By Diane Jennings and Darlean Spangenbergen
The Dallas Morning News
DAYTON, Texas — The nine men sitting in a circle are striking only in their ordinariness. They’re young and middle-aged, black, white and Hispanic, fathers and grandfathers, sons and brothers, from big cities and small towns.
Except for a tattoo or two and their baggy white prison uniforms, nothing sets them apart as violent sex offenders - the worst of the worst.
These nine inmates count themselves lucky — not because they’re preparing for release, but because they’re among the few of Texas’ 26,000 imprisoned sex offenders receiving treatment.
Though the Legislature voted to double the treatment program’s budget to $4 million, most of the state’s incarcerated sex offenders still will get no treatment, said Geralyn Engman, manager of the treatment program at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
The program is part of a larger debate on whether sex offenders can be cured — or at least learn how to manage their impulses.
Effective sex offender treatment has been elusive, experts say.
Still, state officials involved in treatment said 5 percent to 13 percent of sex offenders are rearrested for sex crimes. The only other criminal less likely to reoffend is a convicted murderer, said Allison Taylor, executive director of the Texas Council on Sex Offender Treatment.
A recent state audit of the Texas prison program shows some encouraging results. Reincarceration rates were more than 60 percent lower for offenders who went through the program than for those who did not. Most returning to prison went back for technical violations, not new criminal charges.
Jeremy Serna, 33, who has served most of a 15-year sentence for rape of an adult woman, said nothing “caught my attention” until he got into the treatment program a few months ago.
“If you lock somebody up for 25 years, that puts a Band-Aid on the problem,” Mr. Serna said.
‘Let me earn it’
At the Hightower Unit in southeast Texas, the nine convicts said they have a better chance of succeeding with treatment than without. Some have not been in the free world since sex offender registration became mandatory.
Mr. Serna said he knows people outside prison are going to hate and fear him.
“I understand because I have family. And I would want my family to be protected from people like me - without treatment.”
But “if somebody comes in and they try to work on themselves, give them a chance. ... Let me earn it. Let me show you.”
Treatment should start immediately, the inmates said, not in the last 18 months of a lengthy sentence as it currently does.
“You come into prison, where taking from the weak is acceptable,” Mr. Serna said.
When inmates get treatment at the end of their sentences, “you’ve got so much bitterness in there, you’re kind of reluctant.”
The criminal justice program consists of intensive therapy designed to help the inmate understand what he did, take responsibility for it and learn to control behavior.
Ms. Engman said it sounds good to start earlier, but the program’s philosophy is to prepare the inmate before he re-enters society and not to go back into the general prison population.
It’s not realistic, she said, to treat offenders for 20 years.
Empathy for victims
Joshua Duncan, 28, serving three years for two counts of indecency with a child, said emotional education classes like those offered would have helped him when he was growing up. “It teaches you a lot of things about your feelings and your thoughts, a lot of things that people from my family didn’t learn,” he said.
Offenders agreed with survivors that greater awareness and increased reporting are as important as tougher sentences.
Many of them said they’ve talked to their own kids about abuse.
“I’ve talked to my daughter several times,” said Joshua Payne, 28, who is 10 years into a 15-year sentence for sexual assault. He was 18 and his victim was 16. He encouraged his daughter to talk to him or another adult if she’s afraid of something.
“I’m not a mind reader,” he told her. “If I don’t know, I can’t help you, and I want to help you as much as I can.”
Rob Avara, 49, who is serving a nine-year sentence for aggravated sexual assault, said the program has given him empathy for victims and the shame they feel.
The strain of being a sex offender outside prison can’t be much worse than being a sex offender inside, he said, where such criminals are reviled.
“Do you know what it’s like to lay in bed at night and wonder if tomorrow they’re going to find out?” Mr. Avara asked. “To wonder if tomorrow I go out on the rec yard, is somebody going to know something and is my life in jeopardy?
“Each one of these brothers in white is seeking a chance to prove that what we got in here from the program works,” he said, “and if a program offender gets busted a second time for doing a [sex] offense, I’m a firm believer in they need to be fried.”
Copyright 2007 The Dallas Morning News