A controversial bill to create a public list of teenagers who commit violent sex offenses is moving through the Tennessee state legislature.
Teens who end up on the public list would stay there for twenty-five years.
State Representative Debra Maggart says the issue is public safety.
“They’re out in the public, and the public, I think, has a right to know.”
The Hendersonville Republican says the bill would also make the state eligible for up to five million dollars in federal justice department funds.
But a Memphis psychiatrist who treats dangerous adolescent sex offenders says facts don’t back up the kind of fear that’s at the heart of the bill. Dr. Valerie Arnold says teenagers can be treated. She says of the patients who complete her program successfully, some eighty-five percent don’t get in trouble again.
“I think there’s clear evidence that treatment is very, very effective, and the whole community is safer.”
The bill is in a House subcommittee, and lawyers who work in this area of criminal law are expected to testify next week.
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Maggart says the fact that adolescent sex offenders can be successfully treated doesn’t make her bill any less necessary.
“Some of the juveniles can be rehabilitated, you know, we just heard testimony from a doctor who said that she can rehabilitate 85 percent of them. But you know, what about the 15 percent? What about the ones that are not rehabilitated? Do we just let them rape at will?”
Dr. Arnold is the interim chief of Child & Adolescent Psyciatry at the University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center in Memphis – although she told the House Criminal Practice Subcommittee Wednesday she was speaking as an individual.
“I only see the patients that represent danger to the community, so that for multiple reasons it is not felt that they can be treated as an outpatient, which is a very small percentage of the patients that actually seek treatment. So I’m seeing the harder, more dangerous patients, and of them, very many of them get better.”
Arnold says that other crimes committed as a juvenile typically don’t follow a person into adulthood.
“I’m just appalled that somebody could murder someone,… and no consequences after they do that, but here’s somebody that has the potential to get better, and yet we’re going to stigmatize them for 25 years.”
The U.T. psychiatrist says not everyone who applies for treatment is accepted. Some seven percent of potential patients are triaged back into the criminal justice system, she says.
“I mean, if we feel somebody is a risk to the community, we don’t discharge them. We could notify the courts, the DHS, the sheriffs, we have a duty to warn – and we clearly believe that.”
Of those patients who persevere, who learn to deal with their weak places and who are treated along with their families, only about 15 percent fail to succeed. And she says that 15 percent don’t necessarily commit a new sex offense.
“That’s a very broad definition of success, meaning that they might not have completed high school, they might not have a job, they might not be…they might have had another offense, like, a traffic offense.”
Maggart says passage of the bill would make the state eligible for a $5 million federal justice department grant.
Maggart’s bill is HB2789 Maggart, Fincher/SB 2725 Black
The Edward Byrne Memorial State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance Grant program comes under the federal Bureau of Justice Assistance.
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