Beans and Cornbread D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
October 2009
Touch of Evil
With nearly 2,500 sex offenders in New Mexico, one might be living in your neighborhood.
By Jeff Berg
We are lying together on my couch. I recall looking out the window at the still bare limbs of the tall, sturdy elm that arched over my house, offering shade in the summer and a serenade from a couple of squeaky branches that rubbed the eaves on blustery winter days.
 |
Dr. Robert Cathey works with sex
offenders at the Southern New Mexico Correctional Facility near Las Cruces: "Research
shows that those who do decide to get counseling do very well." (Photo by Jeff Berg) |
This day, sunny and chilly, became very different, as I stretched out with Linda. We had just awoken from a nap on a relaxing day, one that offered solace and quietude, far away from the rigors of our jobs.
I held her, front to back, in the classic spooning position, trying to decide what I should suggest that we could make for dinner. We worked well together in the kitchen.
I could not see her face at the moment when she said, "He touched me."
Puzzled, and brought back to the moment, I clearly remember saying, "Who touched you?," thinking it might have been my shy cat making nose-to-hand contact with her for the first time, after we had been dating for over a year.
"My father," she said.
Sexual abuse and sex crimes are rampant in this country, and New Mexico is no exception. Sexual predators are everywhere. They are not just in the poor areas of town or out on the farm. In my solidly middle-class neighborhood of Las Cruces, I could walk to the homes of two registered sex offenders within five minutes.
There are more than 685,000 registered sex offenders in the US, and nearly 2,500 in New Mexico. Amazingly, for a change, New Mexico ranks much lower in the number of registered offenders in the US than many states, even Hawaii. The New Mexico registry also includes people who committed sex crimes in other states.
Even in a small town like Silver City, the registry shows 21 offenders. Three are currently incarcerated and one is listed as "absconded."
Those numbers reflect merely the sex offenders who have been caught and convicted, not people like Linda's father, who was never arrested for the crimes against his own daughter, or others who are never caught or turned in for one reason or another.
Within the state of New Mexico, registration is required only for those convicted of a sexually related crime since July 1995, or for those who were convicted before then and served time or are currently on parole or probation. Sex crimes vary in nature in New Mexico, ranging from rape and incest to child pornography. There are no truly accurate figures of how many men are incarcerated for sex crimes at the Southern New Mexico Correctional Facility, just west of Las Cruces.
I remember, 21 years later, the sensation of my stomach beginning to churn. Those three words — "He touched me" — changed our lives and our relationship forever.
Before she and I were friends, I had admired her from afar. Linda (not her real name) was tall, about an inch taller than I, making her nearly six foot. She had pale skin, an infectious smile, and a shock of red hair that was thick and wavy, falling to her shoulders.
Friendship became dating, dating became love, and the love carried with it an advanced degree of honesty and openness. She shared with me the cretinous activities of her husband — an alcoholic, gambling, non-working womanizer — and I told her of my history of making bad relationship choices, although my divorce rested pretty much on my shoulders because of my own past cretinous activities.
I like to think of myself as an intuitive person, one who can tell when things aren't quite the way they should be, and I often sensed that with Linda. She was holding back something, masking it with her friendly attitude toward all and her nonstop work ethic, which, last I heard, earned her a very high management position in another state.
In the past, I had volunteered at the local domestic abuse center, and part of our training was to help people talk about the hurtful things that other people had done to them.
"What do you mean, he touched you?" I asked.
She began to sob softly. "He would come in my room when my mother was working nights, and touch me. He would fondle my breasts, saying that he was 'getting me ready' for when I had a boyfriend."
My teeth clenched. My eyes watered. I had met her father, another cretinous member of my gender, when he and Linda's mother had come out for a visit the previous summer. He looked and felt creepy. He was whip-thin, with jug-handle ears and a deep voice, and was probably smarter than he let on. He smoked. He wore T-shirts that he "air cleaned," as he called it — hanging it on a hanger near an open window, then wearing the same T-shirt for several days.
I asked Linda some other questions, mostly relating to the time of her life when this happened. I tried my best to reassure her, to let her know what had happened was wrong, not her fault, and that he needed to be confronted. We sat up. I held her as close as I dared. We did not make love for several weeks after that.
Dr. Robert Cathey has worked at the Southern New Mexico Correctional Facility for 20 years. He is currently the Clinical Supervisor of Mental Health Services.
"Sex crimes involve a lot of plea bargaining," Cathey says. "Someone could have committed a sex crime, but may be here because they were convicted of residential burglary or extortion, for example. I've talked with DAs, and the reality of the situation is that the DAs are willing to do that to get them off the streets, and use whatever they can to get a maximum sentence."
This might seem like a good "deal" in some ways, getting the bad guys (and gals) who commit these crimes off the streets. It can also work well for the prisoner, Cathey notes, because sex criminals and those who commit other crimes involving children are indeed, the lowest of the low, even among the prison population. So, if a sex offender goes to prison for burglary — when, in fact, he also sexually assaulted his victim — chances are that his fellow inmates will not know of his sexual crime, and will not make prison life even harder for him.
Another surprising fact that Cathey brings up is no prisoner — not even a sex offender — is required to receive therapy while incarcerated.
"The majority of the inmates do not seek therapy, and New Mexico law does not require them to do so," he explains. "I still see clients, and it is a federal mandate that there must be one mental health care provider for every 100 inmates. But there is no legal basis that requires them to do so, and the majority does not."
There are more than 800 inmates at the prison outside of Las Cruces. Cathey's staff does have enough professionals on duty to provide help to anyone who desires it, providing an inmate requests therapy.
He shows me a workbook called "Starting Over," which is produced by the Department of Justice-Federal Bureau of Prisons. Worksheets posing questions, most of them simple, are used in an attempt to get inmates to reevaluate their behavior; other sections explain such things as the victim and family impact of a sex offender's behavior. The workbook is one of the few tools available to Cathey.
Ironically, the stigma assigned to sex criminals helps keep them away from therapy. If a fellow inmate found out that the therapy was for sexual deviancy reasons, further hell may be in order for that prisoner. "There will be many repercussions, from shunning to violence," Cathey says, especially for those who molested or assaulted children.
All the odds seem stacked against Cathey and his staff, as he explains what methods of therapy work best for these prisoners: "We only do individual therapy at this time, but research shows that group therapy works best for sex offenders."
And again, this is because of state law and regulations. The administration of the prison system has recently started to undergo some change, however, which may allow Cathey and other mental-health providers some additional opportunities for more counseling for cons.
"Research shows that those who do decide to get counseling do very well," he adds.
Cathey points out that there is no real way to profile a sex offender or potential offender. In general, though, they are often law abiding in every other way.
"They'll probably be more law abiding than the average person, more conservative, and the theory behind that is that breaking another law might lead to their being caught (for their sex crime)."
Although it's a common notion that most victimizers were victims of sex abuse themselves growing up, that doesn't match Cathey's experience. When he does counsel sex offenders, he says, fewer than 30% report being victims of some sort of sexual abuse when they were children.
Cathey emphasizes personal responsibility when talking to a sex offender. "I will be getting their personal history and working with that, but he will also have to acknowledge: 'You made a choice, no matter what has happened in your life previous to this.' The majority of those victimized were not victimized by others. Their major problem will be denial — they need to acknowledge why they are here."
He describes a small program in the Oklahoma penal system that seems to working, in which all of the sex offenders statewide are kept in one facility. "They are only allowed to go if they agree to counseling and treatment."
New Mexico does have a small pilot program for those who commit sex crimes, which is located in Las Vegas, NM, but its occupancy is only 24 at this time.
All sex crimes are about power, Cathey adds, and not about a sexual act itself. He feels strongly that many offenders are sex addicts, and that crimes arising from this issue can often be based on lack of acceptance or failed relationships, especially for those who attack children. They often have a history of being rejected by adults their own age, and turn to preying on the vulnerable.
For some New Mexico families, however, Cathey says being sent to prison — for sex crimes or other offenses — is a sort of rite of passage. He recalls being called to the visitation room one time to assist a woman visitor who was distraught upon visiting her son.
"She was crying, but it turned out to be tears of joy," he remembers clearly. "I took her to a side office to visit with her, and she told me that she was happy because now her son had become a man. He was 16."
Cathey says that he has seen this in many other families, where two or three generations in a row will have prison records.
Women, of course, are often the victims of sexual predators, but women can also be victimizers themselves or accomplices to men who commit sex crimes.
On the New Mexico registry of sex offenders, only 12 of the people listed and pictured are women. In part this can be explained by the fact that even though women have the capacity to commit such crimes, "they have the extra restraining factor of cultural female norms and genetics, which make them more aware of the consequences of their actions, both for themselves and their victims," according to an article by Phillip Hodson, a fellow of the British Association for Counseling and Psychotherapy.
Hodson writes, "What tends to be true is that even if a woman has the capacity for atrocities inside her, the catalyst to bring those behaviors to the surface often seems to be the presence of a man who lacks the imagination to empathize with his victims or restrain his desire for power and sexual or violent gratification. Women who abuse are less unusual than we might like to think. Men tend to be the more common abusers, especially of children, but when a woman does do it, they often do it horribly. Often it seems to be about anger rather than sexual or power gratification. The anger could be due to her resentment that her charismatic man, as she sees him, wants someone else."
Types of sex crimes by New Mexican women vary, but few in the registry are recent offenders.
Dr. Dana Greene is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. An advocate of prison reform, Dr. Greene is also a skeptic about the sex-offender registry.
"It is antithetical that we as a nation espouse as the root principles of crime and punishment the restructuring of the powers of government and individual rights," she says. "So, the registry system doesn't have harmony between the government and the rights of individuals.
"An analysis of the principles of the registry is disturbing: It is punishment using false statistics saying that an individual will reoffend in the future. The registry is used to feed an emotional need, and it also has the effect of cultivating vigilantism."
Greene goes on, "It seems unclear about what people imagine the point of registration to be. Instead of offering programs to educate parents (in particular) about offenders and having programs for children such as the buddy or whistle system, we don't give people the tools to help them learn of other ways to deal with the issue."
Greene does agree strongly that false figures about sexual offenses arise from plea bargaining, adding that all states do that. But she goes on to pose the question of why those who are convicted of DWI don't have their cars marked, much the way sex offenders are stigmatized, showing that they are DWI criminals.
"It is very foolish to marginalize people who have problem with emotional control," she says, "and by using the registry, we think we are doing something to make the lives of children safer, and in fact, we are not."
Much of what Greene says can be applied to the recent case of Phillip Garrido, who even as a registered offender in California was able to keep a kidnap victim his prisoner for nearly 20 years, in spite of visits by authorities and occasional complaints by neighbors.
In any case, Greene says, any solution that would see a decrease in sex-related crimes is a long way off.
At the time Linda told me about the incidents with her father, she was in counseling for help with the emotional toll that her earlier marriage had taken on her, which was certainly compounded by earlier incidents. She was diagnosed with anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, and the ramifications of these problems infected our relationship. I went to counseling with her for quite a while, learning how to deal with these issues, combined with my own problems of the time. It helped a lot, but only for a time.
She was able to have her parents attend several counseling sessions, wherein her father had the gall to defend his actions. Her mother chose the path of denial, thus allowing her to stay in the financial arrangement that her marriage offered, despite being loveless, deceitful and filled with tension.
My relationship with Linda lasted only a few years before her issues raised their ugly heads again. She decided to try taming them on her own.
I've not heard from Linda in many years, but recently, I discovered her on Facebook. I saw that she has remarried, still has the same thin but warm smile, and this intelligent, kind and beautiful woman still has that shock of flaming red hair that attracted me like a moth to the light.
Looking at her picture, I was able to smile and remember many good and wonderful things about our time together. But I also still carry guilt for some bad judgment on my part, as the phrase "my conscience still echoes your name" runs through my head.
Today I wonder what we might be doing now if she had not had to say, "He touched me."
As Dodson concludes his article, "Some people are, in the old-fashioned lingo, evil."
Victims of sex crimes, past and present, can find information on help of all kinds at the New Mexico Clearinghouse on Sexual Abuse and Assault Services, (505) 883-8020, online at pages.swcp.com/nmcsap To check your neighborhood for registered sex offenders, visit www.nmsexoffender.dps.state.nm.us.