 You're watching FJTN, the Federal Judicial Television Network. We also want this training program to give you an opportunity to learn more about sex events. I attended the program today so I could take back information from myself as well as fellow officers about the investigating of people charged with sexually-based offenses at the federal level. It's also difficult for the victim to see it as a sexual crime. We at the Federal Correction and Supervision Division feel that this is an important issue to be addressing and that we have made it a priority at the AO. I think this training will teach us to do better pre-sentences, number one, to start the process and secondly will help us supervise them by knowing what kind of conditions to impose and knowing more about the offender himself when he's released for supervision. The client is the community or the community is the client, so I may be treating, we may be treating an offender, an individual, but that individual may not be my primary client. We've always heard about this program at Butler, but now we've actually been here and have had an opportunity to see the staff, meet the staff, see the program, so it's going to give us a lot of insight into what goes on back here and how we can continue that in the community. Welcome. This special needs offenders program is a focused addition in this series featuring the sex offender treatment program at the Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, North Carolina. In June 2000, nearly 100 pretrial services and probation officers participated in a workshop at the Federal Correctional Institution in Butner. Sponsored in part by the Federal Judicial Center, the seminar was presented by the staff of Butner's sex offender treatment program. For two and a half days, the program's director, Dr. Andres Hernandez, and his staff trained officers on a variety of topics including an overview of sex offenders and the treatment program at Butner, a sex offender specific PSI, and risk assessment and supervision. So much material was covered in those two days that we couldn't adequately cover it all in one two hour broadcast, so we divided the program into two parts. Today is part one, which begins with an overview of sex offenders and the specifics of the Butner program. The part two of the series will pick up with a sex offender specific PSI and continue with risk assessment and supervision techniques. Now, if you're interested in learning more about standards of assessment and treatment, let us know through your evaluations. If there's enough interest, we'll consider developing a third installment in this series. Dr. Hernandez put together a wealth of information and supplemental reading materials. Most of those materials, along with a complete slide presentation, can be found on the DCN. Other materials referred to by Dr. Hernandez can be found on the website for the Center for Sex Offender Management, and their web address is www.csom.org. Let's start with Dr. Hernandez and the warden of FCI, Butner, Steven DeWall. Let me once again welcome you to our program entitled Effective Management of Sex Offenders in the Community. This was a project that was several months ago, just an idea, and I'm so glad to have you here. It's now a reality. We have an excellent program, or what we believe is an excellent program for you. We have a lot of information to share. We also want to hear from you. Certainly you have a wealth of knowledge and expertise that we need to benefit from, and I hope today and tomorrow we can have an exchange of information between our two agencies. Before I move on, I wanted to introduce our warden, Warden Steven DeWall, who has made certainly this training conference possible. These training materials certainly are possible due to Warden DeWall's support. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce Warden DeWall. Good morning. Let me start off by saying that I want to welcome you to the Federal Correctional Complex here in Butner, North Carolina. One of the nice parts about being a warden and about being a supervisor is to be able to have the bragging rights with the kind of folks who have put together through their professional expertise a program of this type. I think you will find that as you go through the program over the next day and a half, two days, that they are going to request a lot of feedback from your point of view in reference to this program, referencing issues, referrals, how it can work. This will help support us as we continue to go forward with the Bureau of Prisons Executive Staff on exactly how this program is going to work. And again, welcome to FCC Butner. Thank you. I have a lot of material to go through. We're going to be talking about sex offenders. When I refer to sex offenders, I'm going to refer to criminals. By definition, anyone who has committed a sexual crime is a sex offender. I frequently get questions from probation officers, from other individuals, and the question goes, well, this person was convicted of child pornography, possession of child pornography. Does he see a sex offender? And my answer to that is yes, he has committed a sexual crime. Okay, so these are some of the more traditional sexual crimes that we encounter in our practice. Child molestation, abuse, assault, rape, indecent exposure, masturbation. These are the more traditional crimes. Now, in the federal system, we tend to see an overrepresentation of a group of inmates primarily comprised of child pornographers. These are people who engage, as you well know, in distribution, traffic of child pornography, downloading child pornography from the internet, using the U.S. Postal Service to get these materials or introduce them via U.S. Customs. So these individuals do end up in our jurisdiction, in our prisons, and they tend not to end up in state systems. We have this other group of criminals. These are individuals who lure children through the internet and who travel across state lines with the intent of committing sexual abuse of a minor. Those who pander, these are the panderers, individuals who engage in traffic in child prostitution, not those who engage in it, but those who profit from it, recruit children, groom children to, and sometimes abduct children to engage in this type of activity. We also have a group of criminals who are very sophisticated about what they do. These individuals engage in what's called the child sex trade tourism. Does anyone know what that is? Has anyone encountered these cases? Have you heard of pedophilic organizations setting up tours overseas? In Mexico, certain parts of South America, Central America, Southeast Asia, in certain parts of Europe, to go for the explicit purpose of sexually abusing children. There are some pedophilic organizations in this country who sponsor orphanages in Southeast Asia, and the sponsorship is for the exclusive purpose of having access and quote unquote right to sexually abuse those children. This is a largely unknown type of criminal activity. It's very sophisticated, but it has, as you might expect, profound, profound consequences on an entire system that is affected by it. We also have murderers who can also be classified as sexual offenders. If the murder was sexually motivated. These are the more unusual type of sexual crimes, but nonetheless, these are quite prevalent in our system. Who are these individuals? Again, by definition, they are criminals. These individuals may or may not be parapheria. Parapheria refers to a group of psychiatric diagnoses. Parameans deviant or away from normal. Philia means sexual attraction. These are all those disorders, all those individuals who may be considered sexually deviant. Some sex offenders may have a parapheric disorder, and some individuals with a parapheric disorder may not be sex offenders. A diagnosis of parapheria does not require that the person engage in criminal sexual behavior. There is a considerable overlap between parapherias and sexual crimes, but these are not synonymous categories. I want to highlight that issue. These are some of the parapherias that are listed in the DSM-4. This is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. Pedophilia. Many child molesters are pedophiles. Many child molesters are not pedophiles. Or I should say, do not meet the criteria for pedophilia. Many rapists are sexual sadists. Many rapists are not sexual sadists. Many child molesters are pedophiles and sexual sadists. Exhibitionism, voyeurism, these are people, the peeping toms. And the catch-all category, not otherwise specified. That is, when we don't have, when we haven't made up a term, a diagnostic label for a parapheriac, we make one up and say, not otherwise specified. I've seen some pretty creative diagnoses such as pictophilia for child pornographers. Now, there is no such thing. People just came up with that term, pictophilia. I think it's a profoundly erroneous category, but we'll leave my commentary for later. All right. What do these people have in common? What common characteristics do they have? There's a large study, very large-scale study that was conducted over an eight-year period. And this is the primary author, Gene Abel and his associates, Judith Becker and a bunch of other people, over an eight-year period studied a group of 561 sexual offenders. These are adult male sex offenders. This was probably the first study of its kind in which they ensured the inmate's anonymity for self-report. Again, 561 incarcerated male offenders, these are some of their demographics. The range of age 13 to 76, so really spanning the whole age range from teenagers to well advanced in age with a median part and an average age of 31.5 years. They were, for the most part, moderately educated. So you can say this is not a function, sexual offending is not a function of low education, low socioeconomic status. In fact, 40% of these individuals had at least one year of college. The federal system, particularly with child pornographers, this certainly holds up and we probably see a much higher percentage of individuals who have high educational attainment achievement. Individuals who are physicians, who are college graduates. Individuals who are in law enforcement. Number of individuals that we get in the federal system have advanced degrees. So socioeconomic and ethnic groups, again, not representative of any particular one. These 561 were pretty much from all socioeconomic and ethnic groups. I do want to mention something in the federal system. We have probably an overrepresentation by instant offense of Native American sex offenders. That is by virtue of the type of crimes and where those crimes are adjudicated. About 49, 48% of all instant offense sex offenders are Native Americans. In this particular sample, about 50% were married. Now this kind of shoots down that myth that sex offenders offend because of lack of opportunity. They're not having sex. They are socially incompetent and cannot be part of a relationship with another adult. Well in fact, over half were involved in a quote unquote meaningful adult intimate sexual relationship. Now this is a very good point. The majority of these individuals reported deviant sexual interest prior to age 18. I can't tell you how many times I've been confronted with cases of individuals who at 48, at 52, at 69 suddenly have an attack of pedophilia. That doesn't happen. It doesn't happen. Sexual interest prior to 18, prior to 18, that's when most of us have already developed our sexual arousal patterns. And for a person to say, look, I've never done this before. I've never been attracted to a child and here you find in their possession 10,000 images depicting child pornography that doesn't add up. So this is a very important finding. Another important finding is that these individuals engaged in the behavior multiple times. All too often we get these individuals saying, I did it only one time, only once or twice or as many times as they have been caught. Well, that doesn't happen. These individuals engage in this behavior multiple times and they accrue many, many, many victims. This particular sample accrued 100 over 195,000 victims. This is a significant number. Now this is a number that is skewed by high frequency sexual offenses such as exhibitionism, such as voyeurism. Nonetheless, even when you take all of those high frequency sexual crimes out of the equation, this is a very, very significant number. If I remember the data set correctly, there were only 53 child molesters who targeted boys. They reported over 20,000 victims, just that subgroup. So what are the implications of research like this and other similar findings? What I'd like for you to remember from this is sexual deviance often begins at a young age. It is seldom that a person will have an attack of pedophilia at 42. That doesn't happen like that. Sex offenders engage in multiple parapherias. It is seldom, and I'll talk more about this, it is seldom that they engage in only one type of criminal behavior or deviant sexual activity. The instant offense is the tip of the iceberg. Again, pretty much the same. And finally, sex offenders are a heterogeneous group. It's a group that is representative of everyone. Those who are poor, those who are rich, those who are in between. Black, white, brown, red. All socioeconomic and educational achievement. All right. This is consistent with data that we have collected in SOTP stands for sex offender treatment programs. And I'm going to use that acronym over and over again. I came on board and took the position of director of the sex offender treatment program in January of 1997. Since 1997, we've treated more individuals than 93. But in this particular study, we only looked at 93 individuals that have gone through the program. Some have completed the entire phase of the program. Some have been expelled from the program because of a wide variety of reasons. Some of these people are still in the program. We have or we typed four groups in this particular sample of 73. Child pornographers, those who engage in this luring and travel with intent. That's my sort of catch-all phrase for those who target children, try to meet up with them, travel across state line with the intention of sexually abusing them. Those who engage in contact sexual crimes, this may be child sexual abuse, rape of an adult woman, anything that involves a contact sexual offense. And then other. Others, these are individuals who are in for drug-related offenses, bank robbery. Not that many, but... So these are the numbers of offenders in each group. 39 being the largest group. Yes, sir? What incentive is there for the individual to volunteer to participate in this program? None. Except treatment. So this is a unique population. They do volunteer. Now some of them say, yes, you know, doctor, I want treatment. And when they actually get here and we put them through the treatment program and what it entails, they say, well, no, I really don't want to participate in this. We have some of that. There are very few who actually complete the program. And those individuals need to stay motivated and need to endure the process of treatment. That can be very grueling sometimes, you know, coming up with a victim list, a victim list that they don't want to admit to themselves, let alone to others, to the probation officer, to treatment providers for fear of prosecution and other consequences. I'll talk more about the admission criteria and who actually makes up this group of people. Okay, these are contact crimes admitted to before treatment. This is based on PSI information, based on psychological evaluation reports that we have received. This may also include information regarding self-report. So these are not just convictions for contact crimes. It may include self-disclosure to you as the PSI writer. After treatment, that means after they complete a victim list. This is self-report only. Very few of these people have been polygraphed. So child pornographers, people who are seen frequently by the court as not very dangerous offenders, actually this particular group had the highest number of contact crimes. 925 offenses, very significant. This was, I believe, a fluke. Had we had a higher number, and maybe there's some sampling error here, but I do expect, I would have expected this number to have been much higher than it was. From 42 to 228. And these are just three individuals admitting to contact crimes, and then that jumps to 30. Again, a total of 1,197. Okay, these are individuals of the sample of 63 in the total sample. There were a group of 32 individuals who had no, absolutely no contact crimes. So this is about, I would estimate, about 40% of our sample had no known history of contact crimes based on the PSI. Of this group, in this group there were 25 child pornographers. It's a very typical case. A person gets caught for trafficking, possessing, downloading child pornography. They don't have a criminal history. They've never been picked up as sex offenders before. A group of 25, five with the travel with intent, and two in the other category. These people admitted to committing 429 contact crimes. Now, what's different about this and the other data sets that I presented, the other data sets included non-contact sexual offenses, exhibitionism, voyeurism, frottage, and in other contact crimes. This is, in this particular data set, this only includes contact victims. These are actual people that were victimized by these alleged, not very dangerous offenders. So these people are quite busy. Again, the same data set. The largest representation is child pornographers and contact offenders. Most of these are Native Americans. Another graphic depiction of disclosures, an increase of 1,000, over 1,000%. Again, this is the overall number of 73 offenders. These are the child pornographers, contact crimes, the luring and travel with intent, and the other category. I hope you can take these slides and share them. I hope to soon publish these data. There is no data out in the field that supports what we have found. This is a unique program because we have a unique sample of sex offenders. There are a lot of people, so-called experts out there, offering their opinions about cyber sex criminals, and they know very little about what we're dealing with. They're offering opinions based on their gut feeling, their clinical impressions, and what they see as they see a highly educated man without a prior criminal history. There is a lot of similarity between the offender and everybody else in the criminal justice system, a person who's quite good and sophisticated about deceiving and manipulating others, and no criminal history. So the natural tendency would be for clinicians and others to form that opinion that these individuals are really not that dangerous, that somehow it's the internet's fault, or some devious child molester who was sending the child pornography, and these people were kind of helpless victims. What we discover is that some of these individuals may have pedophilic tendencies, and the internet is a viable mechanism or medium whereby they can further that interest, and then they get caught for it. There are plenty of individuals who use this medium to actually further their already existing sexual deviants. It's unfortunate at this point we don't have a classification system for child pornographers. I hope over time to develop one. My advice to you would be share this information. This is public information. There is nothing here that identifies identities. I am more than happy to talk to anyone who will listen to me. So, any other questions? What about people who are in the BOP for, say, a fraud conviction or drugs, but may have prior state convictions, child molestation? Are they eligible for this? I'm glad you raised that issue because it goes to what I'm going to talk about next. We have approximately, about six months ago, we had about 1,500, maybe 1,600 sex offenders who were serving time for a sexual offense in our system. So that's a little, slightly more than 1% of the entire population. We have about 130,000 inmates in our institutions. So it comprises about 1%. These are instant offense sex offenders. The others, we refer to them by their public safety factor. And this is an assignment that inmates receive upon their initial custody and security classification. This enables us to identify them, flag them as sex offenders in our system. And yes, they are eligible to participate in the program even if they have had no sexual convictions. And they knock on my door and they say, Doc, I'm a pervert, I'm a sex offender. I like to participate in your program. And in fact, we had one person like that, only one though. That's a very rare occurrence. And a few months ago, I didn't think that that was even possible. But this guy certainly disconfirmed that belief. They are eligible. And let me talk about those numbers. These numbers refer to everyone in our system who is a sex offender. Individuals who are serving time for a sexual offense and individuals who are labeled as sex offenders or flagged for a previous conviction. I should also mention that none of these numbers here include sex offenders who target prison staff and who target other inmates. It's a big population, but we don't know much about that population. We've been in the process of studying that population and developing specialized programs for them. And I'll talk more about that tomorrow. How many sex offenders do we have in the BLP? Well, 1% is the instant offense sex offender. And then we have probably another 4% who are public safety factor sex offenders for a total of about 6,000. Now these data are from February of this year and we had a total of 5,500 in some offenders in the sex offenders in the BLP. Now by region, you may know that the Bureau of Prisons is divided into six regions. We are in the Mid-Atlantic region. Now the number with the highest number of sex offenders is the North Central region, right here, 1362. Rate of increase. I've had brief conversations with some of you and you have certainly talked about the number of cases, the increase in the number of cases that you see through your districts. Well, we've also seen that. In fact, in the past two years, we've seen an increase of 45%. Only two years ago, our total number was about 3,800. We are probably, this is six months old, we're probably at about 6,000. So this number is increasing rapidly. Why is it? I think there are a lot of reasons for the increases. It has to do with special legislation and not legislation but funding for the prosecution of some of these crimes. I've heard of the FBI's Sting operation, the Innocent Images operation. That has produced a number of prosecutions and cases filed. We are becoming a nation that is increasingly literate of the internet and we're using the internet more and more. We have now mechanisms where people can police the internet and use these type of criminal activities through the internet and report it to a central location. This is called a cyber tip line. It's a congressional initiative. It's done through the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children along with FBI and other law enforcement agencies. It's a very important tool which has produced in only one year 460 arrests. This is from a little over 2,000 reports and these are citizens just like you and me who are on the internet and have come across this kind of garbage on the internet and do report it to the cyber tip line. That goes directly to law enforcement. Any questions? Let me open it up for maybe a 10-minute session of questions and then we'll break. Yes ma'am. You were saying that you encouraged the polygraph but then you said the 73 people you were talking about most of them hadn't had that. Do you use it on a regular basis here? We would like to use it on a regular basis. It took me almost a year, a year and a half to get it approved. Then it took me a while to find a vendor and then it got too expensive. So now I'm trying to recruit a psychologist from the northeast who is not only a good psychologist but a good plethysmography examiner but he's also a polygraph examiner. So as soon as I get him on board if he's willing to come we'll be doing a lot of polygraph examinations. Can you talk a little bit about what your opinion is that are the important variables that are getting these guys to disclose the information? I know the tool like sexual history questionnaire and the polygraph but what do you think is occurring in the offender's mind so that the disclosures are increasing as they go along in the treatment program? I guess that's a multifaceted process. It has to do first of all with their baseline motivation. By virtue of them participating and volunteering for the program there is some degree of motivation. They want to get better. Now for most of them if we just went on what their conviction was or what's on their record and we assume that that is what we're dealing with and we didn't actually delve into the sexual history and the victim list as much as we do they would probably be very fine with that. They wouldn't volunteer any additional information. For many of them it's very difficult to come to terms with their sexual offending history. They have a great deal of emotional energy invested in seeing themselves as not very dangerous. They have lied to their spouses, their children, their parents, their brother, sister, everyone about their criminal history and there is a lot at stake. Now what gets them to actually disclose and begin to talk about these issues? I think it has to do number one with the treatment community. We have systematically shaped a therapeutic community that is very powerful. It has a very powerful and insidious effect on disclosures. The predominant value in the program is honesty. So there is incredible peer pressure to come clean, put all the cards on the table. We do a great deal of motivational interventions. Tell them, look, unless you do this you're going to be continued to hide and maintain secrets and you're not going to get any better. We explain to them that sex offender treatment is not about just sex and deviant sex. It's about a lifestyle, about a lifestyle of irresponsibility, a lifestyle of manipulation, deceit, a lifestyle of hedonism, a lifestyle of egocentrism and we try to impact their lives at that level as the context for therapeutic intervention, as the context for specific cognitive behavioral techniques, relapse prevention techniques, because without that context these interventions can get quickly lost. The peer pressure in a group setting is such that the offender will come in and say, yeah, I only did this. He's now 47 and they all look at one another and say, yeah, right, you've only done this once, you're not attracted to children, so there is pressure, systematic pressure. We also work with them individually as well as in the group setting to again motivate them. We're not looking for self-incriminating information and in fact when we've had them polygraphed I specifically have told the polygraph examiner do not elicit identifying information because that is not the purpose of treatment. The purpose of treatment is to assessment and treatment is to have an accurate account of what they've done. I'm more interested in finding out the full magnitude of their deviant sexual behavior than the identity of their victims. Now if it's a child victim I'm bound by law to report that to authorities and there have been two cases in which I have had to do that, call a law enforcement agency in the location, the jurisdiction where the offense occurred, where I have the identity of the victim and I have the location of the victim and I have made that call and the offender, the program participant has been fully aware of that. So there is an understanding that I'm going to be straight with them and they're going to be straight with me. I'm going to hold them accountable and I will not accept dishonesty and I will not accept deceit. Now I hope that gives you an idea of what is the climate in which treatment occurs. Sometimes I'd like to believe in my own narcissistic mind that I produce these changes but these people sometimes come to us ready to change and we are at the right time at the right place with the right people and expertise and we're able to capitalize on that. These people are not without serious reservations about reporting the full magnitude of their behavior. Based on criminal history based on the PSI these people may be very low risk offenders but gee after they report 93 victims and they report a predatory style of sex offending sometimes I think that they should be locked up forever. We still release them. Yes ma'am. At some point down the line is the BOP considering making your program mandatory for sexual predators or offenders who have actually sexual contact with children? Do you think that you'll be moving in that direction at some point? At this point in time there is no talk about making the residential sex offender treatment program a mandatory component. There's been some discussion with myself and the psychology administrator for the Bureau of Prisons making having a similar model of treatment as the drug abuse programs. In other words developing what I would call a psychoeducational pretreatment module or class that would be mandatory. A type of program that is similar to the 40 hour drug and alcohol education class that we currently have and that have something similar for sex offenders. Now that has many implications in terms of cost in terms of identifying sites for that and we are at the preliminary stage but we are discussing it we certainly recognize the need to do more. Okay take a 15 minute break and we'll see you in a few. You heard Dr. Hernandez talk about presenting the sex offender treatment program study in November. Well that study has been presented and Dr. Hernandez provided us with an update of the data and analysis which is also available on the DCN. Now next we'll move into the specifics of the sex offender treatment program at Butler but like Dr. Hernandez just mentioned it's time for a short break so we'll be back in five minutes.