Unforgiven
Unforgiven Jon Maack was 14 when he raped a 9-year-old relative. Here's the life of one sex offender, five years later. BY ANGELA VALDEZ | avaldez at wweek.com Wednesday, May 24 home | news | COVER STORY | 5/24/2006 When I offered to buy lunch for 19-year-old Jon Maack, he chose the food court at Pioneer Place and ordered a cheeseburger and fries from McDonald's. He wanted to go sit in the square, but I dragged him instead to the Park Blocks, quizzing him about his life along the way. Our conversation faltered uncomfortably when we arrived and saw two dozen children playing in the clearing. Without a word, we walked on, passing the next block where a teacher led a train of preschoolers on a leash, and finally settled on a bench near the art museum. You'd never notice how many children there are unless you took a walk with someone convicted of a sex crime. Jon owes the probation restrictions that bar him from parks and libraries to what he did five years ago, when at age 14 he molested a 9-year-old female relative, eventually coercing her into having sex. The girl reported the rapes to her parents months later, and Jon was arrested on April 1, 2002, at Thomas Edison High School, a private alternative school. Because prosecutors believed he continued to offend after he turned 15, he was transferred to adult court, where he faced a mandatory minimum sentence of more than 16 years for charges of rape, sodomy and sexual abuse. He eventually pleaded guilty to three lesser felonies, avoiding any serious jail time, and underwent an 18-month treatment program. Now he's free, except for one thing: He is an adult sex offender and must comply with adult registration requirements and adult probation restrictions. He will have to report his address to the state police every time he moves or turns a year older for the rest of his life. For the same duration, he must confess his crimes on applications for jobs and apartments. And if he violates one condition of his release—by failing a drug test or leaving the state without permission—his probation officer or a judge can lock him up in the county jail or revoke his deal and send him to prison. Individually, each rule makes sense, offering safeguards against the possibility that Jon will try to hurt someone else. But after spending time with Jon, and adding up the challenges he's faced in the last five years, it's hard not to see that the rules have a circular effect, each prohibition making the next harder to meet. Registration, for example, makes it easy for landlords to block Jon's access to housing, which in turn makes it hard to fulfill another obligation, that he stay employed or enroll in classes full-time. Jodie Teitelbaum, who runs the treatment program Jon attended, believes registration and continued monitoring make society safer. But she doubts the rules protect us from most sex crimes, 95 percent of which are committed by someone known to the victim. And she struggles with how to arm her charges for the frustrations that lie ahead. "Honestly, I don't know how much you can prepare someone for the fact that they may not be able to find a place to live," she says. "It makes me wonder what we think they're going to do. How are they going to be contributing members of society when they don't really have a chance?" Standing in the doorway of his Oak Grove apartment, Jon apologizes for the clutter from last night's get-together: empty Doritos bags and scattered video-game cases—Halo, Star Wars Battlefront and Ghost Recon. Grand Theft Auto, he says, "is around here somewhere." Although he is barred from owning pornography or weapons, no rule restricts him from performing fictional sex and violence on an Xbox. He's wearing baggy jeans with slashed knees and an ARMY T-shirt. His black Korn hat hangs on a nail by the door. Jon's new probation officer recently lifted his ban against using the Internet, a common prohibition for sex offenders. With his new freedom, Jon went online and opened an account on MySpace, the online community that has sparked alarm for putting sexually curious minors within reach of predatory strangers. Jon's profile is more of an attempt to bury his past. He writes: Right now I'm trying to get my life back on track so I can move on from my past. I'm single and looking for a good woman in my life and friends to hang out with that can be trusted and relied on. His social life is in transition. He has "a lot of ups and downs" with his best friend, Mike, whom he met in treatment. Mike's girlfriend gets mad when the guys hang out too much and make jokes about being sex offenders. Jon recently started dating a 19-year-old girl and has been trying to prepare himself to tell her about his criminal record. He works off his frustrations on a weight set made from a bar, a few 20-pound rings, two cinder blocks, four milk crates and abundant duct tape. Jon describes his neighborhood as "working class, a little redneckish." The sliding glass door in his apartment looks out on a rubble field with a camper and few broken-down cars, and beyond that, the Bomber Restaurant. "I could be doing better," he says, "but this is the only place they have for people in my situation to live." Before he moved in, Jon made a preemptive phone call to the Driftwood Terrace apartments and told the property manager about his offenses. He was surprised when the manager still gave him an application, and then a set of keys. He knows it's his fault he got into this situation to begin with. When asked about his childhood and his family history, he rolls his eyes. "Eh, I've repressed all those memories," he says with a smirk. With a little coaxing, he paints a hazy picture of a modest house on the modest end of Lake Oswego, where he lived with his dad, his stepmother and their children. His father made enough money from the filtration equipment company he owns to keep the family comfortable. But Jon often tells people he grew up in rural Missouri, where he spent summers with his mom. He seems eager to reject "pretentious" Lake Oswego. Because he has dyslexia, he transferred from one special-ed program to another in school, making it hard to maintain friendships with classmates. He was always small for his age and didn't play sports. By the time he got to high school, he was angry enough to cut himself with bottle caps and knives, leaving thin white scars on his upper arm. One night, in a bedroom in a house with no adults, he began touching, and eventually having sex with, the 9-year-old female relative. He says he was bored and curious and turned on. He had had sex before with a high-school girlfriend and knew what to do. He continued violating the 9-year-old for several months, Jon says, and then he stopped. He claims he never used force. The victim's side of the story can't be told here because the courts won't release police reports on the investigation without a judge's order. The girl, now 14, is no longer in therapy and doing well, according to her father. In December 2002, in a room in the Clackamas County district attorney's office, Jon's attorney presented him with a deal. Instead of rape and sodomy, Jon would plead guilty to attempted sodomy, attempted sexual penetration and attempted sexual abuse. Rather than serve time, he would complete an $80,000 treatment program at his father's expense. If the case had stayed in juvenile court, he probably would have ended up in an outpatient treatment program and been eligible to appeal his registration requirement after three years. Jon's features contract as he talks about the deal. His voice rises, and he speeds up his cadence. "They basically made my mind up for me," he says, "kind of told me, you know, 'This is the only option you have.'" A few days after Christmas 2002, Jon drove with his father to the Counterpoint Residential and Day Treatment Center in a sm all cluster of wood-framed buildings near McMenamins Edgefield in Troutdale. The program is run by Morrison Child and Family Services. He joined about 20 other boys, ages 12 to 18, all of whom had committed serious sexual offenses. "At first I thought, 'Eh, this place is kinda creepy,'" Jon says. "Then I got used to it. You start to notice that you're getting your life back on track." Of the offenders who successfully complete the program, only 2 percent go on to commit additional sex crimes, according to Counterpoint's own research. (About half of Counterpoint's clients don't complete their treatment, however, and thus aren't included in statistics.) Counterpoint staffers try to dispel common myths about the perpetrators of sex crimes, juveniles in particular. Most importantly, juvenile sex offenders are far more amenable to treatment than their adult counterparts. They are also less likely to re-offend, either as youths or later as adults, with recidivism rates ranging between 5 and 14 percent, compared with 10 to 20 percent for adults, according to several national studies. Juveniles have fewer victims and are less likely to commit aggressive or predatory offenses. Counterpoint's group therapy sessions require clients to take responsibility for their crimes. Teitelbaum, now in her 13th year at the center, asks the young men to reveal "how they were able to do it," their fantasies and rationalizations, how they coerced their victims and kept them quiet. Truth-telling is guaranteed with monthly polygraph tests and questioning by peers. If the group sensed someone was lying, Jon says, "we'd berate them with questions. Or just call them on it, like, 'That's a bold-faced lie.' We could smell bullshit." The point of it all is to train offenders to realize when they're in their "cycle," the pattern of thought and behavior that precedes harmful actions, and give them the tools to move in a different direction. Jon learned to recognize his own cycle—"when I start just thinking about myself, and not caring how other people feel. "Usually just realizing that you're in it," he says, "you can just step out of it." Explaining his frame of mind back then, Jon says he knew society considered his actions wrong. But, he says, "It didn't feel wrong." Now, he says, he knows, and feels, the difference between right and wrong. When he sees a television show that deals with sexual abuse, he "feels as uncomfortable as anyone else." A year and a half after entering treatment, in August 2004, Jon graduated from Counterpoint. He took a bus back home to Lake Oswego, where his father rented him a one-bedroom in the Hunt Club Apartments. He was 17 years old. http://www.wweek.com/editorial/3229/7594/SOURCE=RSS