{"id":575,"date":"2022-01-16T12:27:34","date_gmt":"2022-01-16T17:27:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sexoffenderonestopresource.com\/colorado\/?p=575"},"modified":"2022-01-16T12:27:34","modified_gmt":"2022-01-16T17:27:34","slug":"critics-seek-reform-of-colorado-sex-offender-laws-they-say-can-do-more-harm-than-good-lawmakers-researchers-and-even-some-victims-seek-reform-of-states-sex-offender-management-board","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sexoffenderonestopresource.com\/colorado\/critics-seek-reform-of-colorado-sex-offender-laws-they-say-can-do-more-harm-than-good-lawmakers-researchers-and-even-some-victims-seek-reform-of-states-sex-offender-management-board\/","title":{"rendered":"Critics seek reform of Colorado sex offender laws they say can do more harm than good Lawmakers, researchers and even some victims seek reform of state\u2019s Sex Offender Management Board"},"content":{"rendered":"
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William Woody, Special to The Denver Post<\/div>\n

Through a tiltshift lens, Wayne Bethurum stands in the living room of his Cedaredge home Thursday on Sept. 2, 2021. Bethurum, convicted decades ago of sexual assault on a child, acknowledges that \u201cwhat I did was terrible,\u201d but has found that the discovery of his name on the sex offender registry has made it impossible for him to continue with his volunteer efforts in town. \u201cI\u2019ve been ostracized in the community,\u201d he said.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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By\u00a0ALEX BURNESS<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0aburness@denverpost.com<\/a>\u00a0| The Denver Post<\/div>\n
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69<\/a><\/div>\n

Close to 30 years ago, Wayne Bethurum was living in Wray, in his late 40s, when he groomed an underage family member and entered into what he wrongly thought of as a relationship.<\/p>\n

He says he now understands now there is no such thing as a \u201crelationship\u201d between a child and an adult. He completed his prison sentence for sexual assault on a child, and today he lives in Cedaredge, a small town in western Colorado.<\/p>\n

Bethurum has not reoffended. He\u2019s been involved in his community as a photographer who helps put on veterans\u2019 events and motorcyclist meetups. A local nonprofit earlier this year named him volunteer of the month. After that honor, he said, \u201cSomebody ran my name and found out I was on the registry.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNow I can\u2019t volunteer anymore,\u201d he said. \u201cAll kinds of stuff is spread around town and half of it is not true. I\u2019ve been ostracized in the community\u2026 They think of me as the worst of the worst.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said he can\u2019t blame them for judging him that way \u2014 \u201cWhat I did was terrible\u201d \u2014 but many who work closely with people like Bethurum say that turning them into permanent pariahs is ultimately unhelpful to the cause of rehabilitating sex offenders and preventing future sexual violence.<\/p>\n

The size of Colorado\u2019s sex offender registry, now at roughly 20,000 people, is but one in a slew of reasons a growing chorus of lawyers, lawmakers, researchers, people on the registry itself, and even some victims of sexual abuse believe Colorado\u2019s system of managing sex offenders in some cases does more harm than good.<\/p>\n

That system is controlled mainly by the state\u2019s powerful Sex Offender Management Board, or SOMB, a 25-member group that sets rules for evaluation, treatment and monitoring of sex offenders.<\/p>\n

That board\u2019s critics argue that this system can demoralize and endlessly punish people who genuinely want to be better, teaching them to see themselves as incurable monsters even decades after their offenses \u2014 at the expense of more effective and humanizing therapies.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s this rhetoric of \u2018tough on crime,’\u201d said Apryl Alexander, an associate professor at the University of Denver who has been a treatment provider for sex offenders in several different states. \u201cWe do have to be tough on crime, I believe that. We have to make our communities safe. The issue is, are our communities safe? Is anything changing? The issue is that, on sexual violence, not much is changing.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The set of people criticizing the SOMB is not a small one. Repeated state reports in the past decade, including a\u00a0scathing report by the state auditor<\/a>\u00a0last year, have questioned the board\u2019s transparency and resistance to evidence-based best practices.<\/p>\n

The auditor found that board members were voting on policy matters to benefit their own firms, and the state has also been accused by its own watchdogs of wasteful spending \u2014\u00a0as much as $44 million annually<\/a>, as of 2017 \u2014 and delays in getting people past their parole-eligibility date into treatment. Forty-seven convicted sex offenders got out of prison last year without receiving treatment, the state reported.<\/p>\n

\u201cStrong social support, community relationships, stable housing, good jobs \u2014 the person who\u2019s got something to lose in their community tends to behave better,\u201d said Laurie Rose Kepros, director of sexual litigation for the Office of the State Public Defender. \u201cInstead what has happened with the SOMB is that even when they\u2019ve gotten legislative reports, audits, they just keep saying, \u2018Oh yeah, we did that, we fixed that.\u2019 But they didn\u2019t and they don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe politics of disgust\u201d<\/h3>\n

The experts who\u2019ve dominated the SOMB and much of this segment of criminal justice theory in general describe sex offenders as a uniquely manipulative, dangerous population. It was only about a decade ago that Colorado even recognized the potential for rehabilitation in this group, dropping the term\u00a0\u201cno known cure\u201d<\/a>\u00a0from policy.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy do we treat and regulate?\u201d District Attorney Alexis King, of Jefferson County, told lawmakers in June as she spoke against proposed reform legislation. \u201cWe do it because they are a risk to our community safety, and they are a risk because they are often offending repeatedly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reformers tried and mostly failed to go further this year, seeking in the spring to pass into law a series of changes to the SOMB that would have made the board smaller and given a greater voice to treatment providers, eliminated the term \u201csexually violent predator\u201d from statute and limited the use of controversial polygraph examinations, among other changes.<\/p>\n

But the state\u2019s elected district attorneys unanimously cried foul, arguing that these proposals had been rushed and not well vetted, and the legislature opted instead to pass\u00a0a limited bill<\/a>\u00a0and essentially put off the tougher conversations until next year, or no later than 2023.<\/p>\n

Those policymakers openly admit the legislature is hesitant to tackle the issue. After all, who wants to stick their neck out to question harsh punishments against people convicted of crimes like rape and incest? But a large body of evidence shows that current standards, and the self-loathing and isolation they can promote even for offenders deemed low risks to reoffend, are counterproductive.<\/p>\n

Among the areas of highest concern for SOMB critics is the state\u2019s continued authorization of testing deemed by doctors and courts alike to be pseudoscientific and unreliable, including polygraphs and the \u201cpenile plethysmograph,\u201d in which evaluators strap a band to a subject\u2019s penis and monitor their arousal at various images and ideas.<\/p>\n

Conrad Gonzales, long ago convicted on sex assault on multiple children, still recalls his plethysmograph, 22 years ago. He was shown pictures: a child in a diaper, a man wearing a thong, a woman in lingerie. Audio played in the background \u2014 narration of a child sex assault fantasy, he recalls.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter the plethysmograph I thought about getting on I-25 and running into a truck,\u201d said Gonzales, 72, who now lives north of Ault near the Wyoming border.<\/p>\n

The experience sticks with him.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of it is self-deprecation, telling myself I\u2019m worthless,\u201d he said. \u201cThere are times where that really gets to the point of thinking you just don\u2019t deserve to be alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Penile plethysmography is less common today, but still\u00a0authorized in the SOMB\u2019s standards<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 though the board is now in the process of reevaluating that. It\u2019s set to discuss the matter further at its Sept. 15 meeting.<\/p>\n

Like the test Gonzales took, mandatory polygraphs have been widely discredited \u2014\u00a0they also cost the state and offenders millions<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 but the SOMB still defends them as a tool to deter \u201cproblem behavior\u201d and to obtain information that otherwise may never have surfaced.<\/p>\n

This testing is part of a broader overall strategy of closely monitoring sex offenders and keeping them permanently in a class separate from the rest of the population. Deregistration is a third rail in Colorado politics, even more so than other proposed reforms. That\u2019s because the registry is comforting to the public, said Emma Mclean-Riggs, an ACLU of Colorado fellow experienced in working with people assigned to the sex-offender registry when they were under 18.<\/p>\n

\u201cRegistration does not work. It does not keep us any safer. Period,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reason we continue to use registration as a tool is only about the politics of disgust. It\u2019s a way for us to express disapproval of that behavior, and a way for us to \u2018other\u2019 and distinguish ourselves from the folks who commit sexual crimes. We can feel comfortable and safe knowing that the predators are this monstrous other, when in fact we know most abuse happens between people who know each other. We\u2019re not talking about the monster in the bushes. We\u2019re talking about dad, cousin, neighbor \u2014 those folks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mclean-Riggs was sexually abused as a child. It\u2019s not unusual for survivors of sexual violence to reach the same conclusions she has \u2014 contrary to the popular refrain from opponents of reform who insist that people like Mclean-Riggs want to push policies that will harm survivors.<\/p>\n

A 2017 study in the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology found that survivors were more supportive than non-survivors of treatment for sex offenders, and that they were more critical of mandatory community notification laws, which in Colorado include a requirement that police inform neighbors when a \u201csexually violent predator\u201d moves in. (That term applies to a subset of just under 400 sex offenders, though experts say this group is not uniformly dangerous and that the system by which someone is designated a \u201csexually violent predator\u201d can be imprecise.)<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause I\u2019m a survivor I care about exactly one thing: what works. That\u2019s it,\u201d Mclean-Riggs said. \u201cI don\u2019t care about performing disgust, condemning people, punishment. I care about little kids, like I was.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPolitical suicide\u201d<\/h3>\n

Colorado, as with the country in general, is not particularly good at helping victims of sexual abuse. It\u2019s estimated that the population the SOMB serves commits fewer than 1% of sexual offenses in the state \u2014 that is, most offenders get away with it because sexual assault is so under-reported \u2014 and that one in four girls and one in six boys will be sexually abused before they turn 18.<\/p>\n

All the more reason, prosecutors and others argue, to be especially tough on the small fraction of abusers who are actually caught and convicted.<\/p>\n

Jessica Dotter, sexual assault resource prosecutor for the Colorado District Attorneys\u2019 Council and a member of the SOMB, said that Colorado is better than other states at developing containment strategies for that fraction. The SOMB, she said, makes the state more nimble than others that do not have such a body.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the current state of registration, of intense supervision and probation, of multiple cracks at probation before being sent back to (prison), are indicative of our attempts to tailor the sort of treatment and conditions of sentencing,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The reformers argue that even though it\u2019s not on the SOMB solely, or even mostly, to fix the national problem in which few sex crimes are reported and even fewer are prosecuted, the state could at least move the needle by diverting funding away from heavy surveillance programs that they say\u00a0often have no positive rehabilitative effect.<\/p>\n

Said Kepros, \u201cWith feel-good interventions like polygraph testing that do not yield an increase in public safety, we\u2019re choosing not to give money to survivors of sexual violence. We\u2019re not funding prevention. We\u2019re making a choice to not spend money where it does some good.\u201d<\/p>\n

In some cases, the state is choosing to make the offenders spend the money. One man, Rick Ostring, testified to a state Senate committee this year that he\u2019d been forced to spend about $4,000 on mandatory polygraph tests.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy not also use divining rods and tea leaves, as a triumvirate to detect falsity?\u201d said state Sen. Pete Lee, a Colorado Springs Democrat. \u201cHow can we hold our head high and say that we\u2019re engaging in accurate risk assessment when we use tools like that?\u201d<\/p>\n

On both sides of the aisle there are lawmakers coming to see it that way. This past session saw a push \u2014 albeit stalled \u2014 to make the SOMB smaller and more balanced, with greater emphasis on the input of actual treatment providers. There\u2019s increasing consensus that terms like \u201csexually violent predator\u201d are problematic because they often aren\u2019t even accurate. And in general there is a move to talk about and to treat those on the registry with more compassion.<\/p>\n

Dotter warns of a slippery slope.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo call it \u2018a person who has committed a sexual offense’\u201d \u2014 instead of a \u201csex offender\u201d \u2014 \u201cis very offensive to victims and others,\u201d she said. Dotter said she worries about the state removing accountability.<\/p>\n

The lawmakers and advocates seeking changes to the SOMB\u2019s structure and standards say they don\u2019t want to minimize this population\u2019s horrific crimes, but that they cannot ignore the problems in this system that years of research, plus multiple state offices, have over and over called into question.<\/p>\n

They also know this is not a popular political fight. That is true even though many lawmakers agree in principle that the SOMB should be reformed. One lawmaker who voted against this year\u2019s bill, Republican Rep. Mike Lynch of Wellington, said the board is \u201cbroke\u201d just before he cast that vote.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a problem. It doesn\u2019t matter if it\u2019s an election year or not,\u201d state Rep. Stephanie Luck, a Penrose Republican, told The Denver Post. \u201cWhat are we going to do to fix this? Regardless of how it plays out in the press.\u201d<\/p>\n

Added state Rep. Kerry Tipper, a Lakewood Democrat who said she plans to bring a SOMB reform bill next year, \u201cMaybe it\u2019s political suicide. But our job is not to do what is popular.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

William Woody, Special to The Denver Post Through a tiltshift lens, Wayne Bethurum stands in the living room of his Cedaredge home Thursday on Sept. 2, 2021. Bethurum, convicted decades ago of sexual assault on a child, acknowledges that \u201cwhat I did was terrible,\u201d but has found that the discovery of his name on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sex-offender-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sexoffenderonestopresource.com\/colorado\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sexoffenderonestopresource.com\/colorado\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sexoffenderonestopresource.com\/colorado\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sexoffenderonestopresource.com\/colorado\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sexoffenderonestopresource.com\/colorado\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=575"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sexoffenderonestopresource.com\/colorado\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":576,"href":"https:\/\/sexoffenderonestopresource.com\/colorado\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575\/revisions\/576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sexoffenderonestopresource.com\/colorado\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sexoffenderonestopresource.com\/colorado\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sexoffenderonestopresource.com\/colorado\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}