Occupying Hope.

by

by Diane Mierzwik.

 

Harold sits at the same computer station he occupies every day. He works quietly on decimals, stroking his long white beard before writing calculations on the scratch paper then clicking on what he hopes is the correct answer. Beside him is a decrepit four wheel jumbo folding shopping cart used primarily by immigrant and elderly women walking home with their groceries. Harold’s is filled with a sleeping bag, a tote bag shoved full of clothing and a large, collapsible, fabric lunch bag. Today the lunch bag lays flat, empty. A salty, musty smell emanates from his corner of the classroom.

I have brought in bagels for the students. It’s a tax deduction, motivational supplies for a classroom, though it’s really a charitable donation – feeding the homeless. Harold waits for the other students to get their bagel and cream cheese then gets up to retrieve his portion of the goodies, but forgets the GPS device around his ankle is plugged into the socket below his desk. He hovers, tethered to the wall.

My heart aches for Harold. He is a sixty-three year old homeless felon. When he should be looking forward to retirement with memories of his accomplishments and surrounded by family who share his life history, he has this classroom and his rolling cart.

Harold glances around the room, crawls under his desk and unplugs his ankle bracelet from the wall. He returns to his desk, not bothering to plug back in. He has all day to be sure his ankle bracelet is fully charged, not like the other students who must be plugged in for the full two hours they attend, never moving more than the 18 inches of cord the charging device allows. An uncharged GPS device is a parole violation, noncompliance, and can get you sent back to prison. GPS devices are used to track the most dangerous parolees, gang members, those convicted of unprovoked assault, and sexual predators.

Harold is a sex offender. I don’t know what his offense was, rape or child molestation, and I don’t want to know. He is an old, fragile man. I imagine his hurts, his reasons for turning to crime. I know that 40% of sex offenders were victimized themselves (Gousseland).

*****

My cousin moved to Florida as soon as she could leave the family home. Years later my mom pulled me aside to tell me that my uncle Junior had sexually abused Tina. I thought back to a day in their apartment when Tina and I were kids.

It was a summer day and being skinny ten-year-olds, we were dressed in halter tops and cut-off jeans with flip flops, our skin bronzed by the time spent outside playing in the sun.

Tina was racing out the front door to catch the ice cream truck while I lounged on the couch, sharing a bag of potato chips with my uncle Junior. We both watched Tina leave. He leaned over toward me and said, as if I were his confidant, “Tina has a great body.” I was ten. I stared at Tina, trying to decipher what made her body great and not mine, but the unsettled feeling sitting in my gut that something was wrong, yet camouflaged, leached into my life. The comment ran deeper than I could understand, until all these years later.

“But, you know she lies,” my mom said with certitude, believing in the arithmetic of familiar reality. “She’s seeing a counselor and taking medication because she’s crazy, so….”

“Maybe she’s crazy because she was sexually abused,” I responded, flabbergasted that my mom would suggest that Tina had made it all up.

This is as close to sexual abuse devastation as I have ever been. My uncle is dead now, and what seeps into my memories of him are questions about who else he may have abused. He died while living with one of his daughters, a daughter who had a daughter herself. I wonder if he continued to prey on other young girls or was rehabilitated.

 

*****

Though there are opportunities for rehabilitation within our judicial system, our society has voted over and over to spend money on incarceration, not on rehabilitation. In general, Americans believe that public safety comes in the form of locking up and monitoring the bad guys, not in teaching bad guys to behave differently.

In 1994, following the 1989 abduction of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling in Minnesota, Congress passed a law mandating that all 50 states require sex offenders to register with  law enforcement agencies so authorities could track them. Currently in California, you can go to www.meganslaw.com , type in your zip code, find your neighborhood and find every person registered as a sex offender living near you. The screen allows you to see the person’s address, a picture of the person, and the conviction. Offenders are classified in three tiers. Tier 3 offenders must update their whereabouts every three months with lifetime registration requirements. Tier 2 offenders must register their whereabouts every six months with 25 years of registration, and Tier 1 (which includes minors as young as 14 years old and those convicted of statutory rape or public lewd and lascivious conduct) must update their whereabouts every year with 15 years of registration.
 
When asked about this system, law enforcement personnel will shrug their shoulders. “There’s no enforcement. No resources or funding were included with the law, so we can do nothing about it. Registration is voluntary (unless your parole or probation officer forces you) and being registered does not provide us with any legal benefits when investigating a suspect.”
 
So it is left up to the public to be aware. Most advice givers, including California’s Megan’s Law website, make it clear, “90% of child victims know their offender, with almost half of the offenders being a family member. Of sexual assaults against people age 12 and up, approximately 80% of the victims know their offenders…[who]gain access to their victims through deception and enticement, seldom using force…typically occur[ring] within a long-term, on-going relationship between the offender and victim and escalat[ing] over time.”
 
I once asked the parole office psychologist, in her opinion, what should be done about the sex offenders since they presented such a risk to society. “People have more to fear from their own families and friends than these guys. You trust your family and friends to take care of your kids. You don’t leave your kids with strangers.”
 
I can’t bring myself to imagine the victims of the students in my classrooms. Instead I imagine the students as victims, help them with general skills and coach them through filling out job applications and writing resumes.  I attempt to gloss over the question on all job applications: Have you ever committed a felony? I encourage students to do their best, gain skills, and maybe, just maybe they can succeed against a foreboding future. When pressed, I explain to students their options: answer honestly and you may convince your new employer to hire you because of your honesty; answer dishonestly and you will be found out and fired, a firing that will then add to an already poor work history.
 
“But at least I would have work for the two months before they find out,” Jeremy tells me, picking at the dry rough skin around his thumbnail. “What other options do I have? I’m only 42 years old.” He glances at the old timers in the class seeming to imply that he still has a long way to go before giving up. “If I mark yes, I won’t get the job. No one will hire a sex offender.”
 
I am surprised by his announcement. Among the criminal population, sex offenders are considered the bottom rung, often attacked and harassed, at best ignored. I have to assume by his admission that his offense is slight. Rarely does a student admit his crime, especially those wearing ankle bracelets.
 
Many students will offer the crime they have been accused and convicted of, albeit only so they can downplay it, “All I did was…” or blame someone else, “I wasn’t doing anything when this cop…” or try to convince you they’ve been wrongly convicted, “I was carrying drugs for…,” but sex offenders stay quiet. They are careful and charming.
Pops brings roses for me, from “God’s garden,” when I visit on Thursdays. He smiles sweetly, perhaps cunningly, and tells me how nice I look. I thank him, sure to leave the flowers on the desk of the classroom, sure not to hint that there is any relationship other than teacher and student. And I offer him the resources available in the classroom.  
 
Grossman, Martis, and Fichtner point out that treatment does not eliminate sexual crime, though research does show that it can decrease the sex offense (358).

*****
Soccer practice in my community is held at the local park. Surrounded by tract houses and apartments, the park has a playground, basketball courts and wide open fields for baseball, football and soccer.

One cold and windy day I stayed in my car while my son practiced soccer on the other side of the field. I watched as the team finished their last drills, collected their equipment then began walking toward all the parents sitting in their cars.

 
Having left his soccer ball behind, my son left the group and ran back. He didn’t rejoin the group, instead taking his time kicking his soccer ball in front of him as he made his way toward me.
 
At one point my son looked away from his soccer ball and toward a lone man along the edge of the field, stopping briefly then resuming his solitary walk toward the car.
 
“I feel bad,” he said as he climbed into his seat.
 
“About what?” I started the engine, happy for the cocoon of safety we had in our car.
 
“That man asked me to kick the ball to him, but I ignored him. I didn’t even answer.” He looked at me, concerned, narrowing his eyes.
 
“No, you did the right thing. That man should not be talking to children he doesn’t know at the playground. If a man you don’t know tries to play with you, that is not right. Don’t feel bad,” I told him with bravado, as if my words alone could protect a guileless child, stop the leak of potential harm into our lives.
 
At the next soccer practice, the man was there again, trying to ingratiate himself into games of basketball young kids were playing. I called the police and reported a suspicious man at the playground. My friend pulled up the Megan’s Law website on her laptop, and this man’s face stared back at us from the screen. The police showed up and made the man leave.
 
Technically, he had done nothing wrong. As I watched the man walk away from the park and the police officers drive off in their car, the fear of my inability to protect the vulnerable people in my life devoured my assumptions about the safety of my neighborhood park.
 
Grossman et al. (1999) cautions that “any social project substituting treatment for imprisonment of sexual aggressors must be accompanied by vigorous research” (349).
 
The man was told to go home, stay away from the park. He lived in my community. His hibernating threat seemed to lodge itself into every choice I now made.

*****
The day I was substitute teaching in one of our classrooms, a new student came in to enroll. Mark completed the placement assessments with high scores, so I had him start in higher level curriculum, but he seemed to lose interest, instead drumming on the table with his pencils until I would look up, walk over to him, and remind him he was in a classroom and needed to complete work.
 
“Do you need help?”
 
“No.”
 
“Then try to concentrate.”
 
It isn’t unusual for students to become fatigued after a few hours of working in class, but often their parole conditions mandate that they stay for the full six hours.
 
Mark returned after the half-hour lunch break and seemed intent on staring at me. I met his gaze occasionally to shake my head at him or raise my eyebrows, trying to indicate that his behavior was not acceptable, but mostly I ignored him, calculating that class was over soon and he could start fresh the next day.
 
As the classroom day came to a close, most students left, until there was only myself, three other students and Mark, who was mostly playing with his shirt and staring at me.
 
When I looked up from grading papers at my desk to check on Mark, he was masturbating while staring at me. I calmly walked to the door of the classroom and waited for a parole agent to come by. When an agent did come by, he walked in, came out and told me everything was fine. “What do you expect, they’re criminals,” he said as he strolled away.
 
When I reentered the class, Mark was signing out. At the end of the day, I filed a report with his agent. Mark was sent back to prison for violating the conditions of his parole. He would be out on parole again in six months with the stipulation that he was not to return to my classroom.
 
I spent the next few weeks thinking about what I should have done differently. When I noticed he was staring at me, I should have directed him that his staring was inappropriate, I should have made him change his seat so he couldn’t stare at me, I should have…. Speculation about how I could have avoided this minor atrocity led to my own feelings of ineptitude.
 
My heart tells me we are all wounded and we all try to do better. Some of us are more wounded than others and have more to overcome. I have advantages most people don’t. So the advantages I have had made me believe, that others, given the right love and opportunities, would do better. I believed that not everything is inevitable. I may be able to change the future for someone if I can only anticipate it.

*****
Harold’s parole ends in three weeks. He will continue to be listed on websites as a convicted sex offender. But he will no longer wear his ankle bracelet, or have correctional supervision. If he is found talking to children at the park, or loitering by a school, he will be asked to leave. The police can do nothing more, until he is accused of molesting a child. Then it will be too late; the damage will have been done.
 
He is, of course, welcome to continue coming to class. The contract with California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation allows for students who are not current CDCR Parolees to continue attending as long as the non-CDCR population does not exceed 5% of the total enrollment. I encourage Harold to continue to attend class. He smiles, though because of his beard, I can only tell by the slant of his eyes.
 
I am buoyed by tainted hope that this classroom, that computer, those bagels are preventing crime in an imperfect world.
 
 “What else would I do?” he asks.

Works Cited

 
Gousselan, Dr. Pascale. “Sexual Abuse, Incest and Memories.” Thesis Mid-Manhattan Institute of Psychoanalysis, 2007. 11 March 2010 http://www.pascalegousseland.com/work/s13.html .  
Grossman, Linda S., Ph.D., Brian Martis, M.D. and Christopher G. Fichtner, M.D. “Are Sex Offenders Treatable? A Research Overview.” Psychiatric Services 50:349-361. American Psychiatric Association. 12 March 2010 http://psychservices.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/50/3/349 .
“How to Protect Yourself and Your Family.” State of California Department of Justice: Office of the Attorney General.  11 March 2010 http://www.meganslaw.ca.gov/protect.aspx?lang=ENGLISH .
“H.R. 1375, The No Parole for Sex Offenders Act.” Washington Watch. 13 March 2010 http://www.washingtonwatch.com/bills/show/111_HR_1375.html .