Predators Among Us - A 4 Part Series

Predators Among Us - A 4 Part Series
Predators Among Us - Part 1 When the Jimmy Ryce Act was pased six years ago, it was hailed as a special state program to treat Florida's worst sexual predators -- and protect the public. But a six-month investigation by the Miami Herald shows the program is not only failing, but backfiring. Some pf the most violent rapists and pedophiles are allowed to walk away with no treatment, monitoring or supervision -- only to commit new sex crimes, many against children. Florida's worst sex offenders aren't getting the treatment the state has promised Published January 29, 2006 The day Douglas Gray was set to leave prison, authorities slapped shackles on him and shipped him to a secure treatment center in a desolate corner of Florida -- where the state's worst sexual offenders are held even after serving their time. Behind the tall fences and razor wire of the Florida Civil Commitment Center, the 40-year-old child rapist was supposed to learn how to curb his deviant urges. He was supposed to accept responsibility for his crimes. He was supposed to develop empathy for his victims. But none of that happened. There were no polygraph tests to gauge his honesty. No examinations to mark his arousal patterns. Instead, he spent one year eating, sleeping and waiting -- until he was released in June 2002 without a single hour of therapy to help him tame the impulses that turned him into a sexual monster. Free and back on the prowl, Gray didn't last long on the outside. Fifteen months after his release, he wooed a 14-year-old Broward County girl over a telephone chat line, had sex with the child -- and when she told him she didn't want to see him anymore, he beat her and forced her to perform oral sex on him. ''They should have kept that man in there for treatment,'' the girl's mother told The Miami Herald. ``If you just let them out, they're going to do the same thing. My daughter hasn't been the same since.'' Gray is among hundreds of sexual offenders who fell through the cracks of an obscure state program created in 1998 to protect the public from men who prey on the weak and the vulnerable. Each year, state psychologists screen thousands of sexual offenders before they're released from prison to look for signs of mental disorders that make them likely to commit new sex crimes. Rather than set them free, the law allows a drastic measure to ensure they won't ever cross the line again: Keep them locked inside a treatment center until they delve into the depths of their minds and overcome their sicknesses. They are allowed to leave only if psychologists say they no longer pose a threat to the community, and a court agrees. Lawmakers coined it the Jimmy Ryce Act, in memory of the 9-year-old Miami-Dade County boy who was sexually assaulted, murdered and buried inside several large planters by a handyman in 1995. But seven years after the law's passage, Florida's program for screening, confining and treating sexual offenders who pose the greatest threat to women and children is failing, a six-month investigation by The Miami Herald found. Woefully underfunded and barely regulated, the Jimmy Ryce Act stands as an example of how lawmakers are quick to react to heinous crimes like the Ryce murder but often fail to stay the course once the stories fade from the spotlight. Since 1998, Florida has spent $150 million confining 825 men to its treatment center in Arcadia. But computer analysis by The Miami Herald of more than 100,000 sexual crimes -- along with a review of thousands of pages from court cases, state records and documents from Florida's facility and dozens of interviews -- found: • While the state has spent millions placing 825 men at the facility, at least 600 offenders who were passed over by the screening process were latter arrested for new sex crimes -- many against children. • Even when offenders are placed at the center, more than 60 percent still receive no treatment because the Legislature has not fully funded the program and because a loophole in the law allows the men to refuse therapy. • The treatment center -- the heart of the state's program -- is rife with troubles, including pedophiles receiving child pornography in the mail, rapists getting drunk on homemade alcohol and fights breaking out among the men. • Meanwhile, hundreds of offenders have been freed from the facility without completing a comprehensive treatment program -- including nearly 100 who, like Gray, didn't participate in even a single hour of therapy. • Once they leave, there is no specialized monitoring or follow-up to ensure predators keep their lewd and violent cravings in check. No halfway houses, no outpatient facilities, no ankle bracelets with satellite technology. In nearly 50 cases, the state doesn't even know where the men are living. ''The sad truth is that these laws get passed so that politicians can boast about the tough things they are doing and get elected. It's a sad trick on the public,'' said Ted Shaw, a Gainesville psychologist who has spent 25 years evaluating and treating sexual offenders. NATIONAL SPOTLIGHT LEGISLATIVE ACTION, THEN FAILURE Failures in Florida's strategy for dealing with the most dangerous offenders is the latest setback in a long struggle to prevent sex crimes. Cases like Jimmy Ryce in the 1990s and most recently the sexual assault and murder of Jessica Lunsford last February have snared headlines across the country. Each time, indignation spurred action -- stiffer punishments, online registries, civil commitment. Months after the Lunsford murder, U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz proposed federal legislation that would provide $10 million a year to help other states pay for programs similar to the Jimmy Ryce Act. Having passed the House, it now awaits approval by the Senate. ''I believe this amendment will help many parents sleep better at night,'' the Weston Democrat assured constituents, touting Florida as one model for the rest of the nation. But Florida's law falters at every stage: from the screening process that places offenders at the treatment center, to the level of therapy and counseling provided, to how the men are released back into the community. Wasserman Schultz said that she may need to include some safeguards in the federal legislation to ensure Florida's problems are not duplicated in other states. Here's how Florida's law is supposed to work: • Before sexual offenders are released from prison, state psychologists determine if they suffer from psychosexual disorders called paraphilias, which create powerful cravings that are difficult to control without treatment. • If so, those offenders are locked up beyond their prison terms in the state's treatment center. • At the trials, prosecutors and defense attorneys wage legal battles that determine whether those offenders will be held indefinitely. • Once they are committed, offenders continue therapy until they can prove they no longer pose a threat to the community. Sen. Alex Villalobos, a Republican from Miami and co-sponsor of the Jimmy Ryce Act, said the real intent of the law was to keep offenders off the streets, calling it a ''stop-gap'' measure. ''Sexual offenders were not receiving heavy prison sentences, that's what we needed to fix,'' he said, adding that the program achieves that goal. MATTER OF MONEY FUNDING PROBLEMS FROM THE START But breakdowns in the program started from Day One -- when the Legislature refused to properly fund a law it passed amid tough talk and vows of ``never again.'' In the program's first year, the Department of Children & Families asked for $27 million to run the program. It got $17 million. As the number of offenders at the center more than quadrupled -- from 125 in 2000 to more than 500 today -- the amount of funding continued to lag far behind. The program is so strapped for cash that the state's contract with Liberty Behavioral Health, the private company that runs the Florida Civil Commitment Center, provides only enough money to treat 150 offenders -- or less than a third of the men held there. ''We have our sleeves rolled up and we're doing the best we can with the resources we have,'' said Adam Deming, the clinical director of the treatment center. Of the 16 states with civil commitment laws, only South Carolina and Kansas spend less on treatment per offender -- and both hold fewer than 100 men. ''Right now, Florida's program is not doing what it needs to,'' said Shaw, the Gainesville psychologist. With more offenders sent to the center every month, Liberty told the state in September it would provide therapy only to those who have been committed by the courts. But those proceedings -- known as civil commitment trials -- are so long and tedious that more than 60 percent of the offenders at the center haven't had them yet. They're supposed to go to trial within 30 days, but the average wait time is now 2 ½ years. The problem is that lawmakers passed the Jimmy Ryce Act without a clear plan for how the trials would work and few guideposts to follow, according to legal experts. For example, what is admissible into evidence? How should complex, expert testimony be handled? The result: Dozens of suits have been filed challenging the rules, costing taxpayers millions and leaving hundreds of offenders in limbo. Two appellate courts have urged the Florida Supreme Court to step in and create rules to clear up the confusion. But that hasn't happened. Meanwhile, offenders at the center have collectively spent more than 900 years waiting for their day in court. THE SELECTION LACK OF GUIDELINES COMPLICATE PROCESS Even before men are locked in the treatment center, Florida's civil commitment program is plagued with problems deciding who gets into treatment -- and who doesn't. Since the program began, more than 18,000 sexual offenders have been evaluated by DCF. Of those men, 600 were passed over and released, only to be arrested later on new sex crime charges -- many against children. That's a small percentage, but when those 600 are compared to the number of offenders actually accepted into the program, questions are raised about the effectiveness of the screening process. Consider: For every 10 men sent to the center, seven were released from prison -- and later arrested, a trend noted by state auditors in 2000 and again in 2004. In both reports, auditors urged DCF to study its screening process. To this day, nothing has happened. Part of the problem is the law provides few guidelines for determining which offenders should be screened for the program. Unlike Florida, other states have steadfast rules to ensure the most dangerous predators are screened. For example, California's law, which experts point to as one of the nation's best, requires that an offender have multiple victims before they can qualify for the program. That would have placed Timothy Conley, 35, high on the list. He served four years for abducting and raping two teenage girls in Citrus County on Florida's west coast in 1993. But in December 1999, DCF found he was not ''likely'' to commit a new sex crime -- and he was freed from prison. Eight months later, he pulled a teenage girl into his car and raped her twice. He has since been sent back to prison. Records show nearly 70 percent of the men who are referred for civil commitment had one victim even though experts say those who pose the greatest threat to women and children are often those with multiple victims -- like Conley. ''The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior,'' said Fred Berlin, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and one of the country's leading sexual offender researchers. ``So, clearly those with multiple offenses are the most dangerous.'' In Washington state, only those who pose the highest risk -- violent offenders -- are eligible for commitment. In Florida, that's not the case: 40 percent of the offenders considered for the program were not convicted of violent crimes, records show. John Ganey Jr. and Darrell Mikler were both convicted of violent sexual crimes in separate cases, but neither were sent to Florida's treatment center. Ganey, 43, left prison in December 2000 after serving three years for sexual battery. Less than a year later, he lured a 9-year-old Tallahassee girl into the woods around her home and raped her three times. When the girl told her father what happened, he found his daughter bleeding so badly he had to rush her to a hospital where she underwent surgery. Mikler, 40, served eight years of a 20-year sentence for attempting to rape a 12-year-old Miami-Dade County child in 1989. One month after his release, he baited an 11-year-old girl in Fort Lauderdale toward his apartment and shoved her inside. As the girl begged him to let her go, he raped her four times. ''She was just never a teenager after it happened,'' the girl's aunt told the Broward state attorney's office. The girl has since dropped out of high school and has been using drugs, she said. ``Lord, I pray that man never gets out and does that again to someone.'' Ganey and Milker are now back in prison -- each serving life sentences. EVALUATIONS SCREENING PROCESS IS SUBJECTIVE Another problem: the state has only six people to sift through more than 2,000 cases a year. That means reviewing each offenders' criminal records, court cases, medical and mental health files and victim statements, police reports and other documents. Using those records, the specialists -- the first filter in the screening process -- must make highly subjective decisions about which men are ''likely'' to commit new sexual crimes. ''We don't have some magic formula where we plug in information'' and get an answer, said Greg Venz, who was the director of the state's program until he became special counsel for DCF. Private psychologists hired by the state then conduct face-to-face evaluations of those offenders and send recommendations to DCF for a final decision. Questions have been raised about the qualifications of those conducting the face-to-face interviews with the men. Unlike programs in Washington, Massachusetts and other states, Florida has no special licensing for evaluators. In fact, until 2001 there were no requirements. DCF did create some criteria after a state audit pointed out the problem in 2000 -- but national experts say the guidelines are inadequate. ''My view is that there must be some type of licensing requirement and more specialized training. What Florida has right now is well below the threshold needed for this highly specialized field,'' said Natalie Brown, a former Florida evaluator who now screens offenders for programs in Washington and Missouri. LEFT OUT NOT QUALIFIED, HE ABUSED AGAIN In 2000, state psychologists said David Stotler, 30, was not dangerous enough for the program despite two sex crimes against children. His first arrest was in Palm Beach Gardens in 1994 after he fondled a young girl while baby-sitting her. The girl told police that Stotler kissed her and shoved his hands under her clothes while she played Nintendo. He also molested her while they were at a community swimming pool. Stotler qualified for 22 months in prison under state sentencing guidelines, but avoided jail time by pleading guilty to lewd assault in exchange for eight years' probation and six months' house arrest. Three years later, he violated his probation when he tried to force a Palm Beach County boy to perform oral sex on him. He was sentenced to two years in prison in November 1998. Though he had two sex offenses on his record, the state determined Stotler did not qualify for the treatment program two months before he left prison in September 2000. A month later, while baby-sitting a 5-year-old, he crept into the bedroom where the boy lay sleeping, pulled back a blanket, slipped off the boy's pajama bottoms and performed oral sex on the child -- an act Stotler would repeat numerous time with the young boy over the course of the next year. But Stotler didn't stop with one victim. Two more boys under the age of 12 suffered the same torture -- awakened to find the predator abusing them. Stotler's crimes, which eventually led to a life sentence, were discovered only after the 5-year-old began urinating and defecating in his underpants to prevent the abuse. By then, the boy's scars ran deep: insomnia, rage, uncontrollable sobbing and a preoccupation with pain, dismemberment, gore and blood, according to court records. With tears running down his face, the boy's voice shook and cracked as he spoke of the abuse suffered for nearly a year, court records show. ''David touched me,'' he told his mother. ``Momma, don't let him do it again.'' http://www.miami.com/multimedia/miami/news/archive/sexpred/part1/1.html

Predators Among Us - Part 2 Chaos, coverups, boredom and death: ‘This place is a powder keg ready to explode' Published January 30, 2006 ARCADIA -- For seven years, Florida taxpayers have pumped more than $100 million into the Florida Civil Commitment Center, a facility set up to treat the mental disorders of the state's most dangerous sexual predators. What taxpayers got: a place where child pornography arrived in the mail, stashed inside transistor radios. Bags of marijuana came in care packages, stuffed in the guts of peanut butter jars, and men brewed gallons of homemade alcohol under the noses of a shoestring staff. The cornerstone of a program named after a slain 9-year-old boy, the center eroded into a place where boredom, violence and the fog of drugs and alcohol became as common as group therapy sessions -- with one man dying after a fight over a bag of Cheetos. Overcrowded and short-staffed, with less than half of the men actually in treatment, the center lies at the heart of what is wrong with the Jimmy Ryce Act, an investigation by The Miami Herald found. "It's a terribly, terribly run program," said Kelly Summers, a former investigator for the (Florida) Department of Children & Families, who uncovered a slew of problems at the center. "Because no one wants to appear soft on sex offenders, no one wants to address what's going on down there." THE FINDINGS DYSFUNCTION AT THE CENTER A review of hundreds of pages from internal documents, state investigations and audits, along with interviews with mental health experts, offenders, facility staff members, attorneys and advocates, sketch the story of a therapy center run amok. Among the newspaper's findings: • Employees struggle to manage a facility plagued with fights, substance abuse and suicide attempts. Guards have been caught covering up mistakes by erasing security tapes and altering reports, while others have been accused of selling drugs and having sex with offenders. • While the state has sent more men to the center, staffing hasn't kept pace because the Legislature refuses to provide enough funds -- creating a dangerous disparity that reached an all-time high in the months before authorities were forced to conduct a raid last February to restore order. • The number of clinicians also has failed to keep pace with the ballooning population. Since the facility opened six years ago, psychologists' caseloads have quadrupled, leaving hundreds of men pacing the yard, dwelling in doldrums and stirring up trouble. • Nearly three dozen men who suffer from severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder receive little or no specialized treatment -- let alone therapy for their psychosexual disorders -- a direct violation of federal law, several civil rights attorneys say. • Meanwhile, a treatment center originally slated to house 460 men now holds more than 520, creating more tension. Liberty Behavioral Health, the private company that runs the center, insists that security is now under control and that problems at the center are no different from those found at any institution of a "correctional nature." "To characterize the facility as rife with trouble . . . is a gross exaggeration," the company wrote in a response to The Miami Herald's findings But the center never was intended to be a correctional facility, according to the legislation. In fact, the Department of Children & Families, which hired Liberty to operate the center, told The Miami Herald that it has "identified numerous deficiencies in Liberty's performance," including inadequate supervision and "mismanagement'' of security. Several men recently interviewed at the center by The Miami Herald said disruptions and fights continue at the facility. "This place is a powder keg ready to explode," said Richard Lincoln, an offender at the center. Lincoln should be learning to control the impulses that landed him behind bars 10 years ago. But because he already served his sentence, the state can't force him to take part in treatment -- a loophole in the law that helps explain why so many men are not in counseling. Another explanation: The state pays for only 150 of the roughly 520 men to receive therapy. That leaves six out of every 10 offenders with nothing to do -- posing a serious challenge for those trying to keep order. Lincoln spends his days napping, watching television, listening to the radio and eat- ing three meals a day -- cost ing taxpayers nearly $50,000 a year in the process. "Basically, there's nothing for me to do here," said Lincoln, 59, a lanky man with long, stark-white hair and a gray mustache who was convicted of two counts of lewd and lascivious acts against a child in 1995. Sent to the center in 2000, he has done more time there than he did in prison but still refuses to participate in treat- ment. His sentiment -- that therapy does not offer a way out -- is shared by hundreds of others at the facility, with the numbers tripling since 1999 and exceeding more than 300 last year. Interviews with men at the center reveal several reasons: Their records are not kept confidential and can be used against them at their civil commitment trials, and the state has no criteria for graduating them from treatment. Steven Hoo, 50, convicted of molesting a 2-year-old girl, waited six years before he entered treatment because he thought that sharing personal details in therapy would hinder his efforts for release. "And therein lies the problem," Summers said. "You have violent sex offenders that have nothing to do all day long and all night long." GROWING TENSION AN UPRISING, THEN A RAID The boredom and frustration felt by the offenders boiled over on Feb. 9, 2005, when more than 300 officers clad in riot gear and armed with billy clubs and pepper spray began to assemble before dawn. At sunrise, they descended on the cluster of concrete buildings tucked into the sprawling prison compound that houses the treatment center. Their mission: Restore order. Conditions at the center had deteriorated so badly that a lockdown was under way to force the men to obey orders from the state fire marshal. Dozens of offenders refused to leave the yard, where they dragged mattresses from their dorms and draped sheets on extension cords running from buildings to television sets outside. Minutes after storming the center, police confronted men who were brandishing broom handles. In one dorm, officers had to call for reinforcements and shoot bursts of chemical agents into the air to regain control. The raid was a culmination of events building inside the facility for many years. When the center opened in Martin County in 1999, there was nearly one staff member for every man -- a ratio recommended for secure mental health facilities. But, after the center moved to Arcadia in Central Florida in 2001, the population quadrupled while staffing levels failed to keep pace. With the growing number of men, came problems. Calls to the DeSoto County Sheriff's Office -- including sexual battery and assault -- increased nearly 20 percent since 2003, the first full year of data available. By 2004, the men outnumbered employees more than 2-1, a disparity so lopsided that many guards felt inclined to let bad behavior pass, according to internal documents and interviews with several workers. "As long as they are happy, we let them go," one staff member told corporate officers from Liberty Behavioral Health during a tour of the facility in July 2004. According to an internal memo obtained by The Miami Herald, Liberty's officers described fights breaking out between drunken offenders, bikini posters hanging in the rooms of sexual offenders, and a facility where "residents appear to have the run of the cafeteria." In one packed dorm, men outnumbered staff members 45-3. To this day, Liberty has had difficulty attracting and keeping staff members because of stressful working conditions and because Arcadia's labor pool is so small, according to state investigators. With few resources, there is little training to help employees deal with violent sexual offenders who feel they have nothing to lose. Until last year, staff members at the center received just one week of computer-based training. Liberty says employ- ees now get two weeks of training. DCF The Department of Children & Families -- the agency tasked with overseeing the program -- has struggled for years to persuade the Legislature to increase the budget to maintain order at a facility that has been absorbing more offenders every year. As the population soared more than 300 percent, the center's budget increased just 46 percent. In fact, when broken down by the amount spent per offender, funding for the treatment center has actually decreased. In the program's first year, the DCF estimated that it would cost $27 million to run the program. The Legislature provided $17 million. In 2002, the agency requested an increase of $8.6 million to "meet the public safety goal of the Jimmy Ryce Act." It received no additional funding. In 2003, it asked for $1 million because "the need for new funding to operate the facility in a safe manner has become quite critical." Again, no increase. So in 2004, as drugs, alcohol, sex, child pornography and a band of disgruntled offenders disrupted what is supposed to be a calm, therapeutic setting, the facility had no way of maintaining order. The DCF had to pay the Department of Corrections $2 million to ship in 300 officers and conduct a raid on the center just to get the men to comply with orders from the state fire marshal. During the raid, officers searched offenders' rooms and found more than eight gallons of homemade alcohol and other contraband. After the raid, the Legislature provided an additional $2.6 million in last May for more security at the center. But experts say that's not enough to fix the center's woes. "Those of us who are in this business know what it costs to fund a top-notch program that does the job. It's not a mystery," said Ted Shaw, a Gainesville psychologist who is one of Florida's leading sexual offender experts. While Florida spends about $50,000 per offender for its treatment program, states including California, Washington, Wisconsin and Minnesota pay twice as much. THE F DORM STRUGGLING WITH MENTAL ILLNESS On the second floor of a stout two-story building called F Dorm, nearly three- dozen men who suffer from the most severe mental illnesses are tucked away with little hope of getting out. The men struggle with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and developmental disabilities with little or no specialized treatment for mental illnesses that are so severe that it's almost impossible to treat them for their sexual disorders, staff members say. Doug Shadle, a former clinician at the center, said that because the men are sexual offenders, "nobody cares'' about the severity of their condition. "You couldn't get away with it anywhere else," he said. Shadle wrote a proposal two years ago to provide more intensive care for the men of F Dorm Quad 2 as part of a larger plan pitched by Liberty for more money. "This is an issue with constitutional implications," Liberty's $2.5 million request said. "The state has an obligation . . . to address treatment of mental illness and developmental disabilities." But the DCF -- repeatedly turned down for increases in the past -- did not include it in its budget request. Now the state is being sued in federal court because civil rights attorneys claim that offenders are not receiving proper care -- let alone sexual offender treatment. "You have to make sure that people being detained at the facility are receiving constitutionally proper care and treatment. Clearly, that's not happening," said Kristen Cooley Lentz, an attorney for the Florida Institutional Legal Services in Gainesville and one of the lead lawyers in the class-action lawsuit. Liberty said it created a special mental health unit in August 2004 -- five years after the program started. A man housed in the quad died after a brawl over a bag of cheese curls. Daniel Donnelly, 38, sat at a table in the bay area of F Dorm Quad 2 when Alfredo Roebuck, 48, called in payment for two rolled cigarettes he had given Donnelly earlier. Owed to Roebuck: a bag of Cheetos. Donnelly, five- feet, four- inches tall, 134 pounds, had a history of reneging on barters, common at a facility where many men have no money. He refused to give the bag to Roebuck -- who was five inches taller and nearly 100 pounds heavier. Offenders in F Dorm say no guards were watching when Roebuck and Donnelly began to scuffle. State reports say there was one staff member present, a 51-year-old therapeutic assistant responsible for monitoring all four quads in the dorm while most offenders were at lunch -- a deficiency noted in reports conducted after Donnelly's death. After the altercation, Donelly's condition rapidly deteriorated. He later slipped into a coma. Paramedics airlifted him to Lee Memorial Hospital, where he was placed on life support. Donnelly died nine days later, after his family decided to remove his feeding tube. Donnelly's death came as no surprise to Kenneth Dud- ding, a former Washington, D.C., police detective, hired by the center as an internal investigator in March 2004. INVESTIGATIONS DETECTIVE BLOWS WHISTLE During the next year, he conducted investigations at a facility that had completely broken down as an inadequate, untrained staff struggled to handle hundreds of men. In one case, Jerome Wager, an offender with severe mental illness, was able to climb onto the roof of one of the buildings in April 2004. Instead of trying to coax him into climbing down, staff on duty rushed him. So Wagner jumped off the roof and injured his left leg. He was later treated by DeSoto County emergency medical workers. In another case, a two-time sexual offender named Jorge Delgado stabbed offender Marshal Watson 12 times, using a 10-inch metal shank with a white-taped handle in October 2004. After the incident, staff ordered offenders in the dorm to clean up the crime scene with bleach, ruining an investigation by the DeSoto County Sheriff's Office, according to an internal report. A REVIEW FINDINGS OF A COVERUP In both cases, Dudding went back to review security tapes and read reports of the incidents but found that they had been erased or tampered with. "During these investigations, staff immediately began covering up what happened -- destroying tapes, altering reports. I was being hampered," Dudding said. He said that when he complained, he was told that he was being too aggressive. Fed up after just two months on the job, Dudding blew the whistle on the facility in May 2004. Investigators from the DCF's Office of Inspector General spent the next four months picking the facility apart. Records show that the investigators corroborated nearly every problem outlined by Dudding: widespread use of alcohol and drugs, sex among offenders and staff. There were also instances of tampering of with security tapes and incident reports and a general lack of control, the inspector general's report stated. Additionally, the investigation reported that marijuana arrived in care packages, with some stashes stuffed in peanut butter jars. Cocaine was found in one room, but was flushed down a toilet by a staff member. No one was ever charged. But when DCF investigator Summers and her boss issued their report in September 2004, little changed at the facility at first. "When my supervisor and I sent up our preliminary reports, we were surprised about the minimal attention it got," Summers said. She said they pushed harder to help persuade the DCF to conduct the raid in February, after offenders refused to comply with orders from the state fire marshal. "Part of the problem is that DCF is not equipped to handle a facility that is responsible for violent criminals," she said. MORE MONEY PROGRAM ‘NOT DESIGNED TO WORK' The Legislature provided an additional $2.6 million for new additional staff following after the February raid, and the DCF says it contracted with the Florida Department of Corrections in October to monitor safety and security at the center. But even with the additional money and oversight, problems persist. Donnelly was killed four months after the increase, while Delgado repeatedly stabbed another man with a metal shank in December. "The program doesn't work because it's not designed to work," said Dean Cauley, a former clinician at the center. "This was a harebrained idea and an expensive idea that really wasn't thought out very well, and now we are seeing the result of it." http://www.miami.com/multimedia/miami/news/archive/sexpred/part2/1.html

Predators Among Us - Part 3 Without a place to go after confinement, predators hit the streets, free to harm again Published January 31, 2006 When authorities finally caught up with Gary "Catfish'' Mitchell in June 2004, they found two rolls of duct tape, marbles and a canvas sack in his van along with computer disks loaded with child pornography. Three months earlier, Mitchell left the secure treatment center that holds Florida's most dangerous sexual predators and hopped a bus to Pensacola to serve the rest of his parole and begin a new life. He was a changed man. But the grizzled, 56-year-old pedophile proved far from rehabilitated. Within two weeks, he began downloading lurid snapshots of children -- including photos of a sobbing 11-year-old girl being raped by a man. He hid copies of the pictures in transistor radios and sent them to friends who remained at the treatment center. Then, the man who claimed to have molested more than 60 children, fled Florida, parole officers and the state's sexual offender registry and found his way to Nashville, where he landed a job with a traveling carnival, the Cumberland Valley Shows. His case highlights yet another failure in Florida's program for dealing with the most dangerous predators. He's among hundreds of predators set loose from a civil commitment program with no halfway houses, no outpatient facilities and no ankle bracelets to ensure men who were dangerous enough to be held beyond their prison sentences are kept in check once they're released, an investigation by The Miami Herald found. Washington, California, Minnesota, Wisconsin and others states with civil commitment laws monitor offenders like Mitchell when they are released. But not Florida. "We have some gaps in the system that need to be addressed," said Adam Deming, clinical director of the state's facility. "I'm not sure Florida has the type of monitoring systems that are necessary to protect the public from men who are released from here." The state set Mitchell free because he had made progress in treatment. In fact, he spent four years trying to learn to control his mental disorder. But there is one problem: Even with counseling and therapy, Mitchell's cravings for children will never go away. That's why experts say civil commitment must be part of a larger program that includes therapy and monitoring well after offenders leave the center. Without a way of easing men back into the community, offenders face a far greater chance of failing, according to the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers. "Here we're talking about somebody who was considered for civil commitment -- a high-risk offender who is going to need intensive treatment and monitoring well after leaving the center -- but there is nothing in the law that accounts for that," said Jill Levenson, ATSA's Florida board member. COURTS DECIDE MORE THAN 200 MEN HAVE BEEN SET FREE Although clinicians at Florida's treatment center have cleared only one offender for release since the facility opened in 1999, at least 230 men have been set free through the courts. That's because the Jimmy Ryce Act allows courts to decide when offenders are ready to leave the center -- rather than giving the men clear guidelines for release through treatment. "Judges and juries are being asked to decide whether a person is likely to commit a crime in the future -- not tomorrow, not 30 days from now but any time in the future," said Ken Johnson, a former Palm Beach County assistant public defender who handled dozens of cases. "That's a tough thing to ask them to do." A review by The Miami Herald of 230 offenders who spent at least a month at the center before being released found: • Nearly 40 percent were freed even though they refused to participate in treatment while they were confined. • Because Florida has no halfway houses or outpatient facilities for those who have left the center, there is no monitoring once offenders are released -- unless they're on probation. But nearly seven of every 10 left the center with no probation, in part because probation ran out while they were locked inside -- a flaw in the law that dumbfounds experts. • Nearly a quarter aren't on the state's sexual offender registry -- an online lookup used to track all sexual offenders -- meaning authorities and the public have no idea where some of the state's worst sexual offenders are living. • Of those who are on the registry, at least six have absconded and four remain at large. • The average offender has been out just three years -- and already one in 10 are back behind bars on new sex crime charges. Ted Shaw, a Gainesville psychologist and frequent witness for both the state and the defense at Jimmy Ryce trials, says he no longer recommends release for offenders unless there is some type of supervision. He has spent the past four months trying to secure the services of a retired probation officer who would keep track of offenders. The Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers recommends a "gradual return to the community'' that includes treatment once offenders are released to reduce the risk of repeat offenses. Yet the Florida Legislature denied a 2001 request by the Department of Children & Families for $970,000 to establish a release program that would ensure offenders continue treatment while tracking them with satellite technology. Among those set free: • Alonzo Newsome, 38,who was released from the center in January 2001 after being convicted of forcing a 16-year-old boy to undress before performing oral sex on him. After his release, Newsome moved to Miami-Dade County, where less than six months later he lured another boy -- this time a 15-year-old -- into his car and forced him to undress before sodomizing him. • John Wayne Parsons, who spent six years in prison for taking pornographic pictures of a 15-year-old and for molesting a 9-year-old. He was sent to the state's treatment center in 2001 and was released without any treatment in July 2002. Three months later, he was caught reaching into the pants and fondling a 5-year-old Hillsborough County girl. • Eric Adams, who spent two years at the treatment center after being convicted twice for lewd assault and lewd acts against children in 1993 and 1995. He absconded from Florida's registry six months after his release and was later convicted in Marion of lewd exhibition in 2003. • Kenneth Johnson, who was arrested in October on 22 counts of sexual battery against two boys, ages 11 and 16. He spent 16 years in prison for sexually abusing two kids and nearly three years inside the treatment center before being released in May 2003. A STORY OF FAILURE ON THE RUN TO AND FROM FLORIDA ‘‘Catfish'' Mitchell provides a dramatic example of the state's failures. His story of abuse and flights from the law stretches back more than 20 years. He has four convictions, but a sexual autobiography he wrote during his stay at the Florida Civil Commitment Center describes more than 60 offenses dating back to the 1970s, according to the U.S. attorney's office in Indianapolis, which reviewed the document. His first brush with the law was in 1979 in Massachusetts, where he was arrested and charged with raping a 9-year-old girl. But before his trial in 1981, he fled to West Palm Beach. Two years later, still on the run from the law in Massachusetts, he was arrested and charged with fondling a 7-year-old girl in West Palm Beach. He received a one-year prison sentence after being convicted in the Palm Beach County case and then was extradited to Massachusetts, where he spent the next three years behind bars for the 1979 offense. After his release, he returned to Florida, where he was arrested yet again in February 1989 -- this time for performing oral sex on a 9-year-old girl. He even took Polaroid pictures of the child while molesting her and later showed the photos to another young girl, according to police reports. Police found the pictures under his mattress, and Mitchell received a 27-year prison sentence. He served 11 years EIGHT CONDITIONS PROGRESS -- THEN BROKEN PROMISES Before he left prison, Mitchell underwent a battery of psychological tests and interviews to see if he qualified for civil commitment under the Jimmy Ryce Act. One of the psychologists who recommended Mitchell be detained was Shaw. "Mr. Mitchell's deviant sexual interests . . . his past failure on parole . . . his history of dishonesty . . . and his documented predatory behavior combine to exacerbate his risk for reoffense," Shaw wrote. Mitchell was diagnosed as a pedophile and detained at the Florida Civil Commitment Center in June 2000. He stayed there for nearly four years, participating in group therapy sessions, polygraph tests and other counseling. By 2004, Mitchell had made enough progress to convince Shaw, the judge and prosecutor in the case that he was ready to be released. So, on March 15, 2004, he entered into a civil contract with Florida -- essentially a plea deal that allowed him to leave the treatment center in exchange for agreeing to eight conditions, including not leaving the state and participating in weekly therapy sessions. It took Mitchell two weeks to break the contract, when he began downloading child pornography and shipping the photos to his buddies at the treatment center. He violated the rest of the conditions in mid-May, the day he left the state for Tennessee to join the Cumberland Valley carnival. "Quite a few of the men I've recommended for release have failed, and I've had to face that," Shaw said. As the carnival meandered around the eastern suburbs of Nashville, Mitchell wrote a letter to Donald Locke, a three-time sexual offender who remained inside Florida's secure treatment center. In the letter, Mitchell described his new job and how easy it would be to abduct a child from the carnival. He even outlined a plan to snatch a young girl, according to law enforcement officers, the center's internal investigator and an offender. The letter arrived at Florida's commitment center around June 17, the day the carnival pulled into Bloomington, Ind., during the city's Annual Fun Frolic carnival. One offender in the facility read Mitchell's letter and brought it to Kenneth Dudding, the center's internal investigator. Dudding then called FBI Special Agent John Kuchta. "This becomes a top priority when you have an absconded sex offender, a fugitive, traveling around with a carnival, someone who has committed sexual crimes in the past and had been civilly committed," Kuchta said. Kuchta went to work on the case and soon discovered the carnival had set up across the street from an Indiana State Police station in Bloomington. When police searched Mitchell's van, they found the computer disks of child pornography, rolls of duct tape, marbles and a canvas sack. "I was very concerned for the safety of our citizens to have this guy in our state," said Charles Cohen, an Indiana State Police investigator who handles child abduction cases. In fact, Indiana and federal authorities were so concerned about Mitchell they contacted the Center for Missing and Exploited Children to see if any children had been abducted from cities Mitchell and the carnival had passed through. None had gone missing. "It doesn't get any worse than Gary Mitchell," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven Debrota, a member of a federal task force who has prosecuted more than 125 child pornography cases. "I would put him in the worst class of offenders I've ever prosecuted. He should never have been let out." http://www.miami.com/multimedia/miami/news/archive/sexpred/part3/1.html

Predators Among Us - Part 4 With little or no treatment given during prison terms, the state's approach is flawed from the start Published February 1, 2006 John Archer says he began preying on children his own age when he was 7. He remained drawn to them even as as he grew older for reasons clinicians do not yet understand. He said it may have started when he was abused at the age of 4. Another possible cause: the brain defect he sustained at birth. Whatever the reason, he was arrested for slipping his hand into the underwear of a 5-year-old girl during a fishing trip in Holiday, Fla., in 1985. He was 20 years old. Archer admitted to abusing the girl on other occasions and made a rare request to the judge: He asked for help with his sickness. He was supposed to enroll in a special prison program for sex offenders, one of the first of its kind in the country. Even the judge urged Archer to seek therapy in prison, "so when you come out, the balance of your life can be fruitful, good and rewarding." But two months before he was to enter Florida's cutting-edge prison treatment program, Gov. Bob Martinez and the Legislature scrapped it. Twenty years later, the balance of John Archer's life looks like this: four more victims under the age of 12, two new convictions and nearly 19 years spent behind tall fences and razor wire. Now 47, he is a resident of the Florida Civil Commitment Center. The lack of treatment in prison for Archer and others is a crucial flaw in Florida's system for dealing with sexual offenders who pose the greatest threat to women and children, an investigation by The Miami Herald found. Experts say therapy for predators needs to begin in prison, long before men are considered for the state's civil commitment law, for several reasons: • Unlike civil commitment programs, men in prison can be ordered to undergo counseling as a condition for early release. • States have a better chance of selecting offenders who best qualify for civil commitment if they have already been treated and tested in prison. • Prison treatment ensures that even those who aren't selected for civil commitment receive some type of therapy before their release. Numerous studies show that even some counseling lowers offenders' risks of carrying out new sex crimes. • It's cheaper to treat men already in prison -- insteading of paying for additional years of confinement after their sentences end. Most of the 16 states with civil commitment programs currently offer extensive prison treatment programs, including California, Washington, Wisconsin and Minnesota. But in Florida, the more than 520 men now held at the state treatment center collectively spent more than 3,000 years in prison with little or no treatment before they entered the center. "It's insane," said Ted Shaw, the psychologist who ran Florida's Mentally Disordered Sex Offender program before it was shut down. "They are already . Treatment costs just a little bit more than what it does to simply warehouse these guys." CRAVINGS PUNISHMENT DOESN'T HELP With no therapy available in prison, civil commitment becomes the only place the state can treat sexual offenders while they're confined. While lawmakers focus on ratcheting up punishment -- including living restrictions and stiffer prison sentences -- there's no evidence that punitive measures actually deter sex offenders from raping and molesting. That's because the most dangerous sexual offenders suffer from mental abnormalities called paraphilias, which create powerful cravings that are difficult to control without treatment, say experts. "People who are attracted to children don't decide they want to be attracted to children," said Fred Berlin, an associate professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and founder of the National Institute for the Study, Prevention and Treatment of Sexual Trauma in Baltimore. "That doesn't mean you give them a pass when they break the law. But in the interest of protecting the public, we also make sure to treat these people as a public health problem." The tools used by clinicians: therapy sessions with names such as Arousal Management and Victim Empathy, polygraph exams, instruments that measure blood flow to offenders' sex organs and medications that sap their libido. All of the methods and drugs make sexual offenders less likely to strike again, according to dozens of psychological studies and interviews with clinicians. FLAW IN THE LAW EXPERTS DISAGREE WITH PREMISE Part of the problem with Florida's civil commitment program can be traced to the law that created it, say experts. The Jimmy Ryce Act states: "the prognosis for rehabilitating sexually violent predators in a prison setting is poor." But several national experts, studies, and even officials in other state programs disagree. In fact, prison treatment is the very first recommendation for civil commitment laws issued by the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, the nation's largest organization for sexual offender clinicians and researchers. Jill Levenson, a Florida psychologist and ATSA board member, said the problem begins with lawmakers. "Legislators who write these laws are not the experts," she said. "Sometimes they seek our advice before writing them, but more often than not they don't." It hasn't always been this way. For two decades, Florida pioneered treating sexual offenders in prison with what was known as Mentally Disordered Sex Offender program. But Governor Martinez and state lawmakers pulled funding for the program in 1989 in order to save taxpayers $7.3 million a year after adjusting for inflation -- or less than a third of what it now costs to treat offenders beyond their prison sentences. When it was up and running, offenders received 20 to 30 hours a week of intense therapy. Currently, some Florida prisons offer a brief introductory sex offender course: one hour of treatment a week for 12 weeks. But that's the most offenders ever receive. When the legislature wrote the civil commitment law in 1998, the Florida chapter of ATSA put out a position paper urging lawmakers to "consider taking corrective, preventative measures now, by reinstituting a ... prison-based treatment program." It never happened. SHUT DOWN ‘I DON'T WANT TO BE A PEDOPHILE' There were more than 300 men on the waiting list when the state shut down its prison treatment program in 1989. One was John Archer. "I am a pedophile," Archer told The Miami Herald during an interview at the civil commitment center. "I'm not going to lie about it. But I don't want to be a pedophile. I want to get away from it." After serving seven years without treatment for his first offense, Archer was released from prison in June 1992. He says he lasted two weeks before he was picked up by Hillsborough County Sheriff's deputies in November 1992 after luring two boys into the bedroom of his trailer, pulling them on top of him, grabbing them by the buttocks and kissing them on the mouth. "When I was arrested the second time, I begged the officer to get me treatment," Archer said. For the families of the victims, there was little sympathy for Archer. "He violated my kids, and they're afraid to go to sleep at night because they're afraid he's coming after them," said the mother of the two boys. "I don't care about his mental problems right now because my kids have to seek counseling because of him. If he gets any type of treatment, he should get it in prison." Archer pleaded guilty to the charges and received another 15-year prison sentence along with 15 years probation. Before being sentencing, he asked again for treatment, court records show. But there was no program. "The reality, Mr. Archer, is at this time ... there isn't anything anybody is going to do for you, unfortunately," said Hillsborough County Circuit Court Judge Barbara Fleischer. "The hope is there will be a program developed for you, and people who do the same kind of thing." Three years into his sentence, Arhcer wrote Judge Fleischer from prison and asked for treatment a third time: "I would appreciate a chance to enroll into a rehabilitation class/course for my criminal behavior ... which would be beneficial not only to myself but also to society." But again, no one could help. Judge Fleischer took the time to respond: "I have been in contact with the Department of Corrections in Tallahassee," she wrote, "and they informed me that there are are no longer any programs ... from which you can benefit." AT THE CENTER REPORTING THE PRONOGRAPHY By the time Archer was ready to be released from prison, on April 30, 1999, the Jimmy Ryce Act had gone into effect. He was among the first to enter the center. Archer showed some progress in treatment at the civil commitment center, records show, but when child pornography began arriving at the center, he succumbed to the urges that drove him for most of his adult life. He began looking at some of the pictures. "Take a piece of crack cocaine and put it in front of a crack addict. What do you think he's going to do?" Archer asked. Eventually, he realized what he was doing was wrong. Because of the treatment he was receiving, he recognized his old patterns coming back and wanted to break free. So, he decided to turn himself into the center's internal investigator, according to records and interviews. "What I wanted to do was get away from that bunch," he said, adding that he has benefited from counseling. "I've been able to go back and see what makes me tick. Now, I have ways to stop it." Though he voluntarily gave himself up, he was removed from treatment for possessing the pornography in February 2005, and later charged in federal court with possession of child porn. Meanwhile, Archer's probation officer is seeking to send him back to state prison for violating probation -- if he's not convicted of the federal charges. The violation: failing to undergo sexual offender treatment. http://www.miami.com/multimedia/miami/news/archive/sexpred/part4/1.html

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