1/18/1873: Bradwell v. Illinois argued.
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Today in Supreme Court History: January 18, 1873
Sex Offender Laws Are Broken. These Women Are Working To Fix Them.
Sandy Rozek is the polar opposite of what comes to mind when you hear the word activist. A 78-year-old great-grandmother and retired high school English teacher who lives in Houston, Rozek is not woke, doesn’t post on Twitter, and spearheads a movement you’ve probably never heard of.
Rozek works with the National Association for Rational Sexual Offense Laws (NARSOL). She is one of several women who lead an effort to oppose the unjust, irrational, and ineffective laws that continue to punish sex offenders long after they have served their time.
All 50 states have sex offender registries, and the U.S. Justice Department combines them in a single national database. The information, which is available online to the general public, covers nearly 1 million people, whose crimes run the gamut from streaking to rape. In addition to the stigma imposed by that electronic pillory, registration comes with a panoply of restrictions that dictate where people can live and work, when and where they are allowed to travel, and even whether they’re allowed to pick up their own children from school or take them to the park.
Reform organizations cite four major reasons for scaling back or eliminating the registry. They say it’s unconstitutional, imposing ex post facto penalties that deprive registrants of rights everyone else enjoys; it’s unscientific, relying on discredited beliefs about the danger that registrants pose; it’s unforgiving, disrupting people’s lives decades after they’ve completed their sentences; and it’s undiscriminating, burdening not just the registrants themselves but their families and communities.
In this #MeToo moment, when everyone seems focused on holding men accountable for their sexual crimes, the civil rights of people who have committed such offenses tend to get short shrift. But both movements are spearheaded by women who are determined to change the national narrative about sex crimes.
Most of the registry reformers are in their 60s or 70s, with grown children and grandchildren. Unlike the founders of the #MeToo movement, they have not been featured in glossy magazine articles lauding their courage. But make no mistake: These women are brave. Many have been shunned by their friends and family because of their stances. Speaking out against the registry means aligning yourself with modern-day lepers, people who are viewed with fear and disgust by the vast majority of Americans.
Never-Ending Punishment
Like many others in the movement, Rozek became a registry reformer because of a personal connection. About a decade ago, one of her friends was convicted of having an inappropriate sexual relationship. While it didn’t put her on the registry, she served a term of probation and had to complete a treatment program. “I really got started with it because of the treatment angle,” Rozek says. “In Texas, sex offender treatment is a joke. They don’t treat. They monitor. They intimidate.”
When Rozek started volunteering at NARSOL, she was 65. Her first task: scouring the internet for articles on sex offenders and using the comment sections to post corrections. She also penned the occasional op-ed. Eventually she became NARSOL’s communications director, writing for the website, helping to run its committees, and organizing its conferences. She spends up to eight hours a day on the work, all unpaid.
As a Christian, Rozek “just cannot accept that people cannot be forgiven.” If a sex offender has “served his time, and if he’s trying his best to be a decent human being now and wants to be a law-abiding citizen,” Rozek says, “we need to not throw roadblocks in his path….If it was 30 years ago, and the person did everything required, has fulfilled every legal obligation, has been free and clear of any involvement with law enforcement for 30 years, has established a family, has been living with this family for years now, and then all of a sudden he cannot live with them anymore [because of residence restrictions ], that is a horrible destruction to families.”
Although most of the people on the registry are men, most of the people running the reform movement are women. Nobody really knows why, but there are a few theories.
“Women, in our culture, pull together the families,” says Emily Horowitz, a professor of sociology at St. Francis College who is an expert on sex offender registries. “That’s a lot of the reason why women fight so hard. I think men are somewhat hesitant to weigh in on something that’s about sexual violence, because it could be viewed as like, ‘Oh, you’re defending men who hurt women.'”
NARSOL, which was founded in 2007 and has branches in 19 states, is the oldest and largest sex offender law reform organization. It is joined by three other national groups, all led by women, most of whom have a friend, son, or husband on the registry.
The crimes that will land someone on the list vary by state, but they include not just assaultive crimes such as rape and child molestation but also nonpredatory offenses such as public urination, promotion of prostitution, and possession of child pornography. Children as young as 9 have to register in some places. A handful of states require people convicted of any sex offense to register for life—and even after death.
In many states, registration comes with residence restrictions. Under those local and state laws, registrants typically are banned from living within 1,000 or 2,000 feet of schools, parks, churches, or day care centers. The practical impact of such exclusion zones can be so dramatic that registrants end up homeless. In Miami, dozens of them live under a bridge.
Several states also prohibit registrants from visiting locations such as parks, schools, community pools, and day care centers. Sometimes they even restrict where people can work. In Alabama, registrants are not allowed to be employed within 500 feet of “a playground, park, athletic field or facility, or child-focused business or facility.” Such rules compound the problems registrants already face in finding jobs. Many businesses don’t want to hire them, especially since some states require that employers of sex offenders also be listed in the registry.
‘The Key Word Is Rational‘
The national sex offender registry was created in 1994 by a law named after Jacob Wetterling, an 11-year-old Minnesota boy who was kidnapped and murdered in 1989. That law required states to create registries listing people convicted of sexually violent offenses or crimes against children. Unlike today’s databases, this registry was visible only to law enforcement agencies.
Two years later, the law was expanded after 7-year-old Megan Kanka was brutally murdered by a sex offender in New Jersey. Megan’s Law, passed in 1996, made registries accessible to the general public as part of a community notification mandate. In the 2003 case Smith v. Doe, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld sex offender registration, deeming it a form of civil regulation rather than criminal punishment.
That decision encouraged the expansion and proliferation of laws targeting sex offenders. “I call them sex offense registration laws on steroids,” says Southwestern University law professor Catherine Carpenter. “We’re dealing with laws that have no bounds, because the Supreme Court said that they were civil regulations.” From 2003 to 2012, Carpenter says, the number of covered offenses increased “dramatically,” and so did the length of registration. Those changes, she notes, were accompanied by “egregious collateral consequences,” such as residence restrictions.
In 2006, the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA) further tightened restrictions on sex offenders, requiring some to register for life and mandating that they keep their addresses up to date or face felony charges. Today all states require adults convicted of sex crimes to register, and 38 states require some children to register as well. When “we literally started putting kids on the public registry,” Horowitz says, that showed “it’s not really about protecting children.”
The official goal of registering sex offenders is preventing sexual assault, but experts don’t think it does that. “The premise of adult registration is you’ve demonstrated your dangerousness, and we think that means you’re going to be a future danger,” Carpenter says. “The empirical evidence does not support that.”
The idea that sex offenders are especially likely to reoffend is a myth. A 2012 meta-analysis of sex offender recidivism rates published in Criminal Justice and Behavior found that most offenders’ likelihood of committing another sexual offense over a five-year period was around 7 percent. A study of sex offender recidivism in Connecticut found an even lower rate: 3.6 percent. “People who commit sex offenses have the lowest recidivism rate of almost any crime besides murder,” Horowitz says. A 2003 study found that in Illinois, about 37 percent of those convicted of nonsexual assault will be arrested for the same offense within five years, while only 6.5 percent of sex offenders and 5.7 percent of murderers will be rearrested for the same offenses.
Not only that, but data from the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey indicate that more than 90 percent of sex offenders are people known to the victim, such as relatives, friends, and coaches. And according to a 2008 study of sex offenders in New York, around 95 percent of people arrested for sex offenses do not have prior records for this sort of crime, meaning they would not be listed in a registry.
“The registry wasn’t developed out of research,” Horowitz says. “It was developed out of emotion and fear, which is a recipe for disaster in public policy.”
Rozek and other leaders of the registry reform movement want the laws to be grounded in science. “It’s the National Association for Rational Sexual Offense Laws,” Rozek says, “and the key word is rational. Something that is rational is based on science, based on fact, based on evidence. The registry isn’t, and certainly none of the laws coming out of the registry are based on any evidence or any science.”
‘What Would Atticus Do?’
While Rozek became a reformer after her friend was convicted of a sex crime, it was a chance encounter that led Janice Bellucci to the movement. One day in 2011, Bellucci, a 67-year-old California attorney who spent most of her career in aerospace law, was talking to Frank Lindsay, a water treatment specialist who was fixing her home’s reverse osmosis system, when he mentioned that he had written a book. “Quite frankly,” she says, “reading his book changed my life.”
Bellucci found out that in 1979 Lindsay had committed a sex crime against a child under the age of 14, a crime for which he spent a year in jail, nearly all of it on weekends, thanks to a work furlough program. More than three decades later, he had not reoffended, but he was still subject to legal restrictions and potentially deadly threats. “A stranger broke into his home and tried to murder him because he was on the Megan’s Law website,” Bellucci says. “He escaped from his own house after being hit a couple times with a hammer. I just couldn’t believe that any group of people in our country today [was] being treated that way.”
On a sabbatical from her work at a California nonprofit, Bellucci couldn’t get the sex registry out of her mind. “This issue kept popping up, kind of like a jack-in-the-box,” she says. “And finally I sat down with myself, and I said, ‘Why did I go to law school?’ It was the movie To Kill a Mockingbird, and the character Atticus Finch. I’m like, ‘What would Atticus do?'” The answer seemed obvious to her.
Bellucci initially tried to interest the American Civil Liberties Union of California in the issue. “They basically said [they couldn’t help] because they’re afraid that if they became known as sex offender attorneys, their funding would disappear, which I think is a very cowardly position,” she says.
Bellucci’s children were adults, she was unmarried, and she decided she could “do anything I want to do.” So she founded the Alliance for Constitutional Sex Offender Laws (ACSOL). To this day, a needlepoint of “What Would Atticus Do?” sits on her desk, next to a Ruth Bader Ginsburg action figure.
Like many in the movement, Bellucci believes sex offender restrictions are unconstitutional. As a lawyer, she could do something about that, but she did not have a lot of resources. So she and the few early members of ACSOL decided to go after “low-hanging fruit”: Halloween-related restrictions in California.
In Simi Valley, Bellucci learned, sex offenders were required to post signs on their front doors during Halloween, alerting neighbors that they were on the registry and warning trick-or-treaters to stay away. She sued the city, arguing that the requirement was a form of compelled speech prohibited by the First Amendment. She won.
The Halloween signs are a good example of sex offender policies that have no basis in fact. A 2009 analysis of 67,000 sex crimes against children committed by people other than their relatives, reported in the journal Sexual Abuse, found “no increased rate on or just before Halloween.” The researchers concluded that “these findings raise questions about the wisdom of diverting law enforcement resources to attend to a problem that does not appear to exist.”
From the beginning, it was difficult for Bellucci to convince people that sex offenders were a group worth fighting for. But one way to make them more sympathetic was to show the impact that laws aimed at them had on their families.
Bellucci tells me about a young father on the registry who was not allowed to see his sick baby in the hospital. “This infant possibly was going to die within 24 hours,” she says, “and they were going to have this big meeting at the hospital to come up with some plans for how they were going to treat the little boy. And they’re like, ‘You can’t come to the meeting, because the meeting is going to be held at the hospital.'” After some legal maneuvering, Bellucci managed to get the meeting moved so the father could participate.
‘This Is a Labor of Love’
Small victories like that one motivate Bellucci to work 50 to 60 hours a week. “The alliance pays me a whopping $1,000 a month,” she says. “So this is a labor of love.”
In 2016, Bellucci moved from Los Angeles to Sacramento to be close to the state capitol. “For a very long period of time, they kept passing new sex offender laws,” she says. “And guess what? Nobody was there to oppose them. But about six years ago, we started showing up for hearings, and we’re saying, ‘No, this is unconstitutional, and these are the seven reasons why.'”
The Halloween lawsuit was only the beginning of Bellucci’s fight. She began going after California’s so-called proximity restrictions, local ordinances that prevented sex offenders from doing ordinary things like visiting dog parks or picking up their kids from school. Those rules “really had this chilling effect,” Bellucci says, “because the restrictions were different from one city to another, and they were never posted. It might be OK to go to a dog park in one city, but it’s not OK in another city, and there were no signs to tell you.”
The crazy quilt of restrictions made people worry about “missing Thanksgiving dinner with Aunt Sally,” Bellucci says. “They were afraid to travel from one city to the next. People felt like rats getting tested. No matter what you did, you were going to get an electric shock. So many people just stay in the same place and shiver and hope nobody will zap them with electricity.”
Bellucci says lawsuits are a last resort. Her organization usually writes letters first, telling a city its sex offender law is unconstitutional or warning that another city has been successfully sued over the same kind of law. Sometimes the letters work. But when they don’t, Bellucci sues. When she wins a lawsuit, she uses her share of the damages to fund other cases.
Like Rozek, Bellucci wants the registry to be based on science and reason. But that’s hard to accomplish, she says, because when people “hear the term sex offenders, they just panic. They’re thinking of the worst sexual assault that you can ever think of.” It is therefore difficult for them “to absorb new information or to analyze the information that’s in their brain.”
To combat that emotional response, Bellucci assures people that “we believe all children should be safe. We’re not here to unleash a bunch of sexual predators on the public.” Her message, she says, is that “the registry gives people a false sense of security,” because “they’re looking in the wrong direction,” given that “more than 90 percent of the perpetrators are not on the registry.”
‘I Know I’m Not the Only One’
Bellucci is admired by other reformers because she didn’t join the movement to defend her brother or father or child; she did it because she saw an injustice. “The fact that she doesn’t have what we call ‘skin in the game’ [makes her] more amazing,” says Vicki Henry, president of Women Against the Registry (WAR). In contrast, Henry, 71, became an activist because her son is on the registry for downloading and distributing child pornography. He was in the Marines when he was caught in 2007. A military psychologist tied his use of child pornography to sexual abuse by his father.
“I thought I was losing my mind,” Henry says. “When I got my feet back under me a little bit, [I thought] there’s got to be other people that have gone through this. I know I’m not the only one.”
Henry found Daily Strength, an online support group that hosted a subgroup called Families of Registrants, and then found NARSOL. She joined Women Against the Registry, which was a part of NARSOL at the time, and became its president in 2011. Around that time, WAR broke off —it wanted to do more protesting than NARSOL was comfortable with. Now Henry says she volunteers about 12 hours a day, seven days a week.
“I was pretty much raised in church,” says Henry, a Southern Baptist. “My kids were raised in church. We were taught to help other people.”
Henry describes WAR as more aggressive than NARSOL. “We’re more challenging, in your face, the ground pounders,” she says. “We protest. They don’t.”
WAR’s slogan is “fighting the destruction of families,” and Henry is speaking from firsthand experience. Like many on the registry, Henry’s son faces harassment and employment problems. Recently his girlfriend’s mother found out he was on the registry and called his employer. The next day, while he was filling out paperwork in the office, he overheard one of his bosses talking vividly about shooting him in the head with a 9 mm pistol. When Henry’s son confronted him, the supervisor said he was just joking. After he filed a complaint with the human resources department, Henry says, he was suspended for three days because of a minor mistake he had made on the job.
Soon after that incident, Henry’s son had to move out of the home he shared with his girlfriend and his children because of a restraining order that her ex-boyfriend obtained against him. Distraught, he moved back into his mother’s house, where he was caught with child pornography again and rearrested.
“He feels guilty,” Henry says. “He feels like I’m giving up my life because of him. And it’s like, ‘No, no, no, you have to understand. You were abused. I didn’t know that. You were sick.'”
‘Let Them Live in Peace’
Henry spends much of her time talking to lawmakers, describing the deleterious effects that registration has on families. In 2019, Henry traveled to Jefferson City, Missouri, accompanied by a registrant and WAR member named Sarah, to speak to legislators. Henry coached Sarah to be as open as possible about the registry’s impact on her family.
Together, Sarah and Henry went to Missouri state representative Tony Luetkemeyer’s office. After chatting for a few minutes, Henry told Sarah to pull up her pant leg, revealing her GPS ankle monitor. “She said, ‘I’ve worn this for 10 years,'” Henry recalls. “‘I have a family. I have a 5-year-old son and [an older] son. And I’m not able to go swimming with them. I’m not able to get in the boat with [them].’ And he just sat and stared at her, like, ‘Oh, my gosh.'” At the time, the Missouri legislature was considering a bill that would have prohibited some sex offenders from “being near athletic facilities used primarily by children.” As a result of that encounter, Henry says, “the bill was killed.”
Registries are all about ostracism, Henry argues, and GPS monitors are a prime example. “We’re not saying that people shouldn’t be adjudicated,” she says. “But once they’ve been adjudicated [and] paid their debt to society, let them live in peace with their families. Don’t put so many barriers in front of them.”
Henry is not the only registry reformer who joined the movement because her son was caught with child pornography. Rita, who did not want her last name to be used, had a similar experience. Eleven years ago, Rita was having dinner with her husband and 26-year-old son, who was acting strangely. “I knew there was something wrong,” she says. “I just kept asking him and asking him, and then he finally said it.”
Rita’s son told her that a few weeks before, around 1 a.m., he had heard banging on his apartment door. When he opened the door, he was face to face with multiple FBI agents. “He didn’t know what they were looking for,” Rita says. They were serving a search warrant based on evidence that he had downloaded child pornography on a peer-to-peer network.
As he told his mother this story, “he was shaking,” she says. “I almost passed out….I couldn’t believe that you could go to prison for what you look at.” She and her husband sat there stunned. Their son said he had seen a lawyer, and he was facing time in federal prison. He ended up serving a little more than six years.
“It was just extremely difficult to get through those days,” Rita says. “I knew in my heart I had two choices: Do I lie down and die, or do I do something? And in my mind, something was better than nothing. We decided we would get involved, just to try and bring some reason to these laws.”
Rita’s husband searched online and discovered the organization that eventually became NARSOL. In 2009, they traveled from the small New York town where they live to Boston for their first meeting. “It was life-changing for me to meet other people who understood the overwhelming shame and punishment that we were looking at,” Rita says. “And those people are still my dearest friends.”
A few years later, Rita founded Caution Click, an organization that focuses on the legal treatment of people arrested for viewing child pornography. She strives to raise awareness among teenagers and their families so they don’t become sex offenders by sexting or looking at something they’re not supposed to.
‘I’d Still Have a Normal Life’
Another Caution Click member is the mother of Alyssa, a 26-year-old woman who is on the registry for having what she says was consensual sex with a 15-year-old boy when she was 19. At the time, Alyssa, who did not want her last name to be used, was a teenaged mother attending high school in a small town in New York. After a few encounters with the boy, she broke off the relationship and blocked him on social media.
Soon afterward, the father of Alyssa’s son sued for custody, citing her relationship with the 15-year-old as evidence that she was an unfit mother. Alyssa was convicted of misdemeanor sexual misconduct. She didn’t have to serve jail time, but the conviction put her on the registry for life.
“I have a lot of remorse for what I did,” Alyssa says. “I cry about it [and] think about it constantly. I wish I could take it back every single day, because maybe if this didn’t happen, I’d still have a normal life.”
Alyssa struggled to find work and a place to live. “I was diagnosed with severe depression,” she says. “I have anxiety issues, major mood swings. One minute I’m happy, the next minute I’m crying, sometimes not knowing why I’m sad or upset.” Sometimes she thinks about killing herself. “I’m literally in a category with people that really, really seriously abuse children, from babies and up,” she says, even though “I legit couldn’t hurt a fly.”
In 2019, Alyssa managed to find a good full-time job in Pennsylvania and a home in a trailer park. She planted flowers in her yard. “I made a whole garden,” she says. “That took a lot of money and a lot of effort and sweat, and it came out so beautiful. I’d wake up and go out on my porch, and I’d just sit there and look at my flowers and breathe in the fresh air. [It was] like being in Pennsylvania, it was a different kind of air. It wasn’t toxic. It wasn’t filled with anything negative.”
The idyll did not last. One day, another resident of the trailer park called the property manager to complain that a sex offender was living there. Alyssa was given three days to leave. “I sat in the car, and I was punching the heck out of my steering wheel, and I was screaming,” she says. “[You’re] doing something good with your life finally, and then you get ripped away from it. So I completely had a mental breakdown.” She packed clothing in garbage bags and took her kids back to New York to live with her mom.
Alyssa hasn’t been able to find a job in New York, and she can’t move out of her parents’ house because, as a sex offender, she does not qualify for low-income housing. She isn’t even legally allowed to take her children to the playground. “Sometimes I risk it,” she says. “I bring [my son] to the park anyways. Listen, if you want to arrest me, that’s fine, but just know I wasn’t doing anything. I wasn’t looking at nobody. I wasn’t touching nobody. I’m just trying to let my kids live their lives.”
What Would Jesus Do?
Of all the reform organizations, ACSOL probably has had the most legislative impact. Through lawsuits and warning letters, Bellucci and her volunteers have managed to eliminate nearly all of California’s local ordinances making certain places, such as parks and schools, off-limits to sex offenders. They have also filed 31 lawsuits challenging local ordinances that limit where offenders can live. Nearly all of them have been successful.
Bellucci’s biggest accomplishment so far is helping to create a tiered registry system in California, scheduled to be implemented in 2021. Instead of treating all sex offenders, regardless of their crimes, as equally dangerous, the tiered registry will divide them into three risk categories. It also will do away with lifetime registration for most offenders.
NARSOL, Rozek’s group, has filed successful lawsuits against sex offender restrictions in Maryland and North Carolina. It recently won a victory in Butts County, Georgia, where it sued Sheriff Gary Long for requiring sex offenders to place warning signs in their front yards during Halloween. “Warning!” the signs said. “No Trick or Treat at This Address.” Last October, a federal judge ruled that Long’s signs were unconstitutional, based on the same First Amendment argument that Bellucci had deployed in Simi Valley. NARSOL also filed an amicus brief in Packingham v. North Carolina, the 2017 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned a state law barring sex offenders from social media.
WAR and Caution Click have fewer legislative goals and focus more on education, so their accomplishments are harder to quantify. But all of the organizations are trying to change the way we talk about sex offenses. When you speak to enough reformers, you notice how they’ve subtly changed the language used in such conversations: Sex offender registry is shortened to the registry; child pornography becomes illicit images or C.P.; sex offenders are registrants. Reformers want people to recognize that individuals on the registry encompass a wide range of offenses, many of which are nonviolent.
Activists argue that changing the language around the registry can reduce the stigma associated with it, one of its greatest harms. Sandralea, a WAR member in Florida who did not want her last name to be used, says her adult son was put on the registry after he was convicted of exposing himself to a 2-year-old—a charge she says was false. The church she’d raised him in, where she had been a member for 23 years, didn’t want him to come back until the pastor had ministered to him and said that it was OK for him to attend again.
“As a Christian, I find Christians are the worst,” says Sandralea. “I feel like [members of] the Christian community who sit there and profess to be of Christ are the most unforgiving people I’ve ever seen in my life.” She changed churches and started a Facebook newsletter ministry for sex offenders. “I want them to see that they are valued by the Lord,” she says.
I ask Sandralea how she thinks Jesus Christ would have reacted to sex offender laws. “I think that he would find them horrendous, because it’s unforgiving,” she says. “He went and sat with the sinners. He cleaned the lepers. Hello! Sex offenders are the lepers of society today. Jesus would have never treated them the way the Christian community does.”
Bellucci, who is a nondenominational Christian, likewise has found that Christians do not necessarily follow Christ’s example. “I’m really careful who I tell [at] church,” she says. “Some people find out what I do, and they just make sure they don’t sit anywhere near me. They don’t want to talk to me. And you know, at my age, I just let that roll off my back.”
When it comes to family members, Bellucci says, “it’s a little harder.” When she first told her older daughter about her plans for ACSOL, she says, “the first thing out of her mouth was, ‘How could you?’ I just explained it as gently and lovingly as I could: ‘This is what I’m doing. I’m not asking your permission. So it’s up to you. You either accept it or you don’t accept it.’ Over the years—and now it’s been eight years—she’s starting to understand better.”
Henry also sometimes worries about discussing her advocacy. “I put a huge target on my back for being the person I am,” she says. “One guy told me online he would kill me and sodomize my corpse.”
At a recent high school reunion that Henry attended with trepidation, a classmate asked her what she does. “I said, ‘Some of you may not like it, but here’s what I do: My son is on the registry. I advocate for the families.’ I thought, ‘Hey, if you like me after that, it’s fine. If you don’t, I’m not running for homecoming queen or Ms. Senior America. I don’t care.'” The woman who’d asked Henry the question walked over to her and gave her a hug. “You know,” she said, “those people need that.”
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Sex Offender Laws Are Broken. These Women Are Working To Fix Them.
Sandy Rozek is the polar opposite of what comes to mind when you hear the word activist. A 78-year-old great-grandmother and retired high school English teacher who lives in Houston, Rozek is not woke, doesn’t post on Twitter, and spearheads a movement you’ve probably never heard of.
Rozek works with the National Association for Rational Sexual Offense Laws (NARSOL). She is one of several women who lead an effort to oppose the unjust, irrational, and ineffective laws that continue to punish sex offenders long after they have served their time.
All 50 states have sex offender registries, and the U.S. Justice Department combines them in a single national database. The information, which is available online to the general public, covers nearly 1 million people, whose crimes run the gamut from streaking to rape. In addition to the stigma imposed by that electronic pillory, registration comes with a panoply of restrictions that dictate where people can live and work, when and where they are allowed to travel, and even whether they’re allowed to pick up their own children from school or take them to the park.
Reform organizations cite four major reasons for scaling back or eliminating the registry. They say it’s unconstitutional, imposing ex post facto penalties that deprive registrants of rights everyone else enjoys; it’s unscientific, relying on discredited beliefs about the danger that registrants pose; it’s unforgiving, disrupting people’s lives decades after they’ve completed their sentences; and it’s undiscriminating, burdening not just the registrants themselves but their families and communities.
In this #MeToo moment, when everyone seems focused on holding men accountable for their sexual crimes, the civil rights of people who have committed such offenses tend to get short shrift. But both movements are spearheaded by women who are determined to change the national narrative about sex crimes.
Most of the registry reformers are in their 60s or 70s, with grown children and grandchildren. Unlike the founders of the #MeToo movement, they have not been featured in glossy magazine articles lauding their courage. But make no mistake: These women are brave. Many have been shunned by their friends and family because of their stances. Speaking out against the registry means aligning yourself with modern-day lepers, people who are viewed with fear and disgust by the vast majority of Americans.
Never-Ending Punishment
Like many others in the movement, Rozek became a registry reformer because of a personal connection. About a decade ago, one of her friends was convicted of having an inappropriate sexual relationship. While it didn’t put her on the registry, she served a term of probation and had to complete a treatment program. “I really got started with it because of the treatment angle,” Rozek says. “In Texas, sex offender treatment is a joke. They don’t treat. They monitor. They intimidate.”
When Rozek started volunteering at NARSOL, she was 65. Her first task: scouring the internet for articles on sex offenders and using the comment sections to post corrections. She also penned the occasional op-ed. Eventually she became NARSOL’s communications director, writing for the website, helping to run its committees, and organizing its conferences. She spends up to eight hours a day on the work, all unpaid.
As a Christian, Rozek “just cannot accept that people cannot be forgiven.” If a sex offender has “served his time, and if he’s trying his best to be a decent human being now and wants to be a law-abiding citizen,” Rozek says, “we need to not throw roadblocks in his path….If it was 30 years ago, and the person did everything required, has fulfilled every legal obligation, has been free and clear of any involvement with law enforcement for 30 years, has established a family, has been living with this family for years now, and then all of a sudden he cannot live with them anymore [because of residence restrictions ], that is a horrible destruction to families.”
Although most of the people on the registry are men, most of the people running the reform movement are women. Nobody really knows why, but there are a few theories.
“Women, in our culture, pull together the families,” says Emily Horowitz, a professor of sociology at St. Francis College who is an expert on sex offender registries. “That’s a lot of the reason why women fight so hard. I think men are somewhat hesitant to weigh in on something that’s about sexual violence, because it could be viewed as like, ‘Oh, you’re defending men who hurt women.'”
NARSOL, which was founded in 2007 and has branches in 19 states, is the oldest and largest sex offender law reform organization. It is joined by three other national groups, all led by women, most of whom have a friend, son, or husband on the registry.
The crimes that will land someone on the list vary by state, but they include not just assaultive crimes such as rape and child molestation but also nonpredatory offenses such as public urination, promotion of prostitution, and possession of child pornography. Children as young as 9 have to register in some places. A handful of states require people convicted of any sex offense to register for life—and even after death.
In many states, registration comes with residence restrictions. Under those local and state laws, registrants typically are banned from living within 1,000 or 2,000 feet of schools, parks, churches, or day care centers. The practical impact of such exclusion zones can be so dramatic that registrants end up homeless. In Miami, dozens of them live under a bridge.
Several states also prohibit registrants from visiting locations such as parks, schools, community pools, and day care centers. Sometimes they even restrict where people can work. In Alabama, registrants are not allowed to be employed within 500 feet of “a playground, park, athletic field or facility, or child-focused business or facility.” Such rules compound the problems registrants already face in finding jobs. Many businesses don’t want to hire them, especially since some states require that employers of sex offenders also be listed in the registry.
‘The Key Word Is Rational‘
The national sex offender registry was created in 1994 by a law named after Jacob Wetterling, an 11-year-old Minnesota boy who was kidnapped and murdered in 1989. That law required states to create registries listing people convicted of sexually violent offenses or crimes against children. Unlike today’s databases, this registry was visible only to law enforcement agencies.
Two years later, the law was expanded after 7-year-old Megan Kanka was brutally murdered by a sex offender in New Jersey. Megan’s Law, passed in 1996, made registries accessible to the general public as part of a community notification mandate. In the 2003 case Smith v. Doe, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld sex offender registration, deeming it a form of civil regulation rather than criminal punishment.
That decision encouraged the expansion and proliferation of laws targeting sex offenders. “I call them sex offense registration laws on steroids,” says Southwestern University law professor Catherine Carpenter. “We’re dealing with laws that have no bounds, because the Supreme Court said that they were civil regulations.” From 2003 to 2012, Carpenter says, the number of covered offenses increased “dramatically,” and so did the length of registration. Those changes, she notes, were accompanied by “egregious collateral consequences,” such as residence restrictions.
In 2006, the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA) further tightened restrictions on sex offenders, requiring some to register for life and mandating that they keep their addresses up to date or face felony charges. Today all states require adults convicted of sex crimes to register, and 38 states require some children to register as well. When “we literally started putting kids on the public registry,” Horowitz says, that showed “it’s not really about protecting children.”
The official goal of registering sex offenders is preventing sexual assault, but experts don’t think it does that. “The premise of adult registration is you’ve demonstrated your dangerousness, and we think that means you’re going to be a future danger,” Carpenter says. “The empirical evidence does not support that.”
The idea that sex offenders are especially likely to reoffend is a myth. A 2012 meta-analysis of sex offender recidivism rates published in Criminal Justice and Behavior found that most offenders’ likelihood of committing another sexual offense over a five-year period was around 7 percent. A study of sex offender recidivism in Connecticut found an even lower rate: 3.6 percent. “People who commit sex offenses have the lowest recidivism rate of almost any crime besides murder,” Horowitz says. A 2003 study found that in Illinois, about 37 percent of those convicted of nonsexual assault will be arrested for the same offense within five years, while only 6.5 percent of sex offenders and 5.7 percent of murderers will be rearrested for the same offenses.
Not only that, but data from the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey indicate that more than 90 percent of sex offenders are people known to the victim, such as relatives, friends, and coaches. And according to a 2008 study of sex offenders in New York, around 95 percent of people arrested for sex offenses do not have prior records for this sort of crime, meaning they would not be listed in a registry.
“The registry wasn’t developed out of research,” Horowitz says. “It was developed out of emotion and fear, which is a recipe for disaster in public policy.”
Rozek and other leaders of the registry reform movement want the laws to be grounded in science. “It’s the National Association for Rational Sexual Offense Laws,” Rozek says, “and the key word is rational. Something that is rational is based on science, based on fact, based on evidence. The registry isn’t, and certainly none of the laws coming out of the registry are based on any evidence or any science.”
‘What Would Atticus Do?’
While Rozek became a reformer after her friend was convicted of a sex crime, it was a chance encounter that led Janice Bellucci to the movement. One day in 2011, Bellucci, a 67-year-old California attorney who spent most of her career in aerospace law, was talking to Frank Lindsay, a water treatment specialist who was fixing her home’s reverse osmosis system, when he mentioned that he had written a book. “Quite frankly,” she says, “reading his book changed my life.”
Bellucci found out that in 1979 Lindsay had committed a sex crime against a child under the age of 14, a crime for which he spent a year in jail, nearly all of it on weekends, thanks to a work furlough program. More than three decades later, he had not reoffended, but he was still subject to legal restrictions and potentially deadly threats. “A stranger broke into his home and tried to murder him because he was on the Megan’s Law website,” Bellucci says. “He escaped from his own house after being hit a couple times with a hammer. I just couldn’t believe that any group of people in our country today [was] being treated that way.”
On a sabbatical from her work at a California nonprofit, Bellucci couldn’t get the sex registry out of her mind. “This issue kept popping up, kind of like a jack-in-the-box,” she says. “And finally I sat down with myself, and I said, ‘Why did I go to law school?’ It was the movie To Kill a Mockingbird, and the character Atticus Finch. I’m like, ‘What would Atticus do?'” The answer seemed obvious to her.
Bellucci initially tried to interest the American Civil Liberties Union of California in the issue. “They basically said [they couldn’t help] because they’re afraid that if they became known as sex offender attorneys, their funding would disappear, which I think is a very cowardly position,” she says.
Bellucci’s children were adults, she was unmarried, and she decided she could “do anything I want to do.” So she founded the Alliance for Constitutional Sex Offender Laws (ACSOL). To this day, a needlepoint of “What Would Atticus Do?” sits on her desk, next to a Ruth Bader Ginsburg action figure.
Like many in the movement, Bellucci believes sex offender restrictions are unconstitutional. As a lawyer, she could do something about that, but she did not have a lot of resources. So she and the few early members of ACSOL decided to go after “low-hanging fruit”: Halloween-related restrictions in California.
In Simi Valley, Bellucci learned, sex offenders were required to post signs on their front doors during Halloween, alerting neighbors that they were on the registry and warning trick-or-treaters to stay away. She sued the city, arguing that the requirement was a form of compelled speech prohibited by the First Amendment. She won.
The Halloween signs are a good example of sex offender policies that have no basis in fact. A 2009 analysis of 67,000 sex crimes against children committed by people other than their relatives, reported in the journal Sexual Abuse, found “no increased rate on or just before Halloween.” The researchers concluded that “these findings raise questions about the wisdom of diverting law enforcement resources to attend to a problem that does not appear to exist.”
From the beginning, it was difficult for Bellucci to convince people that sex offenders were a group worth fighting for. But one way to make them more sympathetic was to show the impact that laws aimed at them had on their families.
Bellucci tells me about a young father on the registry who was not allowed to see his sick baby in the hospital. “This infant possibly was going to die within 24 hours,” she says, “and they were going to have this big meeting at the hospital to come up with some plans for how they were going to treat the little boy. And they’re like, ‘You can’t come to the meeting, because the meeting is going to be held at the hospital.'” After some legal maneuvering, Bellucci managed to get the meeting moved so the father could participate.
‘This Is a Labor of Love’
Small victories like that one motivate Bellucci to work 50 to 60 hours a week. “The alliance pays me a whopping $1,000 a month,” she says. “So this is a labor of love.”
In 2016, Bellucci moved from Los Angeles to Sacramento to be close to the state capitol. “For a very long period of time, they kept passing new sex offender laws,” she says. “And guess what? Nobody was there to oppose them. But about six years ago, we started showing up for hearings, and we’re saying, ‘No, this is unconstitutional, and these are the seven reasons why.'”
The Halloween lawsuit was only the beginning of Bellucci’s fight. She began going after California’s so-called proximity restrictions, local ordinances that prevented sex offenders from doing ordinary things like visiting dog parks or picking up their kids from school. Those rules “really had this chilling effect,” Bellucci says, “because the restrictions were different from one city to another, and they were never posted. It might be OK to go to a dog park in one city, but it’s not OK in another city, and there were no signs to tell you.”
The crazy quilt of restrictions made people worry about “missing Thanksgiving dinner with Aunt Sally,” Bellucci says. “They were afraid to travel from one city to the next. People felt like rats getting tested. No matter what you did, you were going to get an electric shock. So many people just stay in the same place and shiver and hope nobody will zap them with electricity.”
Bellucci says lawsuits are a last resort. Her organization usually writes letters first, telling a city its sex offender law is unconstitutional or warning that another city has been successfully sued over the same kind of law. Sometimes the letters work. But when they don’t, Bellucci sues. When she wins a lawsuit, she uses her share of the damages to fund other cases.
Like Rozek, Bellucci wants the registry to be based on science and reason. But that’s hard to accomplish, she says, because when people “hear the term sex offenders, they just panic. They’re thinking of the worst sexual assault that you can ever think of.” It is therefore difficult for them “to absorb new information or to analyze the information that’s in their brain.”
To combat that emotional response, Bellucci assures people that “we believe all children should be safe. We’re not here to unleash a bunch of sexual predators on the public.” Her message, she says, is that “the registry gives people a false sense of security,” because “they’re looking in the wrong direction,” given that “more than 90 percent of the perpetrators are not on the registry.”
‘I Know I’m Not the Only One’
Bellucci is admired by other reformers because she didn’t join the movement to defend her brother or father or child; she did it because she saw an injustice. “The fact that she doesn’t have what we call ‘skin in the game’ [makes her] more amazing,” says Vicki Henry, president of Women Against the Registry (WAR). In contrast, Henry, 71, became an activist because her son is on the registry for downloading and distributing child pornography. He was in the Marines when he was caught in 2007. A military psychologist tied his use of child pornography to sexual abuse by his father.
“I thought I was losing my mind,” Henry says. “When I got my feet back under me a little bit, [I thought] there’s got to be other people that have gone through this. I know I’m not the only one.”
Henry found Daily Strength, an online support group that hosted a subgroup called Families of Registrants, and then found NARSOL. She joined Women Against the Registry, which was a part of NARSOL at the time, and became its president in 2011. Around that time, WAR broke off —it wanted to do more protesting than NARSOL was comfortable with. Now Henry says she volunteers about 12 hours a day, seven days a week.
“I was pretty much raised in church,” says Henry, a Southern Baptist. “My kids were raised in church. We were taught to help other people.”
Henry describes WAR as more aggressive than NARSOL. “We’re more challenging, in your face, the ground pounders,” she says. “We protest. They don’t.”
WAR’s slogan is “fighting the destruction of families,” and Henry is speaking from firsthand experience. Like many on the registry, Henry’s son faces harassment and employment problems. Recently his girlfriend’s mother found out he was on the registry and called his employer. The next day, while he was filling out paperwork in the office, he overheard one of his bosses talking vividly about shooting him in the head with a 9 mm pistol. When Henry’s son confronted him, the supervisor said he was just joking. After he filed a complaint with the human resources department, Henry says, he was suspended for three days because of a minor mistake he had made on the job.
Soon after that incident, Henry’s son had to move out of the home he shared with his girlfriend and his children because of a restraining order that her ex-boyfriend obtained against him. Distraught, he moved back into his mother’s house, where he was caught with child pornography again and rearrested.
“He feels guilty,” Henry says. “He feels like I’m giving up my life because of him. And it’s like, ‘No, no, no, you have to understand. You were abused. I didn’t know that. You were sick.'”
‘Let Them Live in Peace’
Henry spends much of her time talking to lawmakers, describing the deleterious effects that registration has on families. In 2019, Henry traveled to Jefferson City, Missouri, accompanied by a registrant and WAR member named Sarah, to speak to legislators. Henry coached Sarah to be as open as possible about the registry’s impact on her family.
Together, Sarah and Henry went to Missouri state representative Tony Luetkemeyer’s office. After chatting for a few minutes, Henry told Sarah to pull up her pant leg, revealing her GPS ankle monitor. “She said, ‘I’ve worn this for 10 years,'” Henry recalls. “‘I have a family. I have a 5-year-old son and [an older] son. And I’m not able to go swimming with them. I’m not able to get in the boat with [them].’ And he just sat and stared at her, like, ‘Oh, my gosh.'” At the time, the Missouri legislature was considering a bill that would have prohibited some sex offenders from “being near athletic facilities used primarily by children.” As a result of that encounter, Henry says, “the bill was killed.”
Registries are all about ostracism, Henry argues, and GPS monitors are a prime example. “We’re not saying that people shouldn’t be adjudicated,” she says. “But once they’ve been adjudicated [and] paid their debt to society, let them live in peace with their families. Don’t put so many barriers in front of them.”
Henry is not the only registry reformer who joined the movement because her son was caught with child pornography. Rita, who did not want her last name to be used, had a similar experience. Eleven years ago, Rita was having dinner with her husband and 26-year-old son, who was acting strangely. “I knew there was something wrong,” she says. “I just kept asking him and asking him, and then he finally said it.”
Rita’s son told her that a few weeks before, around 1 a.m., he had heard banging on his apartment door. When he opened the door, he was face to face with multiple FBI agents. “He didn’t know what they were looking for,” Rita says. They were serving a search warrant based on evidence that he had downloaded child pornography on a peer-to-peer network.
As he told his mother this story, “he was shaking,” she says. “I almost passed out….I couldn’t believe that you could go to prison for what you look at.” She and her husband sat there stunned. Their son said he had seen a lawyer, and he was facing time in federal prison. He ended up serving a little more than six years.
“It was just extremely difficult to get through those days,” Rita says. “I knew in my heart I had two choices: Do I lie down and die, or do I do something? And in my mind, something was better than nothing. We decided we would get involved, just to try and bring some reason to these laws.”
Rita’s husband searched online and discovered the organization that eventually became NARSOL. In 2009, they traveled from the small New York town where they live to Boston for their first meeting. “It was life-changing for me to meet other people who understood the overwhelming shame and punishment that we were looking at,” Rita says. “And those people are still my dearest friends.”
A few years later, Rita founded Caution Click, an organization that focuses on the legal treatment of people arrested for viewing child pornography. She strives to raise awareness among teenagers and their families so they don’t become sex offenders by sexting or looking at something they’re not supposed to.
‘I’d Still Have a Normal Life’
Another Caution Click member is the mother of Alyssa, a 26-year-old woman who is on the registry for having what she says was consensual sex with a 15-year-old boy when she was 19. At the time, Alyssa, who did not want her last name to be used, was a teenaged mother attending high school in a small town in New York. After a few encounters with the boy, she broke off the relationship and blocked him on social media.
Soon afterward, the father of Alyssa’s son sued for custody, citing her relationship with the 15-year-old as evidence that she was an unfit mother. Alyssa was convicted of misdemeanor sexual misconduct. She didn’t have to serve jail time, but the conviction put her on the registry for life.
“I have a lot of remorse for what I did,” Alyssa says. “I cry about it [and] think about it constantly. I wish I could take it back every single day, because maybe if this didn’t happen, I’d still have a normal life.”
Alyssa struggled to find work and a place to live. “I was diagnosed with severe depression,” she says. “I have anxiety issues, major mood swings. One minute I’m happy, the next minute I’m crying, sometimes not knowing why I’m sad or upset.” Sometimes she thinks about killing herself. “I’m literally in a category with people that really, really seriously abuse children, from babies and up,” she says, even though “I legit couldn’t hurt a fly.”
In 2019, Alyssa managed to find a good full-time job in Pennsylvania and a home in a trailer park. She planted flowers in her yard. “I made a whole garden,” she says. “That took a lot of money and a lot of effort and sweat, and it came out so beautiful. I’d wake up and go out on my porch, and I’d just sit there and look at my flowers and breathe in the fresh air. [It was] like being in Pennsylvania, it was a different kind of air. It wasn’t toxic. It wasn’t filled with anything negative.”
The idyll did not last. One day, another resident of the trailer park called the property manager to complain that a sex offender was living there. Alyssa was given three days to leave. “I sat in the car, and I was punching the heck out of my steering wheel, and I was screaming,” she says. “[You’re] doing something good with your life finally, and then you get ripped away from it. So I completely had a mental breakdown.” She packed clothing in garbage bags and took her kids back to New York to live with her mom.
Alyssa hasn’t been able to find a job in New York, and she can’t move out of her parents’ house because, as a sex offender, she does not qualify for low-income housing. She isn’t even legally allowed to take her children to the playground. “Sometimes I risk it,” she says. “I bring [my son] to the park anyways. Listen, if you want to arrest me, that’s fine, but just know I wasn’t doing anything. I wasn’t looking at nobody. I wasn’t touching nobody. I’m just trying to let my kids live their lives.”
What Would Jesus Do?
Of all the reform organizations, ACSOL probably has had the most legislative impact. Through lawsuits and warning letters, Bellucci and her volunteers have managed to eliminate nearly all of California’s local ordinances making certain places, such as parks and schools, off-limits to sex offenders. They have also filed 31 lawsuits challenging local ordinances that limit where offenders can live. Nearly all of them have been successful.
Bellucci’s biggest accomplishment so far is helping to create a tiered registry system in California, scheduled to be implemented in 2021. Instead of treating all sex offenders, regardless of their crimes, as equally dangerous, the tiered registry will divide them into three risk categories. It also will do away with lifetime registration for most offenders.
NARSOL, Rozek’s group, has filed successful lawsuits against sex offender restrictions in Maryland and North Carolina. It recently won a victory in Butts County, Georgia, where it sued Sheriff Gary Long for requiring sex offenders to place warning signs in their front yards during Halloween. “Warning!” the signs said. “No Trick or Treat at This Address.” Last October, a federal judge ruled that Long’s signs were unconstitutional, based on the same First Amendment argument that Bellucci had deployed in Simi Valley. NARSOL also filed an amicus brief in Packingham v. North Carolina, the 2017 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned a state law barring sex offenders from social media.
WAR and Caution Click have fewer legislative goals and focus more on education, so their accomplishments are harder to quantify. But all of the organizations are trying to change the way we talk about sex offenses. When you speak to enough reformers, you notice how they’ve subtly changed the language used in such conversations: Sex offender registry is shortened to the registry; child pornography becomes illicit images or C.P.; sex offenders are registrants. Reformers want people to recognize that individuals on the registry encompass a wide range of offenses, many of which are nonviolent.
Activists argue that changing the language around the registry can reduce the stigma associated with it, one of its greatest harms. Sandralea, a WAR member in Florida who did not want her last name to be used, says her adult son was put on the registry after he was convicted of exposing himself to a 2-year-old—a charge she says was false. The church she’d raised him in, where she had been a member for 23 years, didn’t want him to come back until the pastor had ministered to him and said that it was OK for him to attend again.
“As a Christian, I find Christians are the worst,” says Sandralea. “I feel like [members of] the Christian community who sit there and profess to be of Christ are the most unforgiving people I’ve ever seen in my life.” She changed churches and started a Facebook newsletter ministry for sex offenders. “I want them to see that they are valued by the Lord,” she says.
I ask Sandralea how she thinks Jesus Christ would have reacted to sex offender laws. “I think that he would find them horrendous, because it’s unforgiving,” she says. “He went and sat with the sinners. He cleaned the lepers. Hello! Sex offenders are the lepers of society today. Jesus would have never treated them the way the Christian community does.”
Bellucci, who is a nondenominational Christian, likewise has found that Christians do not necessarily follow Christ’s example. “I’m really careful who I tell [at] church,” she says. “Some people find out what I do, and they just make sure they don’t sit anywhere near me. They don’t want to talk to me. And you know, at my age, I just let that roll off my back.”
When it comes to family members, Bellucci says, “it’s a little harder.” When she first told her older daughter about her plans for ACSOL, she says, “the first thing out of her mouth was, ‘How could you?’ I just explained it as gently and lovingly as I could: ‘This is what I’m doing. I’m not asking your permission. So it’s up to you. You either accept it or you don’t accept it.’ Over the years—and now it’s been eight years—she’s starting to understand better.”
Henry also sometimes worries about discussing her advocacy. “I put a huge target on my back for being the person I am,” she says. “One guy told me online he would kill me and sodomize my corpse.”
At a recent high school reunion that Henry attended with trepidation, a classmate asked her what she does. “I said, ‘Some of you may not like it, but here’s what I do: My son is on the registry. I advocate for the families.’ I thought, ‘Hey, if you like me after that, it’s fine. If you don’t, I’m not running for homecoming queen or Ms. Senior America. I don’t care.'” The woman who’d asked Henry the question walked over to her and gave her a hug. “You know,” she said, “those people need that.”
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You Can Call Connecticut “The Sanserif State”
Practice Book, Rules of Appellate Procedure, 67-2(a):
Only the following two typefaces, of 12 point or larger size, are approved for use in briefs: arial and univers.
Quite unusual, in my experience.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2v0Jqt8
via IFTTT
You Can Call Connecticut “The Sanserif State”
Practice Book, Rules of Appellate Procedure, 67-2(a):
Only the following two typefaces, of 12 point or larger size, are approved for use in briefs: arial and univers.
Quite unusual, in my experience.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2v0Jqt8
via IFTTT
Escobar Exposes America’s Existential Battle To Stop Eurasian Integration
Escobar Exposes America’s Existential Battle To Stop Eurasian Integration
Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Saker blog,
Coming decade could see the US take on Russia, China and Iran over the New Silk Road connection
Iranian seamen salute the Russian Navy frigate Yaroslav Mudry while moored at Chabahar on the Gulf of Oman during Iran-Russia-China joint naval drills. The photo was provided by the Iranian Army office on December 27, 2019. Photo: AFP / HO / Iranian Army office
The Raging Twenties started with a bang with the targeted assassination of Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani.
Yet a bigger bang awaits us throughout the decade: the myriad declinations of the New Great Game in Eurasia, which pits the US against Russia, China and Iran, the three major nodes of Eurasia integration.
Every game-changing act in geopolitics and geoeconomics in the coming decade will have to be analyzed in connection to this epic clash.
The Deep State and crucial sectors of the US ruling class are absolutely terrified that China is already outpacing the “indispensable nation” economically and that Russia has outpaced it militarily. The Pentagon officially designates the three Eurasian nodes as “threats.”
Hybrid War techniques – carrying inbuilt 24/7 demonization – will proliferate with the aim of containing China’s “threat,” Russian “aggression” and Iran’s “sponsorship of terrorism.” The myth of the “free market” will continue to drown under the imposition of a barrage of illegal sanctions, euphemistically defined as new trade “rules.”
Yet that will be hardly enough to derail the Russia-China strategic partnership. To unlock the deeper meaning of this partnership, we need to understand that Beijing defines it as rolling towards a “new era.” That implies strategic long-term planning – with the key date being 2049, the centennial of New China.
The horizon for the multiple projects of the Belt and Road Initiative – as in the China-driven New Silk Roads – is indeed the 2040s, when Beijing expects to have fully woven a new, multipolar paradigm of sovereign nations/partners across Eurasia and beyond, all connected by an interlocking maze of belts and roads.
The Russian project – Greater Eurasia – somewhat mirrors Belt & Road and will be integrated with it. Belt & Road, the Eurasia Economic Union, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank are all converging towards the same vision.
Realpolitik
So this “new era”, as defined by the Chinese, relies heavily on close Russia-China coordination, in every sector. Made in China 2025 is encompassing a series of techno/scientific breakthroughs. At the same time, Russia has established itself as an unparalleled technological resource for weapons and systems that the Chinese still cannot match.
At the latest BRICS summit in Brasilia, President Xi Jinping told Vladimir Putin that “the current international situation with rising instability and uncertainty urge China and Russia to establish closer strategic coordination.” Putin’s response: “Under the current situation, the two sides should continue to maintain close strategic communication.”
Russia is showing China how the West respects realpolitik power in any form, and Beijing is finally starting to use theirs. The result is that after five centuries of Western domination – which, incidentally, led to the decline of the Ancient Silk Roads – the Heartland is back, with a bang, asserting its preeminence.
On a personal note, my travels these past two years, from West Asia to Central Asia, and my conversations these past two months with analysts in Nur-Sultan, Moscow and Italy, have allowed me to get deeper into the intricacies of what sharp minds define as the Double Helix. We are all aware of the immense challenges ahead – while barely managing to track the stunning re-emergence of the Heartland in real-time.
In soft power terms, the sterling role of Russian diplomacy will become even more paramount – backed up by a Ministry of Defense led by Sergei Shoigu, a Tuvan from Siberia, and an intel arm that is capable of constructive dialogue with everybody: India/Pakistan, North/South Korea, Iran/Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan.
This apparatus does smooth (complex) geopolitical issues over in a manner that still eludes Beijing.
In parallel, virtually the whole Asia-Pacific – from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean – now takes into full consideration Russia-China as a counter-force to US naval and financial overreach.
Stakes in Southwest Asia
The targeted assassination of Soleimani, for all its long-term fallout, is just one move in the Southwest Asia chessboard. What’s ultimately at stake is a macro geoeconomic prize: a land bridge from the Persian Gulf to the Eastern Mediterranean.
Last summer, an Iran-Iraq-Syria trilateral established that “the goal of negotiations is to activate the Iranian-Iraqi-Syria load and transport corridor as part of a wider plan for reviving the Silk Road.”
There could not be a more strategic connectivity corridor, capable of simultaneously interlinking with the International North-South Transportation Corridor; the Iran-Central Asia-China connection all the way to the Pacific; and projecting Latakia towards the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.
What’s on the horizon is, in fact, a sub-sect of Belt & Road in Southwest Asia. Iran is a key node of Belt & Road; China will be heavily involved in the rebuilding of Syria; and Beijing-Baghdad signed multiple deals and set up an Iraqi-Chinese Reconstruction Fund (income from 300,000 barrels of oil a day in exchange for Chinese credit for Chinese companies rebuilding Iraqi infrastructure).
A quick look at the map reveals the “secret” of the US refusing to pack up and leave Iraq, as demanded by the Iraqi Parliament and Prime Minister: to prevent the emergence of this corridor by any means necessary. Especially when we see that all the roads that China is building across Central Asia – I navigated many of them in November and December – ultimately link China with Iran.
The final objective: to unite Shanghai to the Eastern Mediterranean – overland, across the Heartland.
As much as Gwadar port in the Arabian Sea is an essential node of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, and part of China’s multi-pronged “escape from Malacca” strategy, India also courted Iran to match Gwadar via the port of Chabahar in the Gulf of Oman.
So as much as Beijing wants to connect the Arabian Sea with Xinjiang, via the economic corridor, India wants to connect with Afghanistan and Central Asia via Iran.
Yet India’s investments in Chabahar may come to nothing, with New Delhi still mulling whether to become an active part of the US “Indo-Pacific” strategy, which would imply dropping Tehran.
The Russia-China-Iran joint naval exercise in late December, starting exactly from Chabahar, was a timely wake-up for New Delhi. India simply cannot afford to ignore Iran and end up losing its key connectivity node, Chabahar.
The immutable fact: everyone needs and wants Iran connectivity. For obvious reasons, since the Persian empire, this is the privileged hub for all Central Asian trade routes.
On top of it, Iran for China is a matter of national security. China is heavily invested in Iran’s energy industry. All bilateral trade will be settled in yuan or in a basket of currencies bypassing the US dollar.
US neocons, meanwhile, still dream of what the Cheney regime was aiming at in the past decade: regime change in Iran leading to the US dominating the Caspian Sea as a springboard to Central Asia, only one step away from Xinjiang and weaponization of anti-China sentiment. It could be seen as a New Silk Road in reverse to disrupt the Chinese vision.
Battle of the Ages
A new book, The Impact of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, by Jeremy Garlick of the University of Economics in Prague, carries the merit of admitting that, “making sense” of Belt & Road “is extremely difficult.”
This is an extremely serious attempt to theorize Belt & Road’s immense complexity – especially considering China’s flexible, syncretic approach to policymaking, quite bewildering for Westerners. To reach his goal, Garlick gets into Tang Shiping’s social evolution paradigm, delves into neo-Gramscian hegemony, and dissects the concept of “offensive mercantilism” – all that as part of an effort in “complex eclecticism.”
The contrast with the pedestrian Belt & Road demonization narrative emanating from US “analysts” is glaring. The book tackles in detail the multifaceted nature of Belt & Road’s trans-regionalism as an evolving, organic process.
Imperial policymakers won’t bother to understand how and why Belt & Road is setting a new global paradigm. The NATO summit in London last month offered a few pointers. NATO uncritically adopted three US priorities: even more aggressive policy towards Russia; containment of China (including military surveillance); and militarization of space – a spin-off from the 2002 Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine.
So NATO will be drawn into the “Indo-Pacific” strategy – which means containment of China. And as NATO is the EU’s weaponized arm, that implies the US interfering on how Europe does business with China – at every level.
Retired US Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s chief of staff from 2001 to 2005, cuts to the chase: “America exists today to make war. How else do we interpret 19 straight years of war and no end in sight? It’s part of who we are. It’s part of what the American Empire is. We are going to lie, cheat and steal, as Pompeo is doing right now, as Trump is doing right now, as Esper is doing right now … and a host of other members of my political party, the Republicans, are doing right now. We are going to lie, cheat and steal to do whatever it is we have to do to continue this war complex. That’s the truth of it. And that’s the agony of it.”
Moscow, Beijing and Tehran are fully aware of the stakes. Diplomats and analysts are working on the trend, for the trio, to evolve a concerted effort to protect one another from all forms of hybrid war – sanctions included – launched against each of them.
For the US, this is indeed an existential battle – against the whole Eurasia integration process, the New Silk Roads, the Russia-China strategic partnership, those Russian hypersonic weapons mixed with supple diplomacy, the profound disgust and revolt against US policies all across the Global South, the nearly inevitable collapse of the US dollar. What’s certain is that the Empire won’t go quietly into the night. We should all be ready for the battle of the ages.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 01/17/2020 – 23:45
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3alhujQ Tyler Durden
All The World’s Wealth In One Visualization
All The World’s Wealth In One Visualization
The financial concept of wealth is broad, and it can take many forms.
While your wealth is most likely driven by the dollars in your bank account and the value of your stock portfolio and house, Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins notes that wealth also includes a number of smaller things as well, such as the old furniture in your garage or a painting on the wall.
From the macro perspective of a country, wealth is even more all-encompassing — it’s not just about the assets held by private households or businesses, but also those owned by the public. What is the value of a new toll bridge, or an aging nuclear power plant?
Today’s visualization comes to us from HowMuch.net, and it shows all of the world’s wealth in one place, sorted by country.
Total Wealth by Region
In 2019, total world wealth grew by $9.1 trillion to $360.6 trillion, which amounts to a 2.6% increase over the previous year.
Here’s how that divvies up between major global regions:
Last year, growth in global wealth exceeded that of the population, incrementally increasing wealth per adult to $70,850, a 1.2% bump and an all-time high.
That said, it’s worth mentioning that Credit Suisse, the authors of the Global Wealth Report 2019 and the source of all this data, notes that the 1.2% increase has not been adjusted for inflation.
Ranking Countries by Total Wealth
Which countries are the richest?
Let’s take a look at the 15 countries that hold the most wealth, according to Credit Suisse:
The 15 wealthiest nations combine for 84.3% of global wealth.
Leading the pack is the United States, which holds $106.0 trillion of the world’s wealth — equal to a 29.4% share of the global total. Interestingly, the United States economy makes up 23.9% of the size of the world economy in comparison.
Behind the U.S. is China, the only other country with a double-digit share of global wealth, equal to 17.7% of wealth or $63.8 trillion. As the country continues to build out its middle class, one estimate sees Chinese private wealth increasing by 119.5% over the next decade.
Impressively, the combined wealth of the U.S. and China is more than the next 13 countries in aggregate — and almost equal to half of the global wealth total.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 01/17/2020 – 23:25
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2G031vF Tyler Durden
The Machines Have Us Trained For Obedience, Paul Craig Roberts
The Machines Have Us Trained For Obedience, Paul Craig Roberts
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
Many decades ago there was an issue of Mad comics that portrayed a future time when everything was done by robots and humans had no function. One day the system failed. As it had been eons since humans had to do anything, no one knew how to fix the system. It was Mad comics version of Armageddon.
I think that is where the digital revolution is taking us.
I remember when appliances and cars responded to humans, and now humans respond to them. When I grew up cars and home appliances did not go “beep-beep” to remind you of the things you were supposed to do, such as turn off the car lights and take the keys out of the ignition, or turn off the oven and shut the fridge.
Cars, except for British sports cars, didn’t have seat belts. Today a car doesn’t stop beeping until you fasten your seat belts. I hear that soon the cars won’t start until the seat belts are fastened.
When the electric company’s outsourced crew failed to connect the neutral line to my house and blew out all appliances, sprinkler system, and garage openers, the electric company replaced everything on a prorated depreciated basis that cost me thousands of dollars. The worst part of it is that the new appliances boss me around.
The old microwave would gently beep three times and stop. The new one beeps in the most insistent way—open the door you dumb human right this second, immediately—and keeps on insisting until I obey. The fridge refuses to let me leave it open for cleaning. The oven insists that I open it immediately, despite my habit of cutting the on time short and leaving whatever it is to cook awhile longer in the hot oven.
Here is an explanation of how our electric meters spy on us and pass on the information to interested parties.
We are being told that the Internet of Things is supposed to be our future, everything is connected, everything is a data source. We are told this will make things more convenient somehow, maybe, but your convenience is not what the Internet of Things is being created for. The Internet of Things is being created in a way that things will be associated with your name. So by looking at what the things are doing, people can watch what you are doing. The Internet of Things will be a living, digital organism where you can be found any time of day, watched, identified, and treated like a voluntary member of this new massive database in the sky. Of course, the Internet of Things is a way for government to assure itself that your behavior is not in any way a threat to anyone in government or, if it is, to enable them to quickly pay you a visit in a forceful way.
The Internet of Things will produce more data about you than has ever been collected, and the more data they have on you, the more they can take your stuff from you, the more they can do to you.
Self-driving cars seem to be our future, and robots are taking our jobs away even faster than global corporations offshored them to Asia.
What exactly is it that humans are going to be good for? Nothing it seems.
Why will we need a driving license when cars drive themselves? If there is an accident, who is to blame? The company that made the car? The company responsible for the software? What is the point of car insurance when drivers have no responsibility?
Perhaps it is true that aliens are living among us. Their language is “beep-beep” and they are using our machines and cars to train us, like Pavlov’s dogs, to respond to their command.
I can remember when telephones were a convenience before they became a nuisance. When my land line rings, 95% of the time it is a scam or a telemarketing call, usually robotic. Now, a man will listen to a sexy female voice, for a time, and a woman will listen to a courtly gentleman’s voice, but until sex doll robots catch on, no one wants to listen to a machine’s voice. So why the calls? Why do the telephone companies permit their customers to be scammed and their privacy to be constantly invaded? How do the phone companies benefit from permitting unethical people to destroy the value of phone service?
The same thing, I am told, happens to cell phone users. Recently I finally had to acquire a smart phone, because two people I need to reach only respond to text messages. They refuse to answer any phone, and email is so invaded by scammers, malware, and marketeers that they do not use email. They do not even set up the message system on their cell phones. If you try to call them, you get instead of an answer the message that the person you are attempting to call has not set up their message box.
So there you have it. Except for texting, which can’t (yet) be done with a land line, telephones are a nuisance.
Growing up in Atlanta during the 1940s and into the early 1950s, you could not yourself place a call from your telephone. When you picked up the receiver, an AT&T operator answered and asked: “number please.” You gave her the number, and she rang it and connected you if there was an answer. If you did not know the number, you asked her for information. If you knew the complete name and perhaps the street address, you were provided with the telephone number.
In those halcyon days even in a city such as Atlanta, Georgia, there were party lines. That meant that you shared a telephone line with a neighbor. If you picked up the receiver to make a call through the operator and heard voices speaking, you knew the line was in use and decency required that you hang up immediately. As the talking parties heard the click when you picked up the line, if they didn’t hear the click when you hung up they asked you to get off their call.
In that system, there was no anonymity. Anonymity appeared with dial phones, which allowed you to make your own calls. From a public telephone, the call was not traceable to you. This technology was the beginning of our downfall.
Dial phones, something youths have seen only in antique shops or old movies are still with us in everyday language. We still say “dial the number” when we are punching buttons.
Today thanks to technological “progress,” it is much easier to invade privacy.
Technology is destroying us and the planet. The pollution from technology is phenomenal. 5G itself may do us in. The destruction of privacy, identity, and freedom by the digital revolution is far beyond George Orwell’s imagination. Insouciant humans delight in the gadgets that are turning themselves into unfree people who are under control but who themselves control nothing.
This outcome is easily seen in China where the government uses universal spying to construct for each person a social credit score. If that person is a dissident, has bad habits, etc., that person gets a score too low to qualify for a loan, university admission, employment, etc., and becomes a non-being. Here is Soren Korsgaard’s explanation of our future.
Dystopian classics are back into the spotlight, like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. They have roared back onto bestseller lists due to whistleblowers’ exposés of government imperialism and totalitarian surveillance of their citizens and foreigners. While the kakistocracy and dystopian surveillance state depicted in 1984 undoubtedly reflected, to some extent, contemporary sociopolitical realities, Orwell extrapolated worst-case scenarios set as warnings for future generations. Nonetheless, his book and implicit warnings seem to have been ignored as an authoritarian surveillance state is now a reality for most people in first and second world countries. In lieu of accountability for criminal mass-surveillance or these revelations deterring or limiting the prying eyes of government-sponsored spy programs, the establishment in conjunction with their media platforms has used it to their full advantage, almost as if they, themselves, masterminded the leaks.
Rather than being dismantled, the establishment has openly added advanced surveillance technology to their arsenal in their cataclysmic War on Truth. The mainstream media now parallels Orwell’s Ministry of Truth that broadcasts official explanations, while it effectively neutralizes those who venture outside the parameters of government-approved thinking, which so often equates to threatening their interests.
While the current Western population control via advanced surveillance technology and social engineering is unparalleled in history, China has nevertheless rolled out a system that sets new standards for government control, the so-called social credit system. In a few decades from now, if the Chinese government succeeds, those who are imprisoned by the social crediting system will have no reference point or conception of freedom; digital tyranny will have become the norm.
To some extent, Western policymakers have been apprehensive of the Chinese program, but as we shall see, it is nevertheless evident that they themselves are working diligently behind the scenes to implement the same technology that makes the Chinese digital prison possible.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 01/17/2020 – 23:05
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2TGyYRX Tyler Durden
OK Boomer: Ex-Citi Banker Wins Ageism Case After Boss Calls Him “Old… Set In His Ways”
OK Boomer: Ex-Citi Banker Wins Ageism Case After Boss Calls Him “Old… Set In His Ways”
Today in “anytime you fire someone it’s always a case of discrimination” news…
A former investment banker for Citigroup has won an age discrimination case against the bank after one of his bosses called him “old” and “set in his ways” when he was laid off at age 55.
A London Tribunal ruled in the ex-banker’s favor this week, finding that Niels Kirk was dismissed unfairly. Kirk had previously been a managing director for energy banking, according to Bloomberg. He had previously been employed at Citigroup for 26 years and wasn’t given any warning about a proposed restructuring.
Citi says it will appeal the decision.
One of his bosses, 54 year old Manolo Falco, denied making the statement but did concede that Kirk “had some very difficult relationships with other senior bankers.” But the judge ruled that Falco’s evidence was “less than convincing”, while Kirk had taken notes in the meeting.
The judge presiding said: “The remark appeared to the tribunal to be the kind of throwaway remark Mr. Falco could make.”
The size of any award will be determined at a later hearing. Once an employee proves they are a victim of discrimination, a tribunal can order damages that are higher than the cap of about $109,000.
Kirk’s performance ranking had fallen from a 1 (best) to 3 (good) between 2014 and 2016. His overall compensation also fell from $1.24 million in 2014 to about $600,000 in 2016.
Citi claims its “position as set out in the litigation is that Mr. Falco did not make that comment.” Citi also says it’s upset with the decision “particularly given the small age gap between Mr. Kirk and the employee who was ultimately appointed to the role.”
Kirk’s hired successor wasn’t much younger, at just 51 years old.
Citi has 51 managing directors in the company’s EMEA Corporate Banking Department and, as of 2016, three were over the age of 55 and fifteen were 50 and older.
“Gray hair is very important in this industry,” Falco told the court last year.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 01/17/2020 – 22:45
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/35XYaWs Tyler Durden