I believe the minimization occurs when decent people go to prison for crimes that should never carry a prison sentence----child porn charges and solicitation. When people suffer an injustice, they sometimes minimize; that is only human nature.

If someone is producing child porn by raping a child or distributing it in mass quantities, then yes, I can understand prison time, as that person is dangerous and needs to be kept away from society. But the simple downloader is usually harmless and a prison sentence is just overkill. And the distribution charges just because someone who is not computer literate left a couple of files in their shared folder in a P2P program is nothing but a way for a prosecutor to rack up the charges, scare the defendant, and give him a harsher prison sentence.

The solicitation crimes have become an industry for law enforcement. They skirt the law in so many areas that charging someone and sending them to prison is a miscarriage of justice in itself.

Those two areas of crimes are over prosecuted and even though the offender may be guilty according to the letter of the law, there is much more to the case than meets the eye. Some of the laws regarding child porn and these solicitation cases need to be changed. They are way over the top.

rewdiazepam

Yes all of you summed up my thoughts - in her first few minutes I thought she was full of crap! She did redeem herself somewhat at the end - however the one thing I think is glaringly missing from what she says is that she never addresses the truth that "sex offender" is not a catch all phrase! She is asking people to move beyond the monster label and yet she continues to lump SO in to one huge group! She also talks about people having an image of themselves etc. and that is why they feign innocence but because of the grouping like she does that is a part of it! To clarify - the public thinks of sex offenders as monsters - they have an image that all sex offenders are like Couey or the worst of the worst - so some one that is convicted of a sex offense knows that is the public image and of course they are not going to see themselves like that! Did that make sense? lol

I also agree that that no one accused of a sex offense in the US is going to get a fair trial and there are many that truly ARE innocent that take a plea - on paper they are guilty - the things she says show me that she seems to have no concept of that - she eludes to the fact that if they are convicted they are guilty.

She maybe some expert on sex offenders but personally I am NOT impressed. If she truly works with sex offenders she would also know that one of the things that creates that monster persona is the idea that once a sex offender always a sex offender - she does nothing to dispel that myth.

Maybe I am misjudging what she said but here is what I got out of it - Sex offenders deny guilt becasue we (the public) label them monsters but they are people too and if we stop thinking of them as monster they will feel free to finally admit their guilt and move on with life - but wait the registry prevents them from doing so in most cases - she never mentions that in order to help sex offenders shed the monster label the public needs to stop ostracizing them from a normal life.

"The ones who I thought were probably guilty would never talk about their case. They would give the law clerks only a minimal amount of information. But the ones I thought were innocent were mad as hell and their case is all they could talk about. Their anger often almost consumed them and it became almost an obsession, which of course, it not really healthy."

Rew- This is the only statement that I can say that I disagree with here... You have just painted a brush over an entire population based on your experiences in one place with a small sample of offenders. THIS is the kind of thing that I really hate to see SOs and their supporters do. Paint with that same sloppy brush that the public paints SOs with. Two wrongs don't make a right no matter how you add it up.

Please don't get me wrong, I am not 'dinging' you in any way, just being observant of how we as a group behave and the things we have problems with when the general public does the same thing. ALL of us have to change HOW we speak, perceive, and demonstrate to not only the public but to each other. How can we expect change from the masses when we have such trouble with the same 'stupid human tricks' as the rest of the public?

My personal belief is that most of the country if you dig far enough into their past are sex offenders, the only thing that is different between SOs and them is that they didn't get caught. When I talk to people I tell them this. There are millions if not billions of felonies committed by people every day that have no criminal record, no history of violence, no criminal tendencies and lead productive lives in their communities. The only difference between offenders and them is that they have never been caught. (I'm not talking just sex offences but ALL criminal/felony offences.) In WI, since we are the boozin' state in the nation, drunk driving is a great example of how people break the law to the extent of felonies every day but are just not caught. That does not make them a good citizen, just lucky. You see if you are caught more than 2 times driving drunk it is a felony. Which means if you have driven drunk more than three times, count your lucky stars that you weren't caught cause that is a felony.

I think that people forget that just because they haven't been caught doesn't mean they haven't broken the law. As a teenager under the age of 18 I RARELY dated anyone that was also under the age of 18. That means that I could have make sex offenders out of several folk, the only difference is that they were never reported/caught. Does that make them upstanding citizens because they don't have a sex offense on their record? Or just lucky that they didn't get caught? Or that my parents trusted me to make good decisions.

I try to remind those in our cause and fight that we not only need to be loud and proud and speak truth and fact, but that we need to behave better than those that persecute us. We need to be the bigger people and not become the very thing that we loathe, those that do not take the time to learn or understand any other point of view other than their own.

I was raised to fight within the 'system', use their own processes and rules against them, play their game so well by their rules and overcome all the obstacles they try to throw out there. This builds character, a sense of being able to survive ANYTHING, and garners respect from others. I know most get so frustrated that it makes it hard for them to do any of that, but I have found in my experiences that even when you think you can't do it anymore, when you think you are all used up and can't move forward, that really, YOU CAN. That is is all a matter of mind set and attitude to move forward.

"Life will always be a struggle. When it stops being a struggle, check your pulse, you're probably dead."

Wisconsin,

No worries about you "dinging" me here. We all have opinions and mine is not always correct. One thing about this group is that I learn for others. Sometimes I read a sensible post and I am forced to re-examine my thoughts on the subject. The only way I can learn is to listen to others.

But I was not painting a brush over the entire sex offender population. That was just my observation of inmates I helped in the law library, not those on the outside. I could not form an opinion on the outside as I know nothing about their cases.

Prison is a totally different environment. Communication is not what it is on the outside.

I agree that some registrants who are innocent do not even want to discuss their case, but they had to discuss it in the law library. Some people who have been exonerated of their crime, just want to quietly go away and live a life without any fanfare; some are mad as hell and want to shout to the world, so yes, there are differences.

One inmate who was later exonerated lived in my pod. He was a small guy, very shy and he never talked about his case. Another inmate later exonerated almost grieved himself to death and fell into a deep depression; the last I heard he still has not pulled out, but with the help of John Grisham, he did co-author a book telling his experiences.

We are all different, and we all act in our own way to get through this mess. That is for sure.

rewdiazepam

Can you tell us the name of the book, Rew? I would be interested...

Independent - once again you have ruffled my feathers lol I do not think the defense of Romeo and Juliet and urinating in public are used necessarily to minimize anything - I think they are used to illustrate the wide variety of sex crimes that will land you on the registry - and the list is growing every day - people think of all sex offenders as a group all tied together with a little ribbon and nothing is further from the truth - I also think those examples are used to illustrate that many of these crimes are not the violent stranger danger that the public had been taught to believe.

For me it is not about the opinions you have but the way you say them? While many times you insist that we all "sugar coat" the crimes that place us or them on the registry you on the other hand seem to paint them all with one broad stroke of heinousness - refusing to believe that many of these crimes are quite benign

Actually John Grisham wrote two books as there were two separate inmates, Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz, both from Oklahoma whose ordeal was the subject of the books. I knew Dennis Fritz and he was at the same medium security prison I was housed, but I never met Ron Williamson.

They were both convicted for rape / murder. Their cases are just a classic case of "justice" as it was given out in Oklahoma sometimes. These are the 5% I spoke of earlier.

The shy inmate I spoke of was Timothy Durham who was an orderly on our unit. He was given 3,200 years for a sex crime against a child and everything that I mentioned that can happen in these child sex trial, did in fact, happen to him. His conviction was a classic example of what I was referring to. There has never been a book published about him.

All three men were exonerated by the Innocence Project with the help of Barry Scheck.

Fritz and Williamson were fall partners in the same crime, but Timothy's crime was totally separate.

You can also find out more about their cases by following these links-----

http://tinyurl.com/bhll3ms

http://tinyurl.com/asd3mlq

http://tinyurl.com/q2a6h7s

But here is some info on the books---------

http://tinyurl.com/nyyq67q

http://tinyurl.com/myqap24

rewdiazepam

I think sometimes we concentrate too much on the guilt or innocence of registrants. After all, the innocent registrant is just as much a registrant as the guilty one, so I am not sure if guilt or innocence matters or should be that big a factor.

But sex offenders, guilty or innocent, suffer injustices particularly in the punishment and registration phase. Anyone who argues to the contrary is just not looking at the facts. I call this "willful ignorance" and the people of this country are guilty of that kind of thinking quite often.

The punishment rarely fits the crime, the registration process is, in my opinion, punitive and unconstitutional, and registrants are all categorized as a walking John Couey, the man who murdered Jessica Lunsford.

I know many of the posters here and their stories regarding their sons, husbands, and family members who are either in prison or are a registrant. Almost all these young men and women are decent young men and women who would never harm a child, who while they may have made a mistake, the price they are paying is just ridiculous. These are gross injustices.

This is just horrendous punishment on young people and it troubles me greatly.
This is the type of punishment you might see in the USSR or some totalitarian state, but not in America.

I don't have a problem sending a child rapist to prison, although I do have a problem with the registry for ANY offender. The registry needs to be abolished.

Sometimes, I believe, when we tell others about the injustices in sex crimes, they don't quite understand. They may think we are talking about the crime itself, when we are actually speaking of all the crazy rules and regulations that the registry brings. Most of the people with family members who are guilty will concede that their husband or son broke the law and needs some form of punishment, but the punishment given out in no way fits the crime.

Maybe that is why some people say that sex offenders "minimize" their crime.

rewdiazepam

I would like to see the registry abolished, but I believe that is wishful thinking. Our society and reacting out of fear will prevent that until a more enlightened age, probably a 100 years in to the future if not more. But they can take it away from the public, as it was before it was public.

I look at it this way, we are all on some kind of list possibly more than one. There is Social Security and for those able young men out there, Selective Service. Then there is that Drivers license that everyone needs to get around. Let us not forget the countless memberships, credit cards, bank accounts and other things that you sign up for, give them one of your 'listed' ID numbers and there you are on another list.

We live in a society that is ALWAYS looking for someone to BLAME for whatever bad thing has happened. If you look at us, we even blame people for the friggin' weather and global climate change. We might be responsible for a fraction of it, but who are we to think that we are so important that we can bring on global changes (this is not meant to start a debate about global warming or whatever people want to call it) in our climate. It is like those that are so arrogant to believe that we are the only intelligent life in the universe, which is so vast that to believe that we are would be not only arrogant but naive. The public is always looking for someone to blame, to heap the badness on, to persecute and focus their anger. So they blame the industrialist and manufacturing and our incessant need for a bigger and better car on our climate changing, with few people thinking that maybe it is just the cycle of our planet that is so very old and on a completely different 'time table' than we'll ever be on just be cause our life span is so short. We can't think beyond 100 years at a time it would seem. For we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over that have been repeated since before Christ. It is like the human species is unable to learn from our mistakes.

Because of this kind of thinking that we can't seem to get away from, offenders of any crime will be looking as if they are minimizing their crime if they try to say anything other than "I did it, I am a bad person, I should never be forgiven, and I hate myself." Even then, the public will continue to persecute. Personally I believe that no matter what you say, if the person has made up their mind that you are guilty, everything will look like someone is minimizing, even if it isn't.

I have such a low opinion of the general public it isn't even funny. I paint them with a big fat sloppy brush too, they are all stupid, they are all uninformed and they are all unwilling to learn anything that is outside their comfort zone. They do not look for alternatives to anything, they are the type to shoot first and ask questions later. But if it happens to them, OH the outrage, OH the humanity, and OH how unfair it is. I know this, I used to be one of them... Then I started to learn something. Started to think out side that box I had been trapped in for 30 years. Started to think for MYSELF rather than letting some politician and their media cronies tell me what to think.

There is so much broken in our society that it is overwhelming at where to begin. My father says that we need to start with the constitution, vote in the supporters of it, or those that most resemble supporters of it. Help them restore our freedoms so that the rest will come. But I don't trust any politician to ever reinstate that document in the manner in which it should be regarded and interpreted. I don't believe that any of them will or want to, even if they say they do.

I still believe in the Declaration of Independence, I believe it is what needs to be revived first actually. I think we as a country has forgotten why we wanted to be independent from the UK (Great Britain at the time.)

When I was in school we had to KNOW this... memorized if nothing else... this and the preable of the Constitution, how many of you with children of High School age, do the kids know these words and the reasons why they were written and the gravity of what happened back then?

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.

I fear that the vast majority of our children that didn't graduate prior to 1995 do not know this. And would ask you where it came from... I have a friend that is only 10 years my junior ask me, "who was Lennin?" Scary? If they don't know that, what else is missing from their education? Because being able to realize that we are all in trouble comes from knowing our own history and the reasons why things happened like they did.

besides my husband, the fact that I know I am not going to be able to change our country and the direction that it is heading is why I support and advocate for the RSO, It is something that I might be able to try to affect meaningful change...

Because, "when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security"

I do wish that we as a human species would evolve past the blame game and the motivational greed that drives them... Because when you strip away all the issues, what you are left with is greed for power, all the rest is just a means to get that power... and it is easier to get if you can villanize a whole section of the population and their families.

Completely agree Rew, that irregardless of guilt or innocence the registry in its current form is wrong, it is a form of punishment not a regulatory scheme and it causes a lot of harm to the families of registrants.

In this registry situation, I really worry about the families, especially the children and the impact that the registry has on their lives. Also equally disturbing is what the registry does to the family unit.

The registrants can usually take care of themselves, but the family is held hostage by a criminal justice system and the registry that just does not care about the collateral damage caused by all these regulations. They have done nothing but love their father---or whoever the registrant happens to be---and are punished for it.

As far as the wives are concerned, all too often it seems as if society is saying---almost in a TAUNTING way, "See what happens and the amount of pain involved when you decide to love a sex offender?" They just do not care.

The fact that Johnny cannot have daddy come to his baseball game or Suzy cannot have her father come to her school play cannot be good for the kids. I often wonder, down the line, what effect this will have on those children.

We are just throwing the "baby out with the bath water" here. Everyone and everything related to the registrant in some way is made to suffer.

It is truly amazing to me that, in a country that claims to be a "Christian nation" we have so many mean-spirited people.

rewdiazepam

The effect is the same as the effect of any other kind of abuse, it starts and perpetuates a cycle of abuse that is like some kind of perpetual motion machine...

Those that are abused many times go on to abuse others. That is a fact... what is funny is that most of society doesn't apply that to the way society treats people... as abusers, they seem to think they are exempt from this cycle... They are not...

I did not watch the video. I did read the "blurb" tho. I really wish they would just put up a transcript because I read far faster than I can watch a video.

I can speak for the fact that my husband is innocent and went to trial. The DA is a nutjob who coaches witnesses and just a Biotch...which is why he took a plea after getting a hung-jury.

As to the 5% thing, I think it depends on demographics, some subsets will be higher and others lower. I've spoken time and again to people including Children and Youth workers that have found teenage girls to have quite a high rate of false accusations. It comes down to the need for drama and attention, and the ease of accessing abuse stories on the internet with which to fabricate stories that sound plauible.

There is transcript Faerydark - it is a little hidden in a drop down that says full transcript under the video