You're Wrong About - Sex Offenders

Episode Date: August 7, 2019

“Things are not going to get better if we make the people who scare us seem more powerful.” Mike tells Sarah about the myths of sex crimes, the reality of child abuse and the importance of unsympathetic protagonists. Digressions include frozen pizza, millennials (obvs) and vaccination rates. Mike can only name one state that borders Nevada.Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

I'm actually very monogamous in terms of romantic desire, but I am, like, co-parent monogamously to a lot of animals. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we don't give a shit if people accuse us of loving pedophiles. Oh my god. Oh my god. I've been nervous about this one all day because I'm like, what is she going to say about sex offenders? There's so many ways this could go wrong. Well, this was said on Twitter very recently because here's the thing. You had a big article

out recently. I did. This is why we're doing this. And someone on Twitter had a Michael Hobbs loves pedophiles thread. Oh yeah. And I was thinking about that and I was like, well, first of all, that's kind of my thing. And second of all, isn't that interesting as an insult because if you actually think about it, it doesn't really scan as an insult to me because, like, all of us are capable of loving people who are otherwise great and unharmful and unscary people in the world who have

unsafe sexual desires that they are not in control of having and didn't ask to have. Oh man, you're already, like, fast-forwarding to the spoilers of this entire episode. Coming up in this week's, well, I mean, that's what I've been thinking about. And also, I didn't read your article because I wanted to be debunkable. And so everyone else got to read it, but me. I've just been thinking about my own personal response to that. And it's like, yeah, you know what? Love the pedophile, hate the pedophilia. Sure. Yes.

I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Having and Post. That took us a while to get there this time. I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm working on a book about the satanic panic. And we're on Patreon at patreon.com slash you're wrong about. And today we're talking about sex offenders. We've got some tension to shake off. Let's shake it out. I feel so weird about this one. This is another one that I feel so weird about. Yeah.

Not only because like my inbox is already a mess, but just like now that I know the intolerably high rates of child abuse, it's like thinking about victims of child abuse and thinking about the ways that this topic can like really hurt victims of abuse. And so I'm nervous about like in some way trivializing the experiences of people. And that is like exactly what I don't want to do. Let's talk about that because this is something that has come up for me a lot as someone who's always arguing for the rights of people who've done bad things. Yeah.

And essentially taking the argument that if you do a bad thing, it doesn't make you a bad person. The question people seem to bring to me, isn't it disrespectful to victims of crimes to advocate for the human rights of the perpetrators of those crimes? And my answer to that at this point is I don't want to legislate anyone's ability to forgive anyone else. And people who have been directly affected by violent crime are going to also respond in a really wide range. And some people take therapeutic comfort in forgiving the people who have assaulted them or their loved ones or killed their loved ones. Some people, I think, find vengeance as a means of coping.

And the U.S. government also finds vengeance as a means of coping as it will turn. Yeah. And the thing is, why does the government as an entity need to cope? I mean, my sort of you're wrong about journey with this. I think like most just sort of generally informed people, I always knew that sex offender registries had like kind of gotten out of control, right? And you hear these stories of people that get arrested for public urination or people that get arrested for sex work or these crimes that really aren't about keeping children safe have kind of ended up on these registries. That was my understanding of sort of the ways in which the registries had gone too far. But then I started looking into this and I ended up interviewing

four people that are on the registry and warning to everybody like they did it. Like they did bad stuff. Most of the people on the registry did really, really, really uncomfortable things. And so I think it's really important and you know my thing with homelessness that like I think it's really important to tell the stories of like the unlikeable homeless people. And it's always important. Yeah. Like not every story can be like this person is a victim of circumstance and they're this perfect saint because then you get into this place where you're like, oh, well, you know, we shouldn't arrest people for public urination anymore. But like everybody else is fine. Right. Like that gets you into this place where it's like you take all the saints away.

But the whole system gets to stay in place. And the core idea of the rottenness stays intact of the bad apples. Yeah. And so I think I should probably start with like how this story came about which is that it's gonna be all fake names from here on out, by the way. Can we do names from the movie Titanic since we did the Poseidon Adventure last time? Yeah. Yeah. Slightly lighter vibes. Do you want to give me what's the first male name in the credits of Titanic? The first male character who shows up is Brock Levin. Okay. So we'll call him Brock. So he was 24 years old. He was working at Family Dollar. He was living in Nashville and he downloaded a porno clip featuring a 16 year old girl. And so he says it's wrong. I think it's

wrong. When is it advertised as like 16 year old girl in sexual situation? So this is very interesting. So it's yes, in the title of the clip, it says something, something 16 years old. The prosecutor says she's 14. Yeah. Well, you know what? All those clips about milfs, not all those people are actually mothers. Yeah. I mean, right? So like how literally can you prove that he was taking that title? That's the thing is like who knows what was going through his head. He says this is not something that he was downloading a lot of. Who knows whether I believe that or not. Like this is the clip that he got busted with. It was from a file sharing website. He gets busted. He admits to it. He gets a court appointed lawyer who specializes in immigration law. So

not somebody who knows this field or the sex offender registry particularly well because the prosecution says that she's 14. The crime is aggravated. Why is the prosecution claiming she's 14? Do they know about the details of the clip's manufacturer? Well, this is the thing is that they never present him with any proof that she's 14. So I don't know how the science and I actually looked quite hard to find out like what is the science behind like are they putting clips on these websites? And then is it like you should recognize that she was this age that carries a higher sentence? Well, it's also it's a little fucked up because he thought he was downloading something of a 16 year old, right? So it's like if he had downloaded something of a 19 year old

girl and she turned out to be 15, that would be unfair. You know what I was just listening to on the radio the other day, actually, I think it's just called you're 16, you're beautiful in your mind. And it's like a song that adult men sing and it's about a 16 year old girl. I'm not saying it's good. Like I'm just saying that this is a socially approved desire. I mean, I talked to a lot of pedophilia researchers for this. And like one of them told me he's like, we don't actually have a problem with people being attracted to 16 year old girls, right? Like have you seen a jeans commercial? Have you seen a commercial for anything really? Yeah. And he showed me this thing. There's something actually called the Tanner scale, which measures sort of the stages of puberty. And so

Tanner scale one is like totally prepubescent. Tanner scale five is like fully adult. And he's showing this to me as we're talking. And he's saying like, which one of those do you see the most in commercials, right? And it's all like Tanner scale three or four, right? Like the bodies that we sexualize are not adult female bodies, right? Like in general, they don't have large hips. They don't have large breasts. They don't have that figure. You know what it is? It is the most reliably lucrative female body type. It's what you go with if you don't want to take risks. Yes. And so if you're talking about an industry that sells the female body, it's like, yes, like let's have every restaurant sell hamburgers, people always buy them. Right, right. And so, you know, you don't

want to defend somebody who knowingly downloaded a clip that says 16 year old girl, right? Like this is not an accident or something, right? So I'm not going to defend it. But it is also when you're thinking of deviant behavior, there are of course levels of deviance, right? To me, this does not fall in the like super duper deviant category. And so what happens is because she's under 16, the charge is aggravated, attempted sexual exploitation of a minor, which sounds bad. It sounds like he tried to abduct her at gunpoint. Exactly. Also, because he got it from a file sharing website, you know, like, you know, those old websites like, I don't know, Napster, whatever, where it's like uploading and downloading.

Yeah. Oh, so then other people downloaded from his file. Well, this is the thing. There's no evidence that anybody actually downloaded the file, but it had the capability to upload the file. So he was also charged with aggravated attempt to distribute. Great. So again, it's clearly, you know, you're taking every single possible charge and just like winnowing in there. Yes. And so he's facing eight years in prison, if he goes to trial. He has a public defender who never sort of walked him through what it would mean to be on the sex offender registry. He had already been in jail for a month. He couldn't afford bail. He had already lost his job by this point. His wife and kid at home were, you know,

without him, without the income, like they were both totally desperate. And so they told him, if you sign this plea deal, you can go home today. You know what? I am never signing anything that anyone ever gives to me if they say sign this and you can go home. Because as far as I can tell, that never works out for anyone. Like that's always what you hear. This is like, oh, it won't cost much just your voice of the American legal system. Oh my God. And so in this deal, the deal is he gets eight years of probation and he gets 15 years on the sex offender registry. And so right after that, he moves back in with his fiance and his son. He wants all this to go away, right? He wants to do everything by the book. He wears the ankle

monitor. He signs up for everything. He feels that all the paperwork he has to do to register his address, et cetera. About a month after he moves in to his place with his fiance and son, his probation officer calls his landlord and says, I just want you to know you've got a sex offender living there. Oh, God. And so the next morning they find on their porch a notice saying you have 72 hours to leave. And so this is actually something that comes up a lot in literature that the collateral damage on the families of sex offenders is something that nobody talks about. A lot of sex offenders have spouses. A lot of sex offenders have kids. I mean, we never talk about the families of people whose society has condemned.

Exactly. And so he moves into a homeless shelter because there's basically nowhere else that he can go. His fiance also moves into a homeless shelter. And because they're separated by gender in Nashville, she moves into a female one. He moves into a male one. She sort of bounces around. She's able to get a job. She's able to move into a place. But he's never lived with her again. He has lived in transitional housing for veterans because he used to be in the Navy. And homeless shelters and sleeping in cars ever since. This is all much later on. But eventually the marriage breaks up because he's not bringing any money. He can't find work. He's doing day labor for years because that's the only work that he can get. He's standing outside of Home Depot and

just getting $10 an hour construction jobs or whatever. And she eventually kind of runs out of money. And she moves back to Ohio to be with her parents because she's now effectively a single mom. Like financially speaking, she's a single mom because he's not bringing that much income. And so he ends up divorced. He finds somebody else. Finally, nobody wants to rent a home to a sex offender, obviously. So it takes him two years. He finally gets a landlord who is willing to rent him his attic. And so the landlord hears his story. Brock tells him everything. The landlord seems kind of cool with it. We all make mistakes. They do all the paperwork, etc. And then again, his probation officer calls his new landlord and says, I just want you to know that your address

is now going to be on all of these private sector apps that allow people to see where the sex offenders are in their neighborhood. So it's not going to say you're a sex offender, but it's going to say like one, two, three, four Elm Street is a sex offender residence. And so of course his landlord is like, no, like you can't live here. This isn't worth it for me. Does that mean that people are going to harass you or that your your address is going to end? So okay. So what happens? I mean, this is a huge, this is a huge thing with sex offender registries that there's a lot of vigilante violence. So there's been there was a guy in Ottawa who got the list of sex offenders because it's actually it's private in Canada, only the law enforcement has it. But somehow he got it.

And he went on a killing spree. He just started murdering them one by one. And he only got to before they arrested him because I don't think he was very competent. But like, that's a thing that happens. And like, you know, a much more common thing that happens is when you have these public notification rules, the one in Tennessee actually isn't that bad. There's other states where you literally have to send a postcard to everybody within a two block radius, which most people sort of can't do themselves because they don't know everybody's address. So there's a private company. Oh, my God. The prison recommends to you that you pay 300 bucks and they'll do the community notification for you. Oh my God, for postcards forever stamps do not

cost that much, you assholes. I mean, the profiteering aspect of this is unbelievable. Like, there's so many private companies that do like all the GPS is private companies. Oh, yeah. A lot of sex offenders have to take a polygraph test every month. Those are private companies and you have to pay for it yourself. Alabama just passed a law requiring chemical castration of all of their sex offenders. What? And you have to pay for it yourself. What? So it's like, you're paying a pharmaceutical company for you to take a pill. I believe it's every day. So that you don't have sexual urges. Yeah. I've been to Alabama and it's not continually on fire and yet it's like you're really reflects that idea. And the whole thing is like, you know, Brock is telling me all

this. Every job that he's ever had, he's been promoted like three times. He used to work at a used car dealership because he worked for two months with no pay to convince the owner to give him a chance. And then he got this job and then he eventually worked his way up to being the general manager of this used car dealership. But then he lost the job because his probation officer didn't file his paperwork correctly. He got pulled over for a busted tail light and the cops said there's a warrant out for your arrest because you didn't register your address. Oh God. He's like, the probation officer has been to my house. Like they come like every month to do an inspection. It's a huge pain in the ass. And what had turned out was that the probation officer had been visiting

him but never wrote down his address. And there was now a new probation officer that had come in and the old probation officer hadn't actually given her like the new information of like, here's where Brock is staying. And so through no fault of his own, I've seen the court documents. The court admits like, oh yeah, he's innocent, but we're going to send him to jail anyway. Like a crime is a crime. Even if it's not his fault and he had no knowledge that a crime was occurring. Exactly. And so like, you know, the thing that he said to me was I've lost everything so many times. You listen to this story and it's like he gets a job like this happened three times that he's ended up in jail again for probation violations. One of his probation violations was for using

a LinkedIn profile. Because as a sex offender, he is barred from using the internet for anything other than education or work. And I get and then like LinkedIn is like, it's a work social media thing. So it's another gray area where you can get snatched. Well, exactly. So he set up a LinkedIn profile to look for work. And then his probation officer says, you know, we've received word that you have a social media profile. And he's like, yes, to get work. And they're like, nope, sorry, boom. And he ends up going back to jail for another month. Last time he was in jail, he ended up in jail for nine months. His employer, he works at a diner now washing dishes, his employer testified at his trial and said like, this guy's a good employee, you really don't need to imprison him

for this was another one where he had an email address that he didn't register with them. They said it was only going to be three months. But then there's now this thing where if you need to get out of jail, you need to show the probation system that you have a place to live or else they won't let you out of jail. Why are we coming up with all these excuses to keep people in jail longer when you know, when jails are really straining like really over budget, really have way too many people and like jails often don't have the the equipment or the accommodations or the degree of medical care that they really need for people who are spending long periods of time in there because they weren't designed for people to be in for months or years. It's like, why are we like,

wow, we're having all these problems and it's really hard to accommodate this many people. Let's keep them in for longer and scoop up more. It's to save the children, Sarah. I mean, that literally is like that becomes the only three words that matter. It's funny because I I know a lot of delightful children and never do they turn to me, you know, with their their eyes full of wonder and wisdom and say, Sarah, I want you to incarcerate thousands of people for me somehow. Like they've never said that to me, you know, although their enunciation is not great. But so he ends up serving nine months in jail by the time he gets a place and he's still luckily this boss really likes him. Yeah, thank God he randomly has this dreamboat diner boss who's probably

Michael Dukakis with a mask on. But so, you know, he gets his old job back. But of course, this has always been the situation, but he can't get promoted because he can't hold a management position if he could supervise employees under 18. So there are no employees under 18 at this particular diner. But the role means that he could so he can't get promoted any further. So he has to wash dishes. So that seems like a weird area for the law to get involved in like existentially. This is possible. And therefore, yes, we're going to intervene. And so I mean, one of the things that you know, a lot of the researchers said that I spoke to was there has been this subtle shift that I think sex offenders are sort of the tip of the iceberg of that like the criminal justice

system has really become a management system, right? That like there's vastly more people on parole and probation than there are people in prison. And a lot of the people in prison are there because of parole violations and probation violations. And these things are completely nuts. It's like Florida has one where if you don't have a fixed address, which most of the sex offenders in Florida don't, you have to come in person and re-register every three days. Oh my god. So it's like if you have a job, if you have any kind of life, of course you're going to miss one, right? Of course you're going to sleep in. Something's going to wrong. And then oops, it's a probation violation. Another guy that's on the registry has to pay $200 a month for court

order treatment. So he's in therapy once a week, which is like, I think it's good like for people to be in therapy, but it's also weird for the state to charge him money. And then if he doesn't pay, he goes to jail again. I think there's something really weird happening too where like people's lives are being supervised and micromanaged and controlled. They tell you every decision you can or can't make in your life and yet they're not paying for any of it. Exactly. It's like having the worst parents in the world. It's like having mistrenchable for a parent who orders you around and makes you pay for all of it. Exactly. Do you think some of this has to do with a feeling of one upsmanship in the tough on crime arms race, you know, where like if people have to

be continually more tough on crime than their opponents, that inevitably if politicians get involved in these tough on crime pissing contests, that competition is going to manifest in policies that don't do anything positive for anyone, but are, you know, are the results of some guy at some point trying to prove to voters that he could be tougher on crime than his opponent? Yeah. I mean, to me, I think, you know, so much of the panic around sex offenders. And I think this is going to be like the most of the rest of this episode is really about the misconceptions that we have about child abuse. I mean, I think like everyone kind of knows now that like the stranger danger myth of child abuse is not true. It's only seven percent of children

are abused by someone they don't know. Well, not everyone knows, but a lot of people know. I think a lot of millennials know because we were really raised on those fears. Yeah. Yeah. And we were those kids who were all supposed to get kidnapped. And so at one point we looked around and were like, we're still here because the millennial anthem. I think it is like a good place to start with this is that like child abuse is high. The numbers we have, the numbers are all over the place, of course, but there's a couple of like literature reviews of this. And they say it's around five percent of boys and 12 percent of girls experience abuse before they're 18. Sexual abuse. Yes. Sexual abuse. Yeah. And so two thirds of people who are abused are abused

as teenagers after age 12. And one third of the people who get abused are abused before age 12. And one of the really fascinating things that I had no idea about before all this is that it's about 40 percent of the children that are abused before their age 12 are abused by other children. It's mostly children under 12 being abused by children older than 12. And in almost all of these cases, the older child is acting out abuse that they have experienced. And it's one of their ways of kind of dealing with it, right? That like, this is what has been done to me. So I have to do it to you type of thing. And to me, it's like there's so much complexity in all of this. And it's like, what do you do with like a 10-year-old

that like assaults his brother or like a kid on the playground? And there's, I read a story about a girl that used to run up to kids on the playground and pull their pants down. And like she kind of meant it playfully. It seemed like it didn't really seem like she knew what she was doing. But like that's the kind of thing that has been criminalized. Like there's a bunch of kids in, I don't know why, but Minnesota is like really punitive. And there's a kid in Minnesota that got 25 years on the sex offender registry for something he did when he was 10. Yeah. And so, wow. I mean, to me, it's just like all of this complexity gets collapsed as soon as we apply the label sex offender. There's about 900,000 people on the registry now.

Which is a lot of people, by the way. Like, we have this idea of like, if someone on the sex offender registry moves into your neighborhood, then like, oh my God, then like that changes everything. And it like, that's almost a million people. Like that means that, I mean, they can be pretty evenly distributed. Yeah. I mean, how many people do you know from Vermont? It's like, it's around the same population as Vermont. I know a lot of people from Vermont. Exactly. They're pretty well distributed. It's a lot of people. Like this is a demographic that matters when you are drafting legislation and whose votes you would otherwise care about. But somehow, we've created this free space in political bingo where like, even though the number of people who

are scapegoated by American law is now kind of a big voting block, like we don't think about courting them. I'm going to run as a soft on crime candidate. This is a huge number of people. And a really important thing is that only 14% of people on the sex offender registry nationwide have had contact with children, like our high risk offenders. I mean, one of the statistics I came across and it's like, it's become this thing now where it's like, anytime you look at anything with any of these systems, it's like, oh, shit, now I have to Google the racism part. And like, I know it's going to be bad, right? Like there's no, there's none of these things where you Google it and you're like, oh, it turns out it's not racist. Okay, that's fine. Oh, it turns out that

everyone was acting in good faith. And yeah, it wasn't just white people that were drafting this. Yeah, exactly. And it's fine. So it's one of the statistics is one in 100 black men are on the sex offender registry. Oh my God. Lee Atwater loves that. Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, and it tells you something that if this is concentrated among certain populations, which we know African Americans are not more likely to have sexual attraction to minors, right? Like, there's there's nothing intrinsic about child sexual abuse to African Americans. If they're getting arrested for this much more like, yeah, you know, you know what is sexual hallmark though of life in black America is getting arrested constantly for any old reason at all. Exactly.

And so to me, it's like the most important thing about it is the way that this has happened really quietly. All the sex offender laws are state run. So there is a federal law, but the federal law doesn't specify a whole lot. Basically, it just says we will revoke your funding if you don't have like these minimum standards, like you have to have a registry, it has to be publicly available, blah, blah. Like there's a couple of other technical things. But then what's happened, and you know, really the history of this is that like the minute that gets put in place, that gets put in place in 1996. And then since then has just been this domino effect where one state will pass like a stricter sex offender law, like they'll, you know, increase the sentence from

10 years to 15 years. And then the state next door will say, well, we don't want a bunch of sex offenders flooding over the border, right? So California tightens their laws and then Nevada is like, well, we don't want to get all of their sex offenders. So we better make it 15. Wow. Right. And then the next state over says, well, we don't want to get all of Nevada's sex offenders. So like we need to make it 15. That's so weird. This is basically the cycle that has just happened thousands of times, like very quietly, I looked up a bunch of random, you know, these laws passing and things. And it's always like really small stuff. It's like one of the ones in Tennessee last year was there's now a thousand foot radius around schools and parks and I believe churches.

And they just quietly added this provision to also make it around child care centers. So it's like, it sounds like a small thing like that somewhere that children are. And yet there are a lot of neighborhood child care centers that are just some lady named Karen's. Exactly. And so now all the Karen's have radiuses. Exactly. And so this is what keeps happening is that, you know, Miami has now a 2,500 foot radius around all these categories. And there's, they put out a report after this came out saying literally the only places that you can live in Miami are the airport and the Everglades. Literally everywhere else. Once you draw all the 2,500 foot circles around everything, there's nowhere else. So what this ended up causing was 75 sex offenders

all living together under a bridge. Which sounds like the worst reality show in the whole world. It then expanded to 300 people because basically everyone in the state ended up going there because it was like the only sort of quote unquote amnesty available. And then this is fucking crazy to me. And then the city leaders instead of being like, wow, this is like a huge problem. We should probably get some housing options for these people. They arrested them all for vagrancy. So it's literally, it's like, you can make the argument that lots of things we do in America makes people homeless and then we arrest them for their homelessness. But this is direct. It's like, I have given you no other option than homelessness. And then I have said, how dare you be homeless? I'm taking you to

jail. How dare you not go live among the gators. Yeah, exactly. This is the thing. And so many people are put in a situation where it's like, now we're not going to kill you, but we're just going to make it impossible for you to live. And then anytime you try and survive, we will arrest you somehow. And it's just like, I think policymakers don't necessarily think it through, because again, like if this is a thing, if you don't see someone as human, you don't like, I wish he would literally kill himself. You just think that if you push them and push them farther and farther away, then they eventually will go poof and just disappear because you won't be able to see them anymore. Because you can tell that there's not a goal here. This is not a plan. This

is not chess. This is just like continual one-upsmanship and legislation by anxiety. Yes. I mean, this is the second person that I wanted to tell you about. So the second person in Titanic is Louis Bodine. Okay, Louis. So Louis is like exactly the person who personifies exactly what you're saying of just a person we would rather not think about. So in 2002, Louis molested his own daughter. He told me the details. I am not going to describe the details. She tells the mom and then the mom confronts him and then he admits to it. And so the family stays together and there isn't another incident after that? Yeah. So the family stays together. According to him, there isn't

another incident. She eventually tells a friend. The friend reports it to the cops. So he ends up serving eight years. He's now out. He's now on parole. And so as a condition of his parole, he's on the sex fund registry for life. And he says they're now in contact. They're working on rebuilding their relationship. She's obviously profoundly damaged and profoundly angry. I interviewed this guy a couple of times and it's like, I want to be really clear that he's not all that likable. It's not like a redemptive story. Most of us aren't likable. It's because that we expect other people to be likable because we mistakenly think we're likable. And yet maybe we're all just staggering unlikably around. I mean, yes, there are a lot of people

who've done bad things to other people in this world, but there are a lot of them. Right. Well, I mean, to me, it's like, we talked about this with Tonya Harding that it's very difficult to speak about somebody as a human without seeming like you're arguing for them or arguing against them. Right. The minute you have to humanize a person like this, the immediate reaction among people listening to you is like, well, fuck this guy. He molested his daughter. His daughter doesn't care how sorry he is. Yeah. And the question is, what is the end game of the argument? Right. Right. Because what are you arguing for and what are you implicitly arguing against? Exactly. So what are those terms for you with Lewis?

First of all, like most people, this is something I also did not know, the majority of people who offend against children are not pedophiles. They are not attracted to children. So for him, he had recently found out that his wife had been cheating on him a lot with a lot of different people and he was feeling really emasculated. And to him, he says he was just feeling extremely vulnerable. And this was a way of recapturing some form of affection, which is completely gross, I know. But in his brain, that's what was going on. He's never had attraction to children. He's never someone who is like, oh, volunteer to coach the soccer team. He's not someone who's ever tried to have a lot of contact with children. And then I was interviewing this guy, Michael Cito,

who's one of these major experts on pedophilia. And he says, that's really common. A lot of people that offend against children, some of them are what's called hypersexual, where they're basically just like, they'll have sex with anybody. And if a child is the closest person, there was an article in The Atlantic a couple of weeks ago about the serial rapist and his youngest victim was 13 and his oldest victim was 55. It's opportunistic, right? Speaking of this, kind of on the spectrum, there are serial rapists who exclusively target older victims, like the Boston Strangler had older victims. I think Richard Ramirez, a night stalker, had some very old victims, which again is like, it's not necessarily that you're attracted to super old people. It might have more to do

with the fact that they're vulnerable and they are physically at your mercy. And it's related to a different aspect of your pathology and it's related to power. Wildly different motives can motivate the same crime, essentially. So it's really hard to generalize. Right. And this is what this academic was saying, was that like, for treating somebody, if the reason they offended was that they're attracted to children, there's a way to deal with that. If the reason they offended was that they were super high on meth and just like didn't know what they were doing, like drugs and alcohol are a major factor in a lot of abuse of children. The way that he put it was like, not everybody who drives drunk is an alcoholic.

Like you can't look at the act and see the desires behind it. Like this is why you need a qualitative system that can actually interview people and figure out what is driving the abuse. And so for Lewis, it wasn't attraction necessarily. It was just complete emotional breakdown in his own history of abuse. He was abused by both a man and a woman as a child. And he had no other way of coping. He says he vomited right after it. Yeah. And it's an example of someone doing something awful for understandable reasons. Like you add them all up and you're like, I mean, I personally, I can understand knowing what I know of all of the various ways that people respond to feeling powerless and how often it manifests in enacting power over someone with less power than them.

Like it's a common symptom of a lot of problems, I guess is the best way to put it. So it's like, okay, like this, this sucks. This is really terrible. But like this is understandable. And like we can make sense of this as something that a human being did and say, okay, like we can try and figure out how to make sure that this never happens again. Right. And to me, one of the hardest things about this is that when you talk about somebody like this in a factual humanizing way, it can start to sound like the abuse wasn't that big of a deal. Right? If you start saying like, oh, he's not really a pedophile and like he felt super bad afterwards, it can feel to people the same as these shitty arguments of like, well, what was she wearing? Or wasn't she texting with him

afterwards? And I just want to be like crystal clear that like, in no way does this call into question the reality of the abuse or the experience of the victim. But it's like, what I think is really important is if you're putting all of these into the category of pedophile, then you're not dealing with the misogyny, right? Or the narcissism or the impulse control or all of these other things that you need to look in the face if you're going to prevent this from happening. Yeah. Well, and to the whole, you know, I will not defend this distinction. The thing about why guilty people need lawyers is that, you know, the system is not going to come after you if you're the kind of person who it who it comes after and not, you know, billionaire, sex, island,

deadliest game type people. If the system comes after you, it's not going to say, let's give you a proportionate sentence. Like, let's give you something that is reasonable. So like, you don't need someone to stand up for you and necessarily say, this person should go back to their life as if nothing ever happened. Because like, a lot of people shouldn't do that. But also, no one should be destroyed by being shoved into a black hole. Right. Well, I mean, to me, it's like, what do we do with people like this? Right? Like, he's done something unspeakable. If we don't want him to stay in prison for the rest of his life, and some people do, and like, that's the easiest, like that makes it easy. But if you don't think

that he should stay in prison for the rest of his life, it's like, okay, then what do we do? Right? Like, this is a system based on wanting people to disappear and just not wanting to think about it any more than just punishment. So he's now restricted, of course, from living within a thousand feet of schools and childcare centers and all these other places that make it basically impossible to live anywhere in Nashville. It's really hard for him to get a job. I mean, you know, the same stuff that Brock was going through. And it's like, he's now, since we spoke, actually, he had to move into his car because he couldn't afford the rent at the weekly motel that he was staying at. And so if we have this idea of like, these predators that need to be kept

away from children and they need to be restrained at all times, it's like, well, now you've got someone who's homeless and who's like under extreme stress all the time. And if you don't have a residence, you're more likely to be somewhere randomly in public. And also, like, this didn't click into place for me until I spoke to this researcher named Jill Levinson, who's super cool and writes a bunch about this. She pointed out that when you have these radiuses around schools and churches and parks and stuff, they only restrict where people can live and work. They don't restrict where people can just go. So like a thousand feet is actually not that long. It's like a three minute walk. So it's like, once you draw all these circles,

you've restricted somebody from renting an apartment in all of these places. But like, this guy can walk three minutes to a church. He can walk three minutes to a school. Like it's not, you're not actually restricting them from having contact with children. And also, as Levinson also pointed out, like, children are fucking everywhere. Like you go to the grocery store and there's kids there. Like you can't actually restrict people from being near children because there's no like constitutionally acceptable way to do that. All you're actually doing is preventing people from living and working in like 97% of the city. I mean, again, I think this speaks to the fact that this is legislation by emotion.

If you fall into the category of sex offender, that's the ultimate category of criminal. It's the ultimate person in America who is allowed to be abused by the system. And no one will ask why. And no one will say, maybe those screams are a little bit loud. Maybe I should stop pressing this button. Again, I think like so much of what we do to criminals in America is based on the idea that if we hurt them, society somehow by that pain existing will be better. And like that's literally not true. And I don't have the kind of brain that feels it is symbolically true for whatever reason. Right. And so there's been studies on this where one of them looked at 224 abuses in Minnesota and found that residential restriction laws like preventing people from

living in a certain place wouldn't have prevented any of them. There's another one that this is actually really surprising that when they looked at every single sex offender in New Jersey, they found that only 4% had met their victims in the places that are banned by residency restrictions. Oh, that's really interesting. Again, because, you know, power is so intrinsic to this, like that thing of like you walk home and they kidnap you in a van, like that isn't how it works, right? Like they're meeting them in these other places and they're building a relationship, which is how it always works. I mean, just on like the ineffectiveness of sex offender registries, on a sort of basic level, like when a policy is working, you see changes. It's like we lowered

the speed limits and people got in fewer car accidents or like we put in vaccinations in schools and kids got less measles. Like the thing you want to reduce goes down when you change the law. There's never been any evidence of a sex offender registry reducing sex crimes. Really? Yeah, like if it worked, you would have like before we passed the registry, there were this many violations. After the registry, there were fewer. You would see some sort of difference. There's also because the states were so different in when they implemented the laws, you would see like, well, California has a stricter registry than Nevada and they have almost no sex crimes or whatever, but you don't see that. Like there's no response in reality to these laws tightening.

And so it is a sort of like more crossfit thing, which like if it's not working, just do more of the same thing. Well, and I imagine that this has to do with child sexual abuse as it overwhelmingly takes place in this country being kind of an invisible crime because it takes place in households. Yeah. Again, like it does happen, like crimes do happen in public and stranger abductions do happen and like kids have been snatched into vans, but just like in a way that is statistically vanishingly rare. Yeah. And what happens so much more of the time is something that we can't see public policy having an effect on if we're walking down the street saying, well, the van, you know, there don't seem to be many vans out today. So I guess it's

working. And this is, I mean, this gets to the issue of power, right? And so this is something I've been wanting to read to you all episode that I've been reading up on the clergy sex abuse scandal for my white color crime article because like clergy sex abuse is totally white color crime in a way that when we eventually do that episode, I will describe to you. This is the meanest teaser in the entire world. Like how we have to do this soon now because I really want to know why that is. But what I can't get over reading all these old accounts is the extent to which like power is central to abuse, that when you look at the descriptions of how clergy sex abuse happened, it's almost always in the context of someone using their authority to make

creepy shit seem normal. So one of the best studies I came across was actually of adult victims of rapes and other forms of sexual assault by priests. And it's just interviews with people who were victimized and just them describing their experiences. So I want to read this whole thing to you. It's a little bit long. When they're talking about what contributed to the abuse, they say the trust of the leader was stronger than their trust of their own perceptions. In fact, it altered how they interpreted what they were experiencing. For example, when Darla's pastor asked her out to a restaurant for coffee where he used sexual expletives and casual conversation, she was shocked and thrown off balance that a religious

leader would use sexually graphic language. She remembered telling herself that it was more evidence that he's an authentic leader and further reason to trust him. The pastor's language broke social norms and instead of confronting him with his inappropriateness, she allowed him to redefine the social norm. Graphic sexual language became a sign of authenticity. And so I think this is so important for why there aren't very many stranger danger abuses is that what power does is it makes you recalibrate your own gut feelings. It makes you not trust how you feel. You're like, well, that made me feel really uncomfortable, but you know, he's the tennis coach. Yeah. And maybe this is his way of showing me he loves me and I should. I mean, this is, yes.

And so a really important aspect of these clergy sex abuse testimonials is that oftentimes when it happens, the priest is the only person you can go to to talk about it, right? Because they've gained your trust. In half of the cases, they were actually the counselor, like the official counselor to their victim, right? So it's like you gain the person's trust and you monopolize their trust, right? That you are the person in their life that they would go to if somebody else did this to them. There's also something called the normalcy bias, which I also didn't know about before I started reading for this. Just to add to the darkness of this episode, we're going to throw 9-11 into this too. So this is awful. It's like

all awful, everything in this episode. All right. Well, we're just embracing the cartoonish darkness of it all. So that's good. Yeah. Okay, 9-11. This is one of the researchers that studies the normalcy bias. Ripley documents normalcy bias in situations such as the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, where many people in the stricken towers stayed at their desks in uncertainty waiting for clarification from others about what to do rather than evacuating. I didn't know that. And that also makes me think of Kiddy Genevies, right? Because you're like, a woman is screaming on the street, but I really want it to not be something terrible. I want it to be just regular screaming and everything's okay out there, really. Although the situations

of a religious leader acting inappropriately in a terrorist attack are dramatically different, the uncertainty about what's really happening, the disbelief that this could be happening, and the fear of being wrong and being socially embarrassed are similar. And I think this is a really big explanation for why power and abuse are so linked. It's because you only do that with powerful people, right? You're only like, oh, this is going to return to normal because I'm in good hands, right? You do that with trust. So the only power that strangers have over you is physical. Yeah. And surprise. And surprise. They don't have the power of trust. They don't have the power of a uniform. They don't

have the power of, they tell you something and it seems authoritative automatically. They don't have any of those powers. So this is why it's so important. And this is what Michael Sito, this pedophile researcher talked to me about, was that if we're going to have any system that actually protects children from abuse, you need all these other systems, right? That you need all these internal accountability mechanisms within power, like within institutions of power. You also need really good sex ed and consent education for kids when they're super young, right? You need counselors that can see the signs of abuse. Kids that are sexually abusing other kids is usually a sign of abuse. And schools should know this, parents should know this,

counselors should know this. There's all these other systems that need to be working. And they all involve the opposite of making it disappear. They all involve the opposite of finding the offenders and shoving them outside the margins of society. They all involve, okay, we have to sit down and talk about it a lot and bring all of this into the light. This is how I think of social change happening is there are people who have the capacity to delve deep on the issue of being pragmatic about sex crimes. And we also have greater capacities for empathy than we're using right now. This idea that we're going to solve the problem by removing the contagion, like this is not a contagion-based problem. This is something in the human that

we need to figure out how to manage problems. And it's also, I mean, to me, it's also the extent to which we put everything into criminal justice. Like that's the only institution we trust. Because it's the one that tells us people are bad. If we go to Madison, it's like, well, there's this tumor and we're like, fuck you. Yeah. I mean, I keep thinking of somebody like Lewis, who is on the verge of homelessness. And it's like, if he had another system, if he was able to live in some sort of halfway house where there were counselors available, if there were some sort of municipal projects of companies that want to hire people that are trying to get back on their feet and have a rehabilitative

aspect of work, right? And he lived in subsidized housing and he could just have a quiet life with these other institutions supporting him. With minimal distractions and with minimal daily stressors. And maybe fall in love with somebody and build a new house. I mean, it's like the recidivism rates for sex offenders are extremely low, right? It's only 10% of sex offenders reoffend within 10 years. Wow. Among other forms of criminals, it's 83%. Really? It's like a fucking huge gap. And also with sex offenders, the risk of reoffending goes down every single year. So after 16 and a half years, you're no more likely to offend than any member of the general population. Really? Wow. That's amazing, actually. It's amazing that the

rates are that low considering how tortured you are by daily life. Well, I mean, truly. I mean, it's also weird that 86% of people that are on the sex offender registries, that's their first offense. Really? So that indicates the extent to which we are pulling in people who are not career criminals. These are not people that are doing a bunch of terrible stuff and then they get caught. Way back when the justification for keeping people in the system forever is that they're hardened criminals and there's no hope for them and they just got to stay in the black hole forever. This became a pirate voice at some point. But if someone's first offense and every kind of reasonable approach tells you that given a few resources and kind of having their case

competently managed, you have every reason to believe they'll be able to reintegrate into society and be safe and productive, punishing them as if there's no hope for them can only then be seen as revenge. Yeah. I mean, there's this weird thing where this issue has actually gone to the Supreme Court that in 2003 there was a court challenge of somebody saying in Alaska that the application of sex offender registries retroactively so people that committed their offense before the registry existed were being put on the registry and they said this was the ACLU was arguing that this is unconstitutional because it's punitive. You're applying a punishment retroactively and the Supreme Court and this drives me insane ruled, no, it's not punitive

because its purpose is administrative. It can be both Supreme Court, haven't you read Kafka? And this is like this, I don't care what the purpose was, right? Like if the outcome is it's punitive, which like we know that if I had to send a postcard to every single one of my neighbors saying I'm a sex offender, like that's punitive, right? Like that's social ostracism, that's abuse, that's potentially like physical abuse or my children being beat up at school, which happens all the time. Or if you have to pay $300 to do it, which is like exactly where one of the places we know it hurts for an American, which is their bank account. Yes. And so it drives me nuts is the way that it's always justified on these like narrow legal

grounds, like, oh no, we're not trying to be punitive. It's like, well, you're not not trying. Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, they're saying that like technically this information is available, like somebody could go and get public records, you know, and make a request, but like having something available on an app and having something available like in a filing cabinet in a government building, those are not the same thing. Like they're both technically available, but they're not the same thing. And so yeah, I mean, what gets to me too is that like, there's no other crime where this is required, right? Like the person that lives next door to me might have a domestic abuse charge. And he doesn't have to inform, you know, he doesn't have to stay away from areas where

like wives are. Where wives congregate. He doesn't have to stay away from home goods. Yeah, exactly. Yes. And so it's like, it's only on sex offenders that we apply this logic that like, I have a right to know who is nearby, right? Like it's, it's no other category of crime. They're trying now to set up registries for domestic abuse. They're trying to set up registries for animal abuse. Like the logic of registries is now spreading to other issues. And we've seen with sex offenders that like, it does literally nothing. I just don't think registries are a sign of a thriving democracy. Yeah. I mean, in other countries, the way that they do it, there's this thing in the Netherlands

where to work with children, you have to have like this certificate. It's kind of like when you become a bartender, it's like you go online and you do some dumb thing and you show up like, oh, I have a bartending certificate. Yeah, there's a bartending academy that I used to always see when I was on my way to my dumb non bartending college classes and was sorely tempted but never went in. Yeah. But this is the thing is like, everyone who applies to work with children, like daycares, whatever, has to have this certification. But like, there's a lot of reasons why people don't have that certification. And there's a lot of reasons why people don't apply to work at daycares. So like, there's no list that the daycare center like checks,

like, oh, John is on it and Steve isn't like, it's just people that don't have the certificate. If you're on some, there's a registry of people that have committed crimes against children, they can't get the certificate. So all you need is that little middleman in between that like, you've achieved your goal of people not being near children, which I actually think is very reasonable. Like if you offend against a child, you can't be a teacher like that seems completely fine to me. But like, you haven't then created all of this extra stigma and made it completely impossible for somebody to rejoin their life. But here's a key difference though. That was the Netherlands, which as far as I can tell is a country of happy bike riding lesbians.

She's all day. And I mean, as you mentioned earlier, we're putting people in the situation where they're the most likely to reoffend like no one has ever asked like, and then what, and then what, right? Like these basic questions. And then what is not a prosecutor's job, Michael, haven't you watched Law and Order? You do the case. And then the foreman says guilty. And then there's like kind of a discordant, humming music. It's like, you know, and then the cops are put on the person who's has been found to be a criminal. And then they're taken away off screen. And then you play footsie with your assistant. Seriously, like the way we think about crime in America, the dominant

narrative is like, they get poof, like they just don't exist. You never say and then what? Yeah, yeah. Can I end with something on a good note? Yes, I'm very impressed that you're able to do that. I mean, it's all darkness, but this is like the brightening darkness that we live in. This is the hope at the bottom of the Pandora's box of tough on crime. So first of all, I didn't know this until I listened to a bunch of podcasts with lawyers that prosecute these cases. And I find this weirdly inspiring that there is a finite pool of child pornography.

That is very encouraging, because this inflammatory tough on crime rhetoric makes you believe that child pornography is just like, there's avalanches of it that's coming at us in all directions. And what's fascinating is one of the lawyers that I heard an interview with was saying that like, when FBI or whoever busts these people and finds a bunch of videos on their computer or whatever, it's like, it's the same fucking videos. It's been the same videos for like a long time of like prepubescent children, right? Of like the really bad stuff. There's a finite number of those videos and like this idea of like rings of people who are like creating it and passing it

around like that doesn't really exist, which is great, right? Because like the reason why child pornography offends us is because the production of it harms children. The interesting thing is that there is among teenagers, among postpubescent children, there is a avalanche of child pornography because sex have been defined as child pornography as we learned from our sexting episode. See above. So what's interesting though is that the morality and the legality of child pornography is changing because much of the child pornography, the vast majority of child pornography that's produced now isn't abusive to children. Because if you're a 16 year old girl and you stand in front of the mirror and you take a selfie and you send it to

your boyfriend and he distributes it, he's an asshole, you're a victim, but this is not the same. There's no child being abused anywhere in the equation, it just manifests in the same legal result. Exactly. And so there's now a move to redefine child pornography that has to be taken without the consent of the participants. Yeah, which is something that always would have been assumed before. Exactly. And child pornography is something the law, I believe, only started addressing in the 70s. And at the time that it was defined, it was based on this, you know, ring, you know, mass production using all these, you know, this is theoretically this was where all the abducted children were supposed to be going. And so you wouldn't need to stipulate

that it was without their consent, because of course it was, because they had been snatched in vans. You know what this reminds me of is that, okay, did you know that in the Degiorno Pizza ads today, because in the 90s, the gambit was always that like, you're eating this amazing pizza and it seems like it's a delivery pizza, but it's just a frozen pizza. And you go, it's not delivery, it's Degiorno. Right. It's not from an amazing pizza delivery place, like it's this incredible luxurious, it seems like delivery, but it's not. Now, apparently delivered pizza is maligned by the youths. Oh, and you say it's not delivery, it's Degiorno. Oh, weird. So over time, it's done a complete 180. Degiorno has come to consume and contain its opposite. And in the same way, like

we have penalties that apply to a crime that was once defined one way, according to actual examples of it, and also kind of outsized public anxieties about it. And now overwhelmingly, in actuality, is something that wasn't imagined when those laws were written. So the law has to change to reflect reality. It's not delivery, it's Degiorno. And this is one of the interesting things that has happened is there's now many more child pornography charges filed than child abuse charges filed. Which is a great thing to take up our court's time with a bunch of 16-year-old mirror selfies. Well, this is, I mean, a huge reason for this is another big cultural change within prosecutors' offices is because of dwindling resources and everything else.

As you know from your satanic panic research, child abuse cases are really hard to prosecute. And child pornography cases because of the internet, because it's so easy to say you had this file on your computer, are really fucking easy to prosecute. So it's a numbers game. It's 100% numbers game. There's been 37,000 charges filed between 2004 and 2013, which is a lot. God. And it's also, there's also, there's a case where a man rapes a child and films it. He gets 12 years. The guys who watched the film got 50 years. Oh my God. Which is like the perfect encapsulation to me of like the weird magical thinking that we have on this, where it's like, we've added all these extra sentences, aggravated, etc., etc., to child pornography charges because they're so easy. We

can get numbers on them. And we feel like we're doing something and we're anxious because we're so powerless in the face of actual abuse. And you know, and it's like, I of course have slagged the American legal system to death in this conversation. And yet I understand that like, if you're a prosecutor, you can be acting in good faith and actually trying to do your job and protect the people who you represent. I mean, the way we saw that play out in the satanic panic is that there was sexual good faith desire to make children safer. And the ways that we try to do it pack fired so badly. And so you see this energy that wants to go somewhere that wants to do something. But if all it's doing is making us feel better, then that's not a good enough reason

to do it. Yeah. To me, the biggest victim of the sex offender panic has been kids. We've never reckoned with law enforcement practices that contribute to this. We've never reckoned with, I mean, one of the things I can't get over is that no one in the church above an actual priest who abused children has ever gone to jail. No one has been held accountable above the actual abusers. That's something we still struggle with, right? Is leaving systems of power intact. Exactly. It's like, we haven't actually reckoned with schools that know about a coach doing this and don't do anything, churches that know about a priest doing this and just transfer them to another church, people that encourage parents or whoever else not to come forward. It's like,

we haven't dealt with the way that this actually happens. And it's like, if we crack down enough on the dude in the van, it's all going to go away. And it's like, we could bring that number down to zero. It's not going to solve the soccer coach problem. It's not going to solve the dad or the brother problem, right? And so it just seems important to me that everything we've done, if it was to serve kids, we would have made kids safer. Yeah. But it was to serve ourselves. Totally. And our own need to feel that we are the crusaders working on behalf of the children. Although one nice epilogue in this that I mentioned in the Stranger Danger episode is that child sexual abuse has actually been falling for a long time. And we don't know why and we know

that it's not related to sex offender registration laws. People always say, oh, it's because of the sex offender registries. Because again, some states have it more strict, some states did it sooner. There's no correlation. Child sex abuse has been falling just like all crime across the United States for 30 years. It's amazing to me that crime rates would be falling when it seems to me that the pressure our country is putting on citizens is getting worse. Maybe everybody's at CrossFit. Everybody's busy. I don't know. I mean, it just speaks to the fact that the way you feel and like the fears that you have about the world may not be a reflection of what's going on in it. Is that the depressing lesson for the end of this that we shouldn't

trust our feelings? I don't think that's depressing. I think maybe the lesson is that we shouldn't trust our dread. There's a lot of feelings on the palette of feelings. And I'll come back to it, like one of the things that I always return to when thinking about our ideas of crime, which is that our need to believe that there is this class of terrible, dangerous, like we'll snatch you off the street into terrible things to you, criminals wandering around. And the only thing we can do is just sort of grind them down and catch them up in the system and never let them go and hope that they disappear is comforting for us if we want to feel that no one who is remotely like us or anyone we love could commit crimes. It's just like a dark way to live in the

world to think that people are just either there's hope for them or there isn't. It's better for us. It's better for all of us if we can see the world in a way that allows us to not believe in this whole class of people who can only be warehoused for their entire lives. If you feel that way about them, then what hope do you have for your own humanity? I'm trying to think of, I'm trying to think of something pithy to say at the end of all that. I completely agree. It's not delivery. It's to Giorno. I don't know. This is a hard thing to pith out of some of these. Sometimes we get so deep into the crevasse and then you're like, well, time to hike out and say a joke. I'm like, I don't know. I just want to lie here among the scattered bones for a little

while. Just a long awkward silence at the end as we both sigh. We can do a long awkward silence and then theme. Again, things are not going to get better if we make the people who scare us seem more and more powerful. I do think that the longer we look at this, the less scary it gets. The idea of the person that we're looking for isn't actually there. If you never look at it, then you never realize that what you're afraid you're going to see there isn't there really. Right, right. I like my crevasse home. I'm going to build a cabin here and live in this crevasse. Order a pizza.