Should Therapists Disclose that Patients Have Looked at Child Porn?

Today, the Supreme Court of CA decided, 4-3, that a legal challenge mounted by California therapists against a law requiring them to report patients who have admitted to viewing child pornography – in therapy – may proceed to trial.

The law in question, the Child Abuse and Neglect Reporting Act of 2014, appears benign in that it merely expands the list of “mandated reporters” of abuse and neglect; however, it lists 46 categories of “mandated reporters”, many of which work in the therapeutic professions (including marriage counselors and drug and alcohol therapists) and listen to people who assume the information they provide is privileged. The definition of “child abuse” in the new law is very broad, and includes “sexual exploitation”, which in turn covers any person who knowingly “downloads,” “streams,” or electronically “accesses” child pornography.

As the plaintiffs–therapists and counselors–argue, this broad disclosure requirement violates the patients’  constitutional rights to privacy. No one, including the plaintiffs, doubts that child pornography is a serious problem, both on the production and on the consumption side; nor do the plaintiffs argue that viewing child porn in itself is shielded from prosecution by a right to privacy. But discussing this kind of behavior with your therapist is a different matter.

The constitutional analysis here is interesting, but what underlines the conversation strikes me as even more interesting. The plaintiffs declared that they “have treated numerous patients who are seeking treatment for sex addiction, sexual compulsivity, and other sexual disorders, many of whom have admitted downloading and viewing child pornography on the Internet, but whom [plaintiffs], based on their considerable training and experience, do not believe present a serious danger of engaging in ‘hands-on’ sexual abuse or exploitation of children or the distribution of child pornography to others. These patients typically have no prior criminal history, have never expressed a sexual preference for children, and are active and voluntary participants in psychotherapy to treat their particular sexual disorder, which often involves compulsive viewing of pornography of all kinds on the Internet.” Plaintiffs “have also treated patients seeking treatment because of sexual disorders involving a sexual attraction to children (including pedophilia), who have admitted to downloading and viewing child pornography, but whom [plaintiffs], based on their training and experience, do not believe present a serious danger of engaging in ‘hands-on’ sexual abuse or exploitation of children or the active distribution of child pornography to others. These patients typically have no prior criminal record . . . , no access to children in their home or employment, no history of ‘hands-on’ sexual abuse or exploitation of children, and often express disgust and shame about their sexual attraction to children for which they are actively and voluntarily seeking psychotherapy treatment.”

When I read this, I was struck by the similarities between this law and the criminalization of Brian Dalton in Ohio in 2003. Dalton, a registered sex offender, wrote (distressing, disturbing, horrible) fictional scenarios involving the torture of young boys in his private journal and–after the journal was discovered by his mom–found himself prosecuted for possession of obscene materials–the obscene material being his own journal. After much turmoil, the Ohio Supreme Court overturned the conviction.

I used to teach Dalton as a first case in criminal law, to remind my students that we do not criminalize people for thoughts–only for actions. Of course, the realities of internet porn make the actions required to participate in the crime so flimsy that the boundary between thoughts and deeds becomes pretty thin. But even so, I am struck by how both Dalton and Mathews highlight our tendency to persecute and hunt down consumers of child porn precisely at the point at which they are finding outlets for their propensities in an effort to get better. 

Underlying this appetite for criminalization is an assumption that propensities to be aroused by prepubescent children–which, as a society, we find abominable, a sentiment shared by many of the folks who harbor such propensities (and feel an incredible amount of shame about them)–overlap with the commission of serious crimes. This link is fiercely contested in the literature. Moreover, there’s an assumption that sex offenders are irredeemable–something that Danielle Harris shows is not true; desistance is not uncommon.

There is a difference between making a big show of protecting vulnerable children and actually protecting vulnerable children, and both of these instances–Dalton and the new CA law–are examples of the former, not the latter. I hope we can bring more facts and less revenge fantasies into our sex offender laws.

Book Review: Plausible Crime Stories by Orna Alyagon-Darr

Recently, I had the absolute treat to read Orna Alyagon Darr’s new book Plausible Crime Stories, in which she provides a riveting analysis of almost 150 sexual offense cases tried before the British Mandate courts of Palestine, prior to the inauguration of the State of Israel.
The evidentiary process in criminal courts involves efforts by factfinders to establish a factual truth in the face of often conflicting stories about what happened. In doing so, they recur to several different mechanisms, which Alyagon Darr discusses in the book: probability (which the official evidentiary standard endorses), credibility (whether a witness is telling the truth or a lie) and plausibility (which story makes sense.) Alyagon Darr’s book deals mostly with the latter, and its main argument is this: when deciding whether a story is plausible, factfinders rely on a lifetime of experience that is embedded in their place and time. People make assumptions about how a particular event went down on the basis of their beliefs about what makes sense, and these in turn are shaped by their status, ethnicity, and milieu. In this case, the factfinders were British colonial judges, whose approaches were shaped by notions shaped in the British metropole as well as by their stereotypes and understanding of the population of Middle-Eastern colonists they encounter. 
Alyagon-Darr tells, for example, of cases involving homosexual relations, which to the British simply could not entail love or an emotional connection. The narratives that made sense were shaped by what they considered a “typical” story: an older man of higher social status penetrates a younger man of lower status in exchange for money. Stories that fell into this narrative pattern were plausible; stories about love or mutuality were not. Similarly, in Mandatory Palestine relationships between Jewish women and Arab men were so stigmatized and unthinkable that, to make sense of them, the women in question had to be cast as problematic and coming from dysfunctional families.
These are only two examples of many fascinating ones that Alyagon-Darr discusses in the book. Her analysis made me think of Nicola Lacey’s Women, Crime, and Character. Lacey’s argument is that, throughout the 19th century, the treatment of women as offenders morphed as the criminal process evolved from reputation-based to evidence-based. What Alyagon Darr’s book seems to suggest is that this shift–whether or not completed in the British metropole–was not complete in the colonies in the early 20th century. Reputation, or assumptions about reputation, appear to be the lynchpin of both credibility and plausibility. Whether someone’s story about a sexual encounter that happened to them–consensual, nonconsensual, forceful, unexpected–is plausible or not depends on reputational factors such as the character’s ethnicity, age, or assumed sexual practices. In that respect, little has changed–just look at the many unchecked assumptions that underlined the Kavanaugh-versus-Ford debacle. What is interesting about the colonial society brought about by the Pax Britannica is that reputational assumptions pertained not only to individuals, but to entire communities, on the basis of ethnicity as the main characteristic. Which raises another question–should they have set these assumptions aside? Did these stereotypes persist because they were found to be true frequently enough to be valuable tools for judging reputation, character, and plausibility? Alyagon Darr wisely leaves these value questions to the readers, doing the kind of careful historical analysis that we need to do. 
Interestingly, just as I’m writing about this book, I came across the recent embarrassment surrounding Naomi Wolf’s new book Outrage. I was mortified for Wolf–it is regrettable, but very human, to fall in love with one’s theory (in this case, that consensual same-sex relations were harshly punished) to the point of misunderstanding the data. Alyagon Darr’s book is a great counterexample. It leaves open questions, intelligently interrogates the context of the period and the milieus involved, and has enough compassion to understand that not everyone in Mandatory Palestine was born holding the postmodern intersectionality handbook. It is laudable effort to understand historical actors on their own terms, as Ashley Rubin has recently called upon historians and others to do. 
But there’s something else going on here: echoes of Lombroso’s L’Uomo Delinquente, for sure. Alyagon Darr quotes an early 20th century criminologist, Paltiel Dikshtein, discussing “colonial criminology’. It is not a coincidence that the colonists had such appetite for reductionist, essentialist judgments on behavior in the colonies by ethnicity. At the time, Great Britain, particularly in the colonies, was enthralled with the power of science, measurements, and the use of medical tools and classifications. Because of the Lombrosian, scientist-looks-at-primitive-animals perspective, this was especially appealing in the colonies, and could explain Binyamin Blum’s findings about the emergence of forensic science in the colonies. Importantly, as David Horn explains so well, Lombroso’s scientific analysis of crime came of age during the unification of Italy, and should be understood in the context of making sense of differences in crime patterns among different Italian provinces. It’s not a coincidence to find similar mechanisms underpinning the ethnic hodgepodge created by the Pax Britannica, particularly in the complicated, diverse ethnic world of Mandatory Palestine. Similar to the Lombrosian project, what we see in the British is an effort to harmonize norms across the different population under their control. The need to govern and the enthusiasm about scientific inquiry of crime yielded the perfect storm: in criminological laboratories, it would manifest as essentialist diagnoses, and in courtroom settings, as essentialist findings of plausibility. 
Finally, an important word about the emotional impact of the book. It goes without saying that Alyagon-Darr is discussing events that happened a long time ago. Her clear and empathetic writing evinces the kind of compassionate care (without compromising attention to detail) that one would offer a friend of loved one who was hurt five minutes ago. Her descriptions of the horrific crimes people experienced, the betrayals in other people’s versions, the humiliating and dehumanizing medical examinations children had to undergo, read as fresh now as they must have felt to these people a hundred years ago. It makes one wonder about the impact that these open wounds had on the cultural psyche of the Jewish and Arab peoples, and the extent to which unspoken trauma and injury have fed into the larger mess that is today’s Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Not Your Typical Kavanaugh Opinion Piece

To a surrounded enemy, you must leave a way of escape.
                                                                                 –Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Last Friday I spoke at a school-wide forum about the Kavanaugh hearings. Since then, several people have come to thank me for voicing a perspective that is fairly uncommon in the progressive milieu. It is one of the pathologies of the partisan culture we now live in that one must subscribe to positions that often lack nuance and sometimes contradict factual and empirical evidence. The people who spoke to me asked me if I would be willing to share my perspective more widely, so here goes.

I’ll open by saying the obvious: I believe Dr. Ford. Not so much because of any indicia of reliability in her demeanor, but because, for the life of me, I can’t see why anyone would put themselves and their family through this particular variation of hell by lying. The incentives all line up toward the opposite direction. I think a mistaken identity is very unlikely here–even though eyewitness identification is a common source of wrongful convictions in sex crimes, that applies to stranger assaults, not to assaults by people familiar to the victim. It is also not unlikely that my sympathy for Dr. Ford also stems from the fact that she and I share the same milieu: she lives, works, dresses, and talks like me. She uses words like “hippocampus” and “sequelae.” By contrast, the prospect of an aggressively conservative turn in the Supreme Court frightens me because of the risks it poses to basic civil rights and to American democracy, given the corrupted and unprincipled stance of the Trump administration.

A widely publicized letter signed by law faculty was circulated, in which many people I like and respect challenged Kavanaugh on account of his demeanor, which they perceived to suggest lack of judicial temperament. I did not sign this letter for two reasons.

First, I have years of experience defending people in criminal courts against charges of sexual assault. During my time as a military defender, one of my responsibilities was to represent people in the special military court. What was so “special” about the special court was that its jurisdiction extended to high-ranked officers (colonel and up). These are, of course, career officers; the lower ranks in the Israeli army are occupied by young people aged 18-21 in mandatory service. This puts 40-something-year-old men in regular contact with 18-year-old women, in the context of a hierarchical institution that adds rank and military power to age and seniority. The outcome is that a considerable chunk of my legal practice was devoted to defending career officers against charges of sexual harassment and sexual assault.

My experience with these cases taught me a lot of things. One lesson was that most bad behavior is largely situational (as the Stanford Prison Experiment taught us, and as Ashley Rubin recently reminded us.) Another was that two people could be telling you widely divergent versions of an incident and both would be telling the truth, which is shaped through subjective experiences and feelings to a surprising degree. It also taught me that the best strategy for sex crime defense is to agree with the complainant’s version as much as possible. We called this “narrowing the scope of dispute.” The less contradictions there are between the prosecution’s version and the defendant’s version, the less there is to impeach the defendant with.

That Kavanaugh chose as his line of defense absolute denial was against any sort of sensible advice I ever gave a client in these circumstances. It is a sad testament to the partisan culture we live in that people were predisposed to believe him even though his strategy would have been disastrous in court. In addition, Kavanaugh’s religious background, and his base of supporters, would have been receptive to a cultural trope that is very common both in Catholicism and in Evangelical Christianity–talking up bad behavior in the past to emphasize change. Had he admitted to being wild and drinking in his adolescence, this milieu would have embraced his rehabilitation as a moral and religious victory. A similar strategy certainly underlined similar confessions from both George W. Bush and Barack Obama about their drug use. Again, that Kavanaugh did not recur to these sympathy-garnering tactics and still prevailed is an indication that the real mechanism behind this confirmation is partisan animosity, rather than factfinding.

But why did he do that? Here’s where I differ from my friends who signed the judicial temperament letter. I have spent a lot of time in the company of people who were (falsely OR truthfully) accused of sexual misconduct. I have spent time with their wives. I have heard them react to the complainant’s versions. I have seen them contemplate the real possibility that their personal and professional lives will fall apart. And each and every one of them–the guilty and the innocent–reacted in exactly the same way: yelling, tearing up, clenching fists, demonizing their accusers. It is not a peculiar reaction indicating a personal pathology. It is how humans universally react when they face an existential threat.

Now, every progressive outlet I know wrote the same op-ed, published the same meme, and made the same tired argument: Privileged white man, just a job interview, yada yada yada, what is he whining about? These arguments and memes completely miss the point. Everyone–yes, everyone, even you–deals with the emotional bind of the entitlement effect. Everyone tends to attribute the benefits and perks of their social position, no matter how high or low, to their own merit, and their deprivations to the failings of others. Everyone subjectively believes that they worked hard to earned what they have and react poorly to the prospect of losing that. That there is entitlement, privilege, and hubris at work here is obvious. This man’s problems seem perhaps, to you, as not very big problems compared to those of the poor and disenfranchised. But they are his problems. And, to him, the threat is palpable. His personal integrity has been besmirched, his personal life in tatters in front of the whole world, his family publicly humiliated and pitied by millions. This is the sort of thing that makes anyone react in that way–even people who exhibit calm tempers and evenhanded decisionmaking when dealing with other people’s problems. His behavior is not an indication of some sort of unique individual failing. It is the behavior of a person who is threatened and suffering.

My second reason for not signing the letter has to do with a personal decision I have made for the sake of upholding my own values: I do not mob people online for any reason, no matter who they are or how vile their failing is. I do not call for anyone’s firing, incarceration, or public shaming. When I join a political struggle–of which there are many–I join it toward something, not against something. I have found that online mobbing, which is rife on both sides of the political divide, carries with it plenty of mobilized rage (a hot commodity these days) and a detectable dose of schadenfreude. My personal experience marinating in these qualities is that they debase and depress me. I want to be part of positive change, not negative bashing.

The progressive variety of the call to mob, trash, annihilate the objectionable person, which I have come to call progressive punitivism, is especially pernicious. For people who overall fight for rehabilitation, for improved prison conditions, for a lessened reliance on confinement and stigma, it is surprising how quickly these lofty ideals are thrown by the wayside the minute they apply to a person they don’t like. This is why I refused to get on the bandwagon of diminished protections against prosecutions of police officers, vocally objected to the dangerous  and counterproductive recall campaign against Judge Persky, and spoke up against Oakland Mayor’s Libby Schaaf call to lower the burden of proof in trials of people she dislikes. Constitutional protections and a rehabilitative stance are really not worth much if they only exist for the people we like. Changing regimes and preferences might mean that the next target for harshness and stigma might be you or me–as we have daily proof on the federal level–and removing them for one is removing them for all.

Progressive punitivism is not worse than conservative punitivism, but it stings more, because it comes from people who understand the system enough to know better. It also strengthens other pathologies of the progressive left, such as the exclusive and vitriolic ideological purity, which demonizes and ostracizes any potential ally who is not 100% on board with every word you say, and the regrettable tendency to sometimes ignore facts because they are not politically expedient.

An adjacent problem is the fact that, as Jonathan Simon argues in Governing Through Crime, the quintessential American citizen is no longer the yeoman farmer or the small business owner: it’s the potential victim. By rewarding (or compensating) victimization, real or potential, with social capital, we have created a situation in which people are essentially forced to deprioritize their personal healing and marinate in their own victimhood as a condition of being heard. It’s true on the right, and has shaped some truly atrocious sentencing policies, and it’s true on the left, and has shaped some of the more egregious instances in which the overall commendable #metoo campaign became a victim of its own success. My law professor Ruth Gavison used to say that the first and foremost thing we owe victims is that they stop being victims as soon as possible. American public discourse propagates exactly the opposite.

The overwhelming conservative response to the Kavanaugh confirmation, and the energized Republican base as we go into the midterms that may decide the face of our democracy, is proof that the antagonism and demonization of individual wrongdoers is a failing strategy. Whaling on Kavanaugh or Brock Turner (righteous as it might feel) does not, sadly, bring us even a bit closer to eradicating sexual violence. Sexual domination, patriarchal hierarchies, and entitlement based on gender, class, and race, are systemic. People who exploit these to hurt other people do it largely in the context of situational factors that are bigger than their own pathologies. Calling out these pathologies by stigmatizing individual perpetrators and demanding their head on a stick does not lead to deep social reckoning, because it is not an environment that invites any sort of restorative conversation. Demonize people in public and what you’ll get is what you got  from Kavanaugh: counteraccusations, yelling, crying, clenched fists. When people’s liberty, employment, prestige, and family are at stake, and when they feel attacked, they are very unlikely to feel reflective, and they will not feel safe to offer an apology. More to the point, whatever apology they offer, because of its circumstances, is not something you or I would find genuine (as an aside, one hopes against hope that this experience will have offered Kavanaugh a window of empathy into the lives of criminal defendants and suspects, but I’m not holding my breath. He is likely to remember this as an effrontery, not a teaching moment, to the detriment of us all.)

The answer to hurt and violence is not propagating more hurt and violence. The answer lies, I think, in early education. Children are open to the idea that other children–regardless of their gender, color, or wealth–are human beings that can be their friends. Aiming at a diverse group of friends for your young child and prioritizing social experiences that place them in the company of people who live different lives of their own is essential. Teaching children gratitude for what they have can counter the bitterness that can accompany the entitlement effect. Teaching happiness, resilience, and compassion are antidotes to the zero-sum thinking that accompanies the excesses that come with entitlement. If the current administration does not prioritize this kind of administration, let’s go to the polls in November and vote for people who will. And let’s start the revolution inside our own homes, by instilling a sense of community and mutual responsibility in our children.

Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world.
By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased.
This is a law eternal.
                                                                      –The Buddha

Ending Lifetime Registration of Sex Offenders–A Courageous and Sensible Idea

Yesterday’s L.A. Times reports:

“SB 384 proposes thoughtful and balanced reforms that allow prosecutors and law enforcement to focus their resources on tracking sex offenders who pose a real risk to public safety, rather than burying officers in paperwork that has little public benefit,” said Ali Bay, a spokeswoman for the governor.

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey sought the change because the current registry has grown to a difficult-to-manage 105,000 people, which reduces its value to law enforcement trying to solve sex crimes by checking those on the list.

Because the registry is public, it also punishes people who have not committed new crimes for decades, including some who engaged in consensual sex, bill supporters argued.

This is an excellent idea. Before you get all riled up, read the actual text:

This bill would, commencing January 1, 2021, instead establish 3 tiers of registration based on specified criteria, for periods of at least 10 years, at least 20 years, and life, respectively, for a conviction of specified sex offenses, and 5 years and 10 years for tiers one and two, respectively, for an adjudication as a ward of the juvenile court for specified sex offenses, as specified. The bill would allow the Department of Justice to place a person in a tier-to-be-determined category for a maximum period of 24 months if his or her appropriate tier designation cannot be immediately ascertained. The bill would, commencing July 1, 2021, establish procedures for termination from the sex offender registry for a registered sex offender who is a tier one or tier two offender and who completes his or her mandated minimum registration period under specified conditions. The bill would require the offender to file a petition at the expiration of his or her minimum registration period and would authorize the district attorney to request a hearing on the petition if the petitioner has not fulfilled the requirement of successful tier completion, as specified. The bill would establish procedures for a person required to register as a tier three offender based solely on his or her risk level to petition the court for termination from the registry after 20 years from release of custody, if certain criteria are met. The bill would also, commencing January 1, 2022, revise the criteria for exclusion from the Internet Web site.

In her book Sex Fiends, Perverts, and Pedophiles, Chrysanthi Leon of the University of Delaware discusses the changes in our approach toward sex offenders. As she lucidly explains, we used to be able to differentiate between different types of sex offenders and find compassion and pragmatism in our approach toward their punishment and rehabilitation. But with the sex panics of the 1980s, we started blurring lines and seeing all sex offenders as just one category, identifying all of them with the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes. This was a big mistake. Sex offenders, as Tamara Lave reminds us, have a remarkably low rate of recidivism, and the effort to warn the public from them would be better spent on narrow categories of sex criminals that actually recidivate. This bill is a step forward toward more careful classification.

But there’s something else here that is important.

The impetus for the new bill is that the sex offender list has grown so long that it has become difficult to manage. Local authorities spend a lot of time processing paperwork, and time means money. Again, as I discuss in Cheap on Crime, the practicalities of punishment become so cumbersome that we’re taking a step in the right direction. Indeed, any deterrent effect the list has becomes diluted once everyone is on the list for everything, as J.J. Prescott and Jonah Rockoff remind us here.

In sight of the federal disaster that is the Trump/Sessions gratuitous, senseless cruelty enforcement mechanism, it’s nice to see California once again making a reasonable decision.

Sex Offenders Remain Most Reviled Category. Film at 11.

Thousands of people called Simon and Schuster in the last few weeks to ask them to cancel the lucrative book deal they offered self-styled libertarian “bad boy”, Milo Yiannopoulos. That there are things to loathe about his ideology should be fairly obvious to my readers–his sexism, racism, and even threats to people’s life and safety speak for themselves. Despite, and probably because, of the public uproar, S&S persisted in keeping the contract in place.

What eventually led to the book deal’s cancelation, as well as the cancelation of his CPAC participation, was his commentary on pedophilia. All around me, people are treating this outcome as good news.

A few folks have bitterly remarked on the fact that all of Yiannopoulos’ other transgressions were not sufficient to put him in political and commercial disfavor. I share the bitterness, but I also think it’s fairly naive; I am familiar enough with the book publishing business, and have seen enough of the current administration, to understand that any such controversy simply means more publicity and better business. More people clamoring to cancel the book deal directly translate into more books sold. Controversy is good for commerce. I was one of the thousands of callers, but did so reluctantly, for precisely this reason.

The other part of the bitter equation is a bit more difficult to see through the lens of our own biases, and that is the broad consensus, shared apparently by conservatives and progressives alike, that anyone perceived as reaching out to pariahs should become a pariah by association. As Chrysanthi Leon explains in Sex Fiends, Perverts, and Pedophiles, one of the marked trends in our treatment of sex offenders in the last few decades has been to lump everyone into the same reviled group, even though there are many distinctive and different categories of sex offenders, and even though sexually deviant propensities do not necessarily translate into sexually transgressive behavior that victimizes others.

This dangerous focus on pedophiles is a distraction from the fact that most sex crimes against children are perpetrated by someone known to the child–a family member or a friend of the family. And unsurprisingly, it is precisely these crimes that go underreported. We tend to confuse pedophilia (the transgressive propensity) with sexual molestation (the transgressive behavior) because of availability bias: the people whom we know as pedophiles are familiar to us because they were caught. Not all child molesters are pedophiliacs, and not all pedophiliacs are child molesters. If anything, our attitude of revulsion and ostracism against pedophiliacs is what, perversely, might lead some of them to act out their fantasies.

Since the Yiannopoulos affair ended up working in “our” favor (whoever “our” refers to), people are less likely to examine and critique the perniciousness of our treatment of pedophiles, and far less likely to see how this vast consensus stands in the way of people’s rehabilitation and therapy. They are also less likely to examine another pernicious aspect of this: that Yiannopoulous happens to be gay is going to lump him, in the eyes of a considerable part of the population, with the pedophiles he was presumably supporting. Even if you don’t find that you can extend sympathy to someone who cannot help their proclivities (even though they absolutely can refrain from acting on those proclivities), you might feel less sanguine about this whole situation when you consider that one of its unfortunate outcomes is that it will solidify, for some conservatives and centrists, the link between gay people and child molestation, which we have worked for so many decades to overcome.

The publisher’s decision in this case shows not only that controversy sells, but that biases and ostracism are alive and well. I find it a pyrrhic victory.

Aquarius, Episode 7: Spoiler Alerts

Ken Karn is becoming an important muckety-muck in Nixon’s reelection campaign, and as such, he has to put his house in order–including emancipating his wayward daughter, Emma, who is gradually feeling disenchanted with the violence and fear that come with being a member of the Manson family. This episode sees Manson in the process of procuring a music deal, as well as abusing several of his young female disciples.

But again, what’s more interesting is not the Manson angle at all. In the process of trying to locate a prostitute that Manson may have murdered, Hodiak reconnects with an old acquaintance of his–a former sex worker and currently a nurse. “You took part-time nursing school”, he says with astonishment. His new friend’s achievements and respectable profession, however, doesn’t mean she’s treated with dignity; when Karn’s wife comes knocking on the door, she quickly slips back into her uniform, saying, “I’ll give her a minute to leave and then head out through the service door.”

If the show is trying to say something about social approaches to prostitution–and I don’t think it is–the message I take away from this is that the amount of sexual hypocrisy and respectability games has not been reduced.

Residence Requirements for Sex Offenders Struck Down

This morning, in re William Taylor et al., the California Supreme Court struck down the provisions of Jessica’s Law that restricted registered sex offenders from residing within 2000 feet of a school or park.

The bottom line is as follows:

[W]e agree that section 3003.5(b)‟s residency restrictions are unconstitutional as applied across the board to petitioners and similarly situated registered sex offenders on parole in San Diego County. Blanket enforcement of the residency restrictions against these parolees has severely restricted their ability to find housing in compliance with the statute, greatly increased the incidence of homelessness
among them, and hindered their access to medical treatment, drug and alcohol dependency services, psychological counseling and other rehabilitative social services available to all parolees, while further hampering the efforts of parole authorities and law enforcement officials to monitor, supervise, and rehabilitate them in the interests of public safety. It thus has infringed their liberty and privacy interests, however limited, while bearing no rational relationship to advancing the state‟s legitimate goal of protecting children from sexual predators, and has violated their basic constitutional right to be free of unreasonable, arbitrary, and oppressive official action.

Nonetheless, as the lower courts made clear, CDCR retains the statutory authority, under provisions in the Penal Code separate from those found in section 3003.5(b), to impose special restrictions on registered sex offenders in the form of discretionary parole conditions, including residency restrictions that may be more or less restrictive than those found in section 3003.5(b), as long as they are based on, and supported by, the particularized circumstances of each individual parolee.

While the Orange County Register believes that it is unclear whether the ruling has effect outside San Diego County, it seems that a legal provision that is unconstitutional in one area of California is just as unconstitutional in another. Of particular interest is the impact of San Francisco, which, because of the layout of schools and parks in it, is essentially inhabitable to sex offenders under Jessica’s Law. This meant a large proportion of homeless and transient sex offenders, which, as one of them said to ABC news, “are actually walking time bombs out here because we are suffering from sleep deprivation”.