Vick’s bail in an October rape case from $25,000 to $5,000 in February, because the District Attorney did not take the opportunity to show the court that Vick was dangerous. The DA said that he did not want to harm the child victim in a dangerousness hearing, but a court official told Massachusetts News that a judge might have granted the petition even without the testimony of the victim. "An attempt should have been made by the District Attorney," the official said. 

• In November 1998, Eben Hoyt was arrested for dozens of child rapes while on probation, and while registered as a sex offender. Hoyt, a former Methuen school bus driver, pleaded guilty to molesting an eight-year old in 1996. He plea-bargained to avoid prison and was placed on probation. 

• In January 1999, a twice-convicted sex offender was arrested for raping a four-year old boy in Northboro. 

• Last fall, Frederick Wyatt used a 1994 Massachusetts law that allows convicted sex offenders to persuade a jury (rather than a judge) that they are no longer sexually dangerous. Wyatt refused treatment during his fifteen years in the Bridgewater Treatment Center for the Sexually Dangerous. State officials warned that Wyatt remained a danger and called for stronger criminal penalties and sex offender registration laws. Wyatt moved to Ohio after his release. 

• This April, Brian Nagle, who had been convicted of sex crimes in 1987 and 1996, and was registered as a level III (most dangerous) sex offender, raped a six-year old boy in Amesbury, was sentenced to life in prison, but will be eligible for parole after fifteen years. 

The Nagle case confirms what many people believe about child sex offenders -- that they are not treatable and need to be confined until they die in prisons or mental institutions. 

Around 1990, many states began to pass more stringent "sexual predator" laws along these lines. Washington was the first, and others followed suit. But Massachusetts has lagged and in some ways gone against this trend. 

• 1990. Massachusetts ended "civil commitment" -- the process by which sex offenders can be involuntarily confined to mental institutions after their criminal sentences have been served. 

• 1994. Massachusetts passed a law allowing sex offenders to convince juries, instead of judges, that they are no longer sexually dangerous. 

• 1996. Massachusetts became the last state in the country to enact a sex offender registry law, and did so only under pressure from the federal government. The state would have lost federal anti-crime funding had it not done so. 

Now the governor is pushing, and the legislature is considering, laws that would restore "civil commitment," impose mandatory life parole for second-time sex offenders, and repair the registration law -- including more funds to enforce the registration system. 

This legislation passed the House by a 141-16 margin and is likely to pass the Senate soon. 

Senator James Jajuga (D-Methuen), one of the sponsors of the bill, told Massachusetts News that the large number of cases like that of Michael Vick and Eben Hoyt convinced the legislature of the need to amend the law. "These are not isolated cases," he said. 

Civil libertarians complain that "civil commitment" violates the rights of convicted sex offenders, but the U. S. Supreme Court in June, 1997 upheld Kansas’ law committing violent sex offenders to mental hospitals after their sentences are served. 

But it is unlikely that sex offenders will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. "We never see people get the maximum penalty," Sgt. Kevin Martin of the Methuen police force’s sexual assault unit, who was involved in the Eben Hoyt case, told Massachusetts News. 

"Shoplifters can spend more time in jail than child molesters," he said. 

New "truth-in-sentencing" laws help a little, Martin says, but plea-bargaining remains the biggest problem. 

"Court is a game," Martin says. "Sometimes you have to take a guilty plea to a lesser charge rather than roll the dice in court." Child witnesses often are unwilling to testify, or the testimony of several child witnesses will conflict, he notes. 

Martin sees no alternative to permanent confinement for sex offenders. "You can’t cure a sex offender," he said at the time of Eben Hoyt’s second arrest. "If you’re a sex offender, you’re a sex offender for life." 

Can Treatment Work? 

Many psychiatrists agree with Sgt. Martin that child molesters cannot be rehabilitated. Renee Binder, a psychiatry professor at the University of California at San Francisco, told USA Today that "There really is no good evidence that psychiatric hospitals have anything good to offer in this area. This is an abuse of psychiatry." 

Paul Applebaum, chairman of the University of Massachusetts Department of Psychiatry, said, "What we’re seeing is an effort to wrap in medical garments a criminal justice problem." 

At the other extreme is a small but growing fringe of intellectuals, like historian Philip Jenkins of Penn State University and English professor James R. Kincaid of the University of Southern California, who deny that sexual abuse of children is a problem at all. They claim that the drive to punish pedophiles is a symptom of American society’s sexual repression. 

Some mental health experts believe that sex offenders can be helped. David Scott, a retired psychologist and author who was research coordinator for the US Attorney General's Commission on Pornography (the "Meese Commission"), says that most politicians want to lock sex offenders up and throw away the key. But some psychotherapy does work, he told Massachusetts News. 

The problem, Scott says, is that the therapies are long-term and intensive, and are very expensive, and compete with law-enforcement funding. 

Ira Schwartz, Dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Pennsylvania, agrees that sex offenders need to be confined, but says that the important question is where. 

Unfortunately, sex offenders usually do not get treatment, and even more rarely get effective treatment, until after they are released. 

Janet Warren of the University of Virginia Institute on Law and Psychology, told Massachusetts News that there has been a "breakthrough" in research in medical treatment for sex offenders in the last five to ten years. 

She warns that civil commitment confuses punishment and treatment. Those most likely to benefit from medical treatment won’t get it, while the most violent and least treatable offenders are dumped in mental hospitals. 

Robert Prentky, of the Justice Resource Institute at the Bridgewater Treatment Center for the Sexually Dangerous, is also afraid that the focus on criminal penalties is hiding the fact that there are effective treatments for sex offenders. 

The recent spate of laws to lock up "sexual predators," he told Massachusetts News, is just a repeat of earlier cycles where the public responds to terrible sex crimes by calling for harsh penalties. 

He says that the problem needs to be reconceptualized, to shift from risk assessment to management before offenses occur. 

"Stop It Now" 

One group of social workers that is trying to do this with low-level offenders is "Stop-It-Now" in Haydenville, Massachusetts. Joan Tabachnik, Stop-It-Now’s Director of Public Education, says that her organization’s goal is to prevent child sex abuse, rather than to respond after the fact, as the criminal justice and social welfare agencies do. 

Stop-It-Now began a pilot program in Vermont, Tabachnik told Massachusetts News setting up a help line by which thirty people called and identified themselves as people with sex disorders in need of treatment. These are the sort of low-level sex offenders that are not likely to get treatment after they are convicted of sex offenses. 

While Vermont guarantees treatment for people with sex disorders who turn themselves in, Massachusetts forces them to wait until after prison sentences are served -- when it is least likely to be effective. Abusers are most amenable to treatment when they turn themselves in, she says. 
 

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