Living’s difficult for sex offenders
When the 30-day eviction notice arrived last month, he was upset but not surprised. After nearly two years on Idaho’s sex offender registry list, the Coeur d’Alene man is accustomed to being ostracized – and despised.
“I’ve lost three jobs and two housing situations,” said the 31-year-old, who agreed to be identified only by his first name, Ryan.
He knows that his situation inspires no public sympathy. If he’s getting tossed from his $325-a-month studio at the Alpine Apartments, so be it. He should have thought about that before he molested his 2½-year-old daughter in 2003, most people would say.
But for Ryan and other convicted sex offenders – and the people who treat them – the situation is not that simple.
“I understand that people want to protect themselves, to protect their families,” said Ryan, who’s one of about 50 community offenders treated by Coeur d’Alene counselor Tom Hearn. “But, I wonder, where’s a homeless sex offender supposed to live?”
In the past year, public outrage over notorious sex crimes – particularly the alleged acts of sex offender and accused killer Joseph Duncan – has sparked calls for stiffer legal penalties and inspired harsher social penalties as well.
Sex offenders deemed able to live and work in the community increasingly are being targeted by citizens who look them up on the public registry online, officials said.
“Some of the men have reported increased problems with losses of housing, with lost jobs, once they’ve been identified as a sex offender, even if they’re not a high-risk sex offender,” Hearn said.
No North Idaho sex offenders have been attacked or killed in vigilante incidents like those that occurred last year in Washington and Maine, officials said.
But authorities remain worried about increased animosity toward sex offenders – and not because of concern for the criminals, they said.
“The vast majority of the public thinks all these guys should be locked up for the rest of their lives,” Hearn said. “The reality is the majority of sex offenders will be released back into the community.”
Harsh treatment of such criminals could put the public at greater risk, officials said. Some states – not Idaho – classify sex offenders according to the severity of their crimes and then tailor public notification efforts to monitor only the most dangerous criminals, a practice recommended by the national Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers.
“…Over-inclusive notification can actually be harmful to public safety by diluting the ability to identify truly dangerous offenders and by disrupting the stability of low-risk offenders in ways that may increase their risk,” according to a letter ATSA officials sent to a U.S. Senate sub-committee.
In Idaho, offenders are divided into only two categories: dangerous predators and everyone else, said Hearn. Revamping that system would improve identification of sex offenders who have the potential to change.
“We have to do what we can to help these people be successful or we set them up for re-offending,” Hearn said. “For all the terrible things they’ve done, they’re human beings. You can set them up for success, or you can set them up for failure. When you set them up for failure, people get hurt.”
Some 408 registered sex offenders live in Idaho’s five most northern counties, including 262 offenders in Kootenai County, state records showed. Of 33 offenders designated as the state’s violent sexual predators, four live in North Idaho.
Nearly a quarter of the North Idaho registered offenders – 94 – remain supervised by the state Department of Corrections, said Melinda O’Malley Keckler, the department’s public information officer. The rest, including violent offenders who’ve completed prison time, are on their own. On average, about 8 percent of male sex offenders discharged from prison re-offend, according to a seven-year study of the Idaho population. That compares to a re-offense rate of 13 percent for other crimes, the spokeswoman said.
Hearn, who heads the state’s sex offender classification program, long has been a vocal proponent of increased prison time and monitoring for Idaho’s most dangerous offenders. At the same time, he contends that many sex offenders can be safely rehabilitated through treatment.
“I’m not soft on sex offenders, but I’m not convinced that a lot of them need to spend a long time in prison. A lot of the lower risk guys can be safely managed in the community.”
Several North Idaho sex offenders said that public aversion to their crimes makes rehabilitation difficult. Finding a job is difficult for any felon, but even more so for a sex offender.
One 23-year-old Sandpoint man said he was fired from two construction jobs after co-workers found out he’d been convicted of rape.
“My boss said some of the guys are uncomfortable that you’re a sex offender,” said the man, who wanted to remain anonymous out of fear of harassment or harm.
“At one job, I worked one day and the guy said, ‘You don’t need to come back any more.’”
John, a 46-year-old Coeur d’Alene man, lost several jobs because of his conviction for molesting his 12-year-old daughter.
“I found that company owners that are religious in faith are willing to hire you,” he said. “They say that everybody makes a mistake.”
Similarly, local sex offenders said they have to rely on family connections or community tolerance to secure housing. While some communities have halfway or transitional houses for sex offenders released from jail, North Idaho has no such resources, Hearn said.
Ryan, who will lose his apartment at the end of this month, plans to live in a fifth-wheel trailer offered by his dad. He doesn’t want to live with his parents because he doesn’t want to subject them to the stigma of having their address listed on the offender registry. He’s grateful for the support of a boss who knows about his sex offense but agrees to let him work anyway.
“We’re not all monsters, we’re just all guys who made some mistakes,” he said.
Their mistakes, of course, are offenses with devastating and often lifelong consequences for their victims. Sex offender treatment, which lasts five years or longer, forces offenders to admit their guilt, to acknowledge the impact of their crimes on their victims, and to seek change, said Bill Eldred, a 59-year-old offender.
“I had to come to it in my heart that I was a child molester sex offender capable of re-offending,” said Eldred, a Worley man who molested a young relative from ages 8 to 10. “I realized that I had no compassion or empathy. And it hurt.”
A religious conversion saved him, said Eldred, who wears a hat decorated with a gold cross and an American flag. A former log truck driver now on disability, Eldred no longer worries about losing income or housing because of his crime.
But he said that offenders who do can become desperate.
“The problem is, if they don’t have any resources, it can lead to depression, to feelings of uselessness and hopelessness,” he said. “Those are the triggers that lead to drug and alcohol use, to pornography use, to fantasies, to the sexualizing of women, to re-offending. They’re actually making matters worse by not offering them an opportunity.”
Victims’ advocates urge concern first for those harmed by the offenders’ actions. But even the advocates agree that harassing offenders by denying them jobs or housing perpetuates the problem, said Tinka Schaffer, development director for Children’s Village, a nonprofit agency that providers shelter and treatment for abused children in Coeur d’Alene. Halfway houses, supervised rehabilitation and expanded treatment – all subsidized by offenders’ own wages – are the key to changing the culture of abuse, she said.
“I really believe we need to turn it around, or they will re-offend,” she said.
Ironically, experts and offenders alike said that Ryan and the other men on Idaho’s sex offender registry list are probably the least likely to commit future crimes.
“They’re not the scary ones,” Schaffer said. “It’s the ones who are still in the house.”
Local sex offenders said they accept the social isolation and fear that their crimes inspire. But they also want people to know that they’re human beings with the capacity to change.
“Keep that in mind when you meet a sex offender, that that person might be a better person for the mistakes he’s made,” Ryan said. “I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’m not an evil man.”