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6-15-03 SPECIAL REPORT: Working with Sex Offenders
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Today we bring you two stories, one involving "Housing" and the other "Therapy." The apartment complex and the therapy program are both run by women, one 52 the other 48, both take the same stance with their sex offenders, tough! Beyond that is the reason for our story.
It is claimed that sex offenders treat their victims as "objects," and not as "people." Reading these stories makes one wonder whether states need to look closer at who they place in a teaching position with sex offenders. A person learns both from what they are told, and what they see!
» Washington: No-nonsense landlord gives sex offenders a home, hope :
The 52-year-old one-time waitress, one-time restaurant manager, recovering alcoholic, spurned wife and mother of two grown sons has made housing sex offenders her business. She offers cheap rent, clean rooms and plenty of rules and straight talk to ex-cons considered the scourge of society. "I want the worst ones," Wolfe-Dawidjan said. "I want the higher-risk offenders because I feel we do a better job."
A few other private landlords around the state do make apartments available to newly released offenders, but corrections officials say no one takes on the challenges of providing shelter, protecting the community and laying the groundwork for second chances with more energy than Wolfe-Dawidjan.
In the six years Wolfe-Dawidjan has been renting to sex offenders, Spokane police and the Department of Corrections say, they have had few complaints and know of no new sex crimes being committed by New Washington tenants.
When offenders come to New Washington, they are greeted not just by Wolfe-Dawidjan but with an orientation booklet that makes clear her expectations and the consequences for not living up to them.
"If you are serious about making it, this is the place for you. If you are not, you won't be here long," reads a line on the last page. Above is a drawing of handcuffs — the cuff for one hand undone, the other locked tight.
Wolfe-Dawidjan gets at least 10 letters a week from inmates or their families eager to land an apartment in time for their release. Corrections workers, in keeping with state law, call to arrange apartments for high-risk offenders who must list an address before the state can set them free.
Wolfe-Dawidjan said she won't take offenders she views as especially surly or aggressive, because they could take advantage of tenants who have a learning disability or mental illness. Many in the building receive Social Security disability payments; about half hold jobs, Wolfe-Dawidjan said.
The manager's office, where relations with Wolfe-Dawidjan are made or broken, overlooks the stairway up from the street. With help from some of the tenants, including Powell and Flachmeyer, Wolfe-Dawidjan monitors the video console that picks up images from cameras around the building.
An assistant manager, Powell (former parolee) handles the night shift after Wolfe-Dawidjan has gone home to her husband of three years. It is a position of responsibility Powell could not have imagined holding six months ago. "I didn't really think I could do it. She told me I could."
.(by Beth Kaiman, The Seattle Times)
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» Missouri: Marie Clark's group-therapy sessions are a sex offender's worst nightmare. Her down-and-dirty approach gives some of her colleagues the willies too.
Marie Clark walks into the consultation room chuckling. A little boy just came by to see whether her ten-year-old son was at work with her. The minute the boy walked into the waiting room, all the men got up and left. They were sex offenders, waiting for their state-mandated group therapy at Clark's Behavioral Science Institute (BSI).
Clark always dreamed of owning her own business. She started BSI in 1988 after six years spent directing Missouri's first sex-offender program, known as MoSOP, for the state corrections department. "I wrote the Missouri Sex Offender Program," she says proudly. "Nobody knows the history of where all this came from but me."
Her eyes darken. "They're changing the program now. Jim [LaBundy, chief of sex-offender services] thinks I do 'shame-based therapy.'" Tilting her head, she adopts a syrupy tone: "'Oh, they are so ashamed.'" Then she leans forward. "No, they're not," she says. "They're caught."
Past participants say BSI's therapy sessions can be brutal. Fred Jones (a pseudonym) says that at his first BSI session, "Marie barged in, handed this guy a piece of paper and said, 'Sign this.' It was a confession that he had skipped sessions and withheld funds from BSI. He looked at her and said, 'None of this is true.' She threw the paper down, took her pen and threw it across the room and ordered him to crawl over, get the pen and crawl back to sign the paper. Then she started mentioning her close relationship with his parole officer. She got him so scared that he crawled over and signed it." Clark denies the account: "I've never done anything like that, never in my life! And 'withheld funds'? You can't enter our office without paying. It says on the wall: 'Payment due at time of service.' You don't pay, we won't see you. You can't come in."
She does, however, recall other incidents Jones relates. For instance, the time she "came into group yelling at the top of her lungs," telling an offender who'd gone with his supervisor to the St. Louis Science Center -- technically in violation of the agreement he'd signed with BSI not to go anywhere that children frequent -- "that he couldn't possibly be that stupid and she was sure he had victims left behind at the Science Center now." He says she'd "point to people and shout, 'Child molester! Pedophile! Exhibitionist!' and say how despicable they were. When one man was recounting his criminal act, which was a misdemeanor, and was very much ashamed of himself, she said, 'You should be disgusted, I hope you vomit all over that white shirt you're wearing.'" .(by Jeannette Batz, The Riverfront Times.com)
[There are four parts to this story, you can access parts 2-3-4 from the bottom of the article]
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Copyright ©2003 LAMP.
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one striking at the root."
- Henry David Thoreau -
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