There are 45 sex offenders living in one small Long
Island town, 17 on the same block, 7 in a single suburban ranch. Inside a
sex-offender cluster.
The house meeting begins promptly at 7 p.m. Mickey
paces the living room with a clipboard in one hand, a cigarette in the other.
His three newest housemates—Stephen, Hop, and Larry—sit before him. “When you
all came to this house, you begged me to move you in,” he says. “Right or
wrong?”
“Right,” the men mumble.
“I interviewed everybody, explained how we do things,
the whole fucking works. The problem I got right now,” he continues, “I spent
three hours cleaning the whole fucking house today. The kitchen was a fucking
disaster. I don’t want to see that shit no more, because I will take the
microwave, the dishes, the pots and pans, everything out of there, and I will
lock it in the basement so we have nothing.”
The men slouch in their chairs and stare at the
angelfish darting around a tank in the corner of the room. Mickey plunges
ahead, railing against a litany of slovenly offenses. Only Hop offers a meek
defense. “I’ve just been here a few days. I’ve always cleaned up after myself.”
At first glance, this could be a scene out of just
about any place where strangers live together—a college dorm, a group home, an apartment
full of roommates. But the ordinary feel of the meeting belies the strangeness
of the situation; all of the men in the room are convicted sex offenders.
This house, in Coram, New York, sits at the center of
the largest cluster of sex offenders on Long Island. As of mid-December,
according to the state’s sex-offender registry, there were 45 high-risk sex
offenders living in this hamlet, seventeen on a single block. And this house
has the dubious distinction of holding the highest concentration of offenders
in the neighborhood—seven of its nine residents have a sex offense on their rap
sheet.
The men—all of whom asked to be referred to by their
first names or nicknames for fear of harassment—don’t look particularly
menacing, but their stories certainly are: Larry was convicted of raping a
4-year-old girl in 1983, Hop went to prison in 1982 for sodomizing a girl, and
Stephen was convicted of rape in 1985. Mickey, 46, also did time for a sex
offense. His rap sheet, which extends back to the early eighties, features
mostly burglaries and DWIs, but in 2000, he was convicted of sexual assault for
pushing a 16-year-old girl into the woods and trying to pull down her pants
before she managed to escape.
These men live in this house because, for better or
for worse, they have been cast out by society. The nature of their crimes
guarantees that they will be identified as sex offenders—or, as they sometimes
call themselves, “S.O.’s”—for the rest of their lives, their names, photos, and
addresses, along with the particulars of what they’ve done, all available on
the Internet. In Suffolk County, they are prohibited from living within a
quarter-mile of a school or playground or day-care center. As long as they’re
on parole, they can’t leave the county or move in with friends or family who
have kids. And once they find a place to reside, the police start knocking on
doors to inform neighbors that there is a sex offender in their midst, which
often leads to their eviction.
Against this bleak landscape, Mickey’s house is something
of a refuge—a place where sex offenders have banded together, trying to help
themselves by helping each other. “We ain’t got nobody but ourselves,” says
Mickey. “Nobody would help one bit. So we just did it on our own.”
This neighborhood of Coram has never had much to
recommend it—just a dozen or so rooming houses that look like typical suburban
ranches but for the smell of crack drifting from the windows. The area is
better than it once was, but at night, especially when it’s warm, people still
swarm the streets, hanging out, buying and selling drugs. “The first time I
went out there, I thought I stepped into the movie Night of the Living Dead,”
says a local law-enforcement officer. “I almost went for my weapon. People were
coming out of the bushes with their arms extended, trying to make a drug deal.”
One thing the neighborhood did have was a landlady
who would rent to almost anyone. Mary Dodson had moved to the area in the
fifties, and over the years had accumulated so many houses—close to 35—in Coram
and neighboring Gordon Heights that the area became known as Dodsonville. In a
county with a shortage of low-income housing, her properties became magnets for
welfare recipients, homeless people, anyone who needed a cheap place to stay.
With these new residents, all sorts of social ills arrived, too—violence,
mental illness, open-air drug dealing. Depending on whom you asked, Dodson was
a good-hearted Christian taking in people who had nowhere else to go—or a
slumlord who had run the neighborhood into the ground for her own financial
gain.
By the time Mickey arrived in 2005, Dodson was near
the end of her life (she died in 2007, at age 79), and her daughter Bernadette
Parks, then 59, was running the family’s real-estate empire. When Mickey turned
up at the house Parks shared with her mother, he was desperate for a place to
sleep. Parks didn’t ask questions about his past; he looked okay to her. “I put
him in his room—a shitty room,” Parks says. “Went back a couple days later.
Mickey had it painted, cleaned, fixed nice.” Mickey stayed for a while, then
moved to another of her houses. This one, too, they both agree, was a disaster.
“A crack house,” Mickey says. “It was terrible. Robbing each other. Fighting.
You wouldn’t believe the stuff that was going on.” When Mickey asked if he
could take over the management of his house, Parks welcomed the help.
Mickey wanted to live in a house where nobody drank
or used drugs. But how could he create a sober house in a drug-infested
neighborhood? The answer, he decided, was to fill it with men on parole, who
have to submit to regular urine tests. “I decided I’d make it a parole house
and let them watch ’em.”
He didn’t set out to fill the house with sex
offenders specifically. It just worked out that way because there were so many
sex offenders who needed housing. “Parole didn’t know where to put them,” he
says. (It’s so hard to find housing that county officials started putting
homeless sex offenders in trailers; the plan was to move them from one
undisclosed location to another, but since May, the main trailer has been
relegated to a parking lot at the county jail.) Word about Mickey’s house
spread quickly. It was the best of few options.
His sex-offender house is just down the street from
where Parks lives, and though her grandchildren are frequent visitors, she
seems undisturbed by its proximity. “Once a person does their time and makes
amends, they deserve another chance,” she says. “We shouldn’t be afraid of the
people we know who did this—we should be afraid of the people who didn’t get
help yet, didn’t get caught yet.”
The fact is that Mickey has made Parks’s life much
easier since filling the house with sex offenders. Nearly all of his tenants
are on parole and closely monitored. It’s the drunks and drug addicts in her
other homes who cause her grief. About her sex-offender house she says, “It’s
the best house, because of Mickey. Because he puts down rules. I have some
houses that are just the pits because nobody cares.”
Over the past two years, Mickey and Parks have become
close friends, spending hours together in Parks’s backyard, sharing cigarettes
and neighborhood gossip—which roommates aren’t getting along, who’s smoking
crack again, who’s going back to prison. Other residents of her homes sometimes
refer to him as “Bernadette’s son,” a line that often gets a double take, since
Parks is African-American and Mickey is white. “I think she adopted me without
my knowing,” he says.
Every man gets his own room in Mickey’s house—$330 a
month if you pay with cash or check, $309 if welfare is paying the rent. The
smallest room is not much larger than a prison cell, while the largest, Room 9,
is known as the “king’s room.” Or at least that’s what Mickey calls it, and, of
course, that’s where he sleeps.
Larry, Stephen, and Hop live at one end of the house.
They’re all middle-aged, their sex crimes committed more than twenty years ago.
Larry and Stephen are the only two African-American sex offenders in the house,
and they’ve formed the beginnings of a friendship. Physically, neither one
seems particularly threatening: Larry is a small man at five-foot-five and 110
pounds; Stephen’s most noticeable feature is the absence of his front teeth.
“Me and the windshield and the steering wheel had a couple misunderstandings,”
he explains. Larry, now 51, cannot read or write, and his illiteracy has made
him sympathetic to some of his housemates—even though, as Stephen whispers to
me, “he’s a child molester.” Stephen tries to keep tabs on Larry and make sure
he meets his curfew, and when no one else is looking, Mickey reads Larry’s mail
to him. The housemates know very little about his crime; Larry never talks
about it.
Stephen, however, is more forthcoming about his past.
His victim, he says, was an ex-girlfriend—he was angry with her because four
years earlier she’d dumped him. “I was intoxicated,” he says. “I pushed myself
on her, did what I wanted, and that was that. That was the only way, in my
mind, y’know, to get even.” He hasn’t been convicted of a sex crime since,
though the former heroin addict did make two more trips to prison—in the
nineties for attempted robbery, and more recently for selling drugs.
Hop is the only one in the house who loudly insists
he didn’t commit the crime for which he was convicted. “I’m an innocent man,” he
says. “I no longer care if anyone believes me, to tell you the truth. My mother
believed me. My family believes me.” He was arrested at age 17 for sodomizing a
young girl and he spent most of his adult life locked up. He served seventeen
years in state prison, did five years on parole, got sent back to prison after
he stopped taking his psychiatric meds, and then wound up confined in the
Manhattan Psychiatric Center for two years. More than most of the men here, he
struggles with basic living skills, like remembering to take his pills; bottles
of Lipitor sit atop the bureau in his bedroom, untouched. Some days he spends
hours at a time alone in his room with the door closed.
This part of the house is rounded out by one other
sex offender—a 40-year-old man who was arrested after an instant-message
exchange with someone he thought was a 15-year-old boy but who turned out to be
a cop—and two housemates who are not sex offenders: a security guard and a cook
at Checkers. When asked what he thinks of his roommates, the Checkers cook has
no complaints. “They don’t make no noise; they keep quiet,” he says.
Mickey shares his end of the house with John and
Bill. John, 58, has been here since 2004, longer than any other sex offender. A
former alcoholic and cocaine addict, he was convicted of sodomy in 1996 and
spent eight years in prison. Now he’s the house success story, with a full-time
job, a relationship with his kids, a shot at a normal life. He works as a
forklift operator and sends $200 a week, or 40 percent of his take-home pay, to
his daughter in college. A photo of her and his two high-school-age sons sits
atop the microwave in his room. “If I didn’t have my kids, I’d be living in a
garden apartment,” he says. “The only reason I’m here is because it economically
works for me.”
The youngest person in the house is 39-year-old Bill.
Before his arrest, he was married, earned $45,000 a year at a technology
company, and belonged to an Evangelical church. Then, in 1999, his wife accused
him of molesting their 2-year-old daughter. According to Bill’s therapist, Bill
was angry at his wife, and the abuse was driven by a desire to get back at her.
He spent six years in prison. The crime is a topic Bill doesn’t talk about
much; when pressed, he discusses it in oblique terms. “You look back in your
past, and there’s always 100 different things you could’ve done differently or
better,” he says. “I was very passive-aggressive.”
With wire glasses, salt-and-pepper hair, and a slight
paunch, Bill has the look of a computer nerd. And, indeed, there’s enough
secondhand computer equipment in his room to power a small company: nineteen
PCs, two Macs, and three printers. Though Bill’s crime did not involve the
Internet, his parole officer forbade his having Internet access, something Bill
finds frustrating. Even so, he spends hours in front of the computer, playing
video games.
Though he left prison in early 2006, Bill has yet to
find a full-time job. He interviewed for a manager position at Wal-Mart
(dressing up in a suit for the occasion) and his prospects had seemed
promising—until someone ran a background check. More recently, he secured a
part-time gig at a store selling cell phones, but when he learned he’d have
access to customers’ Social Security numbers, he had to quit.
“He got into a real slump over the job situation,”
Mickey says. “When I’d come home, he’d just sit in his room and wouldn’t talk.”
To pull Bill out of his depression, Mickey appointed him his deputy, giving him
the title “house manager.” Without a full-time job, Bill has plenty of time on
his hands, and he’s embraced his role. Evidence of his excess energy is all
over the house. Every week or two, he rewrites the lists of rules that are
posted everywhere. Each bedroom door features an elaborate color sign with the room
number, tenant’s name, and, in most cases, a cartoon character. For Mickey’s
door, he made a poster that reads DO NOT DISTURB MICKEY—HE’S DISTURBED ENOUGH
ALREADY.
When the two men first met, Bill was at Parks’s
house, waiting to see if he could get a room. “He was just sitting there,
shaking like a leaf, because he’s never been in an area like this, and he
didn’t know what was going on,” Mickey says. Bill didn’t look like a
troublemaker, so Mickey told Parks, “I’ll take him.” Every night, Mickey cooks
dinner for Bill and confides in him about his day; Bill, in turn, helps keep
Mickey calm and sober. On the weekends, they run errands together—visiting the
laundromat, shopping at the discount store with food stamps. Though they make
an unlikely pair, Mickey refers to Bill as his best friend.
Two years ago, Bill and another roommate launched a
countywide search for a therapist who would accept them as clients. They had
little choice in the matter: Parole officers insist that all sex offenders
participate in a treatment program—or else risk being sent back to prison. But
when you’re a sex offender, it can be difficult to find a therapist willing to
take you on. For weeks, the two men scoured the Yellow Pages and made calls.
Eventually, they found a social worker named Bill O’Leary who agreed to treat
them. His office is only a fifteen-minute drive from the house, but few of the
men have cars. “It would take the guys three or four hours to get here for a
one- or two-hour session,” O’Leary says. “As the winter came, I felt bad.”
Near the end of 2006, O’Leary started making house
calls, running group-therapy sessions every Sunday morning in the living room.
The turnout ranges from five to eight and usually includes Mickey, Bill,
several sex offenders who live elsewhere, plus a former resident who comes back
each week even though he’s no longer on parole. Mickey and Bill always put out
a candy bowl and make a pot of coffee.
Some of the men in the house may have tried to forget
their crimes, but part of O’Leary’s job is to ensure that those who come to
group therapy aren’t able to rewrite their histories. When a new person joins
the group, everyone has to tell the story of his crime—no making excuses or
skipping over crucial parts. A central tenet of sex-offender-treatment programs
is that sex offenders can’t make any progress if they don’t address their
actions, motives, patterns of behavior. It’s not enough just to say that
they’ll never do it again. “The problem is that you probably never thought you
were capable of this in the first place,” John explains. “So if you say you’ll
never be capable of doing it again, you’re wrong.”
“You probably never thought you were capable of this
in the first place. So if you say you’ll never be capable of doing it again,
you’re wrong.”
John doesn’t take part in group, but he participated
in a six-month sex-offender-treatment program in prison, then worked as a peer
counselor for another eighteen months. Of all the men in the house, he is the
most candid about his crime. His victim was the wife of a co-worker. “I
assaulted her, tied her up, and forced her to perform oral sex on me,” he says,
repeating a sentence he’s said countless times before. The facts of his crime
may be no more horrendous than those of his housemates, but discussing it so
frankly with him—and realizing I was about the same age as his victim—made the
conversation especially chilling. Yet the more we spoke, the more I realized
that his willingness to discuss his crime so openly seemed to suggest a
different sort of future.
Usually, the conversation in group is about the
day-to-day problems of life as a registered sex offender. Some topics come up
again and again: Mickey’s struggle to control his temper, Bill’s
passive-aggressive tendencies, the frustrations of job-hunting, the challenge
of finding a girlfriend, the difficulties of living by parole rules. Avoiding
contact with minors, for instance, is not always as easy as it sounds. What
happens when you go to McDonald’s and the person behind the register looks like
she might be 16? What do you do if you’re exiting the bus and the woman in
front of you asks for help with her stroller?
On a recent Sunday morning, O’Leary, 36, reclines in
a chair in the living room, hands clasped in his lap, wearing jeans, sneakers,
and a white thermal underneath a green T-shirt. Group is supposed to last just
one hour, but often the men have so much they want to talk about that it
stretches on for nearly three. On this morning, the conversation turns to a
favorite subject: the lowly status of sex offenders.
“As far as I’m concerned, the worst criminal that
should be watched is the drug dealers,” Mickey says. “They’re the ones who are
turning the 16- and 17-year-olds into prostitutes.”
“Does a crime define a person?” O’Leary asks. “You know
drug dealers that you met in prison that you felt good about—and there were
others you felt were dirtbags.”
“I don’t like none of them,” Mickey insists.
Of course, they know that they are liked even less.
“You ask the question to an average Joe: ‘How do they feel about sex
offenders?’ And: ‘Oh, I hate ’em. Kill ’em, kill ’em,’ ” says another sex
offender.
“I always said this is going to get a lot worse
before it gets better,” Mickey says.
The topic of how sex offenders are perceived by the
public provides fodder for debate all week, continuing long after the therapy
session ends. The residents, especially John, monitor the news closely for any
mention of sex offenders. “I can’t blame society for wanting to register sex
offenders. C’mon,” he says. “But I think they should also register drug
dealers, guys who do drive-by shootings, arsonists. Let’s be honest. There are
a lot of things that are dangerous to children. But what scares people is that
they feel vulnerable to us. They really feel like they can’t have their kids go
out on the street because one of these guys might grab them. Because what do
they see? They don’t meet me, Mickey, guys who are living fairly normal lives.
All they see is the news: This guy tried to pull a kid into a car, this guy
murdered a little girl. This is all they see.”
In fact, the “stranger danger” notion is mostly a
myth (in about 90 percent of child-sexual-abuse cases, the perpetrator is
someone the child already knows, like a family member or friend), as is the
idea that those who commit sex crimes are typically repeat offenders (only one
in seven violent sex offenders in state prison had a prior conviction for a
violent sex crime). It’s also not true that all sex offenders are child
molesters—or even that all child molesters are pedophiles. Experts have
identified two types of child molesters: “situational” and “fixated.”
Situational molesters are those who may have romantic relationships with adults
but who, under certain circumstances, will commit a sex crime against a child.
(Bill, for instance, would fall into this category.) In contrast, fixated
molesters are those who meet the definition of an exclusive pedophile, a person
who is sexually attracted only to children.
Even in this house full of sex offenders, there is a
hierarchy of criminals, with pedophiles at the very bottom. Mickey doesn’t use
the terminology of psychiatry, but he does grill prospective tenants about
their sex crime and whether they were high or drunk when they committed it. “I
want to know what was really in their heads when they did this. Whether
somebody is drunk, high, or sober, it’s inexcusable what they did. But you look
at the chances of somebody doing it again—the way I look at it is, the one that
did it with a clear conscience is the one I got to watch out for the most, and
a lot of them I won’t let in the house.”
Mickey started interviewing potential housemates
about their crimes after he discovered that one of his tenants had three
different criminal cases and at least seven victims, all under the age of 10.
“I’m really hoping I don’t do it again,” he said. Mickey’s response: “I’m
hoping you don’t do it either, but you’re taking your shit and getting out of
my house right now.” Part of his dislike of pedophiles stems from the same
sense of revulsion the rest of us feel. But there is another, more personal
reason, too: “Those are the people who make the whole S.O. thing as crazy as it
is.”
The ever-growing list of rules dictating where sex
offenders cannot live has led, not surprisingly, to their clustering in those
few places where they can find housing. Near St. Petersburg, Florida, 94 sex
offenders live together in a mobile-home park, two and three to a trailer. In
Miami, twenty sex offenders are living beneath a bridge, where a probation officer
visits them nearly every morning. And as of mid-December, there were 82 sex
offenders living in the 30th Street Men’s Shelter in Manhattan, according to
the New York State registry.
Over the months I spent visiting this house in Coram,
I found myself ricocheting between a sense of revulsion and concern. It was
impossible to meet these men and hear their stories and not find myself awake
at 3 or 4 a.m., wondering which of them had truly reformed themselves and which
were merely trying to convince me of this. But it also seemed obvious that
turning these men into modern-day untouchables and relegating them to the
fringes of society is not the best idea, either for the men themselves or as a
strategy for improving public safety.
A 2007 report by Human Rights Watch found no evidence
that residency restrictions reduce crimes against children, and further noted
that the sex offenders who are most likely to stay out of jail and not reoffend
are those who are not segregated but have “positive, informed support
systems—including stable housing and social networks.” This is one of John’s
concerns about relegating sex offenders to one particular area. “Isolation is
not a good thing,” he says. “One of the things that creates a lot of
sex-offender behavior is isolation.”
Mickey has tried to foster a sense of community among
the sex offenders in his home, but it’s not always easy. Mickey and Bill rely
on each other’s support and friendship, but John, who leaves the house at 5:30
a.m. and goes to bed early, doesn’t have much time for conversation. As for the
newer tenants—Larry, Stephen, and Hop—Mickey has tried to befriend them, but
Bill keeps more distance, not knowing how long they’ll be around.
Close friendships or not, the men in the house are
linked by a shared sense of vigilance. One of the fears about sex offenders
living in such close proximity is that they’ll encourage each other’s worst
tendencies. But nobody in this house has to be reminded that just one tenant’s
committing another sex crime could bring so much negative publicity to their
residence that they’d all be homeless once again. The recidivism rate for sex
offenders is lower than one might imagine—less than the odds that a car thief
or drug dealer or burglar will reoffend. (A 2003 Department of Justice study
found that 5.3 percent of sex offenders were arrested for a new sex crime
within three years of leaving prison.) And although plenty of tenants have been
taken back to jail for violating parole rules, nobody can remember anyone here
getting arrested for a new sex crime. Still, the roommates keep an eye on each
other.
Several months ago, when a sex offender here stopped
taking his psychiatric meds and started acting bizarrely, talking to himself
and wandering outside in the middle of the night, Mickey convinced the man’s
brother to take him to a nearby hospital so that he could be committed. And one
afternoon, when a new housemate who goes by the nickname T jokingly suggested
that he and I go out to dinner together, Mickey went ballistic. After I left,
Mickey and Bill chastised him for an hour about the inappropriateness of his
comment. That night, Mickey called me, then passed the phone to T. A sheepish
voice came on the line: “I’m sorry if I offended you.”
At the moment, the tenant Mickey is watching most
closely is Larry. Twice he’d caught him sneaking a prostitute into his room in
the middle of the night. One night, after he heard the house’s alarm go off,
Mickey ran outside with a flashlight and spied a pair of legs sticking out of
Larry’s window. One more time, Mickey warned, and Larry would be evicted.
Mickey has a habit of feeding his tenants, especially
the new ones. On a weekday evening this fall, he puts his shirt on—he doesn’t
usually wear one around the house—and gets ready to pedal off to his drug
program. Before he leaves, he leans into the bedroom of his deputy. “Take out
the roast beef,” he tells Bill. “You’re going to have to mash the potatoes,
drain the carrots.” And he should also look out for Hop: “Check if he ate. I
think he’s been starving. If he didn’t, hook him up with a plate.”
Not long afterward, Hop is sitting in the narrow
kitchen, hunched over a plate heaping with meat and mashed potatoes.
“It’s good,” he says, shoveling food into his mouth.
“You’re sure? Not too dry?” Bill asks.
“Not with gravy. And they’re real potatoes, too.”
Just then Stephen ventures in and surveys the scene:
“I see you guys cooked a wonderful dinner.”
The hint does not go unnoticed. “You can eat some if
you want,” Bill says.
Stephen joins Hop at the table and the two men talk
about their days (Hop visited his brother, while Stephen went to get a state
identification card), about people they knew in prison, about the house. “If
you’re doing the right thing in this house,” Stephen says, “nobody will ever let
you go hungry. This is paradise.”
But that’s not a bargain all of the roommates are
prepared to keep. Larry wasn’t home that night for dinner because he hadn’t
made it back from the parole office. On Wednesdays, most of the men in the
house make the three-bus trip to Farmingdale to check in with their parole
officers. Larry had flunked his drug test that week and been carted back to
jail.
His roommates weren’t surprised. He’d been missing
his 7 p.m. curfew and hanging out in the neighborhood. It was one of the
housemates who’d tipped off the parole officer to give him a drug test.
Inside the house, opinion about Larry was mixed.
Bill: “Larry was bugged. He had something missing
upstairs.”
Stephen: “He needed help. He had a good heart.”
Mickey: “He’s what you call a serious crackhead.
That’s the only way to put it.”
That night, Mickey searched Larry’s room for drugs,
but he didn’t find anything. Then he started sorting through his
possessions—underwear, socks, flannel shirts, cassette tapes, CDs—getting them
ready for Larry’s relatives to pick up. As he worked, he made a point of
closing the door—partly to ensure that no one tried to snatch any of Larry’s
belongings, partly so that nobody would see him cry. Nearly every time he
cleans out another man’s room he gets emotional. He’d grown attached to Larry
over all those hours spent helping him decipher his mail; he thought he’d be
able to help him. But there wasn’t much time for tears or regrets. He had to
get the room cleaned out. Another sex offender would be arriving soon.
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