I have undergone two distinct forms of sex offender–specific treatment during my time on probation and parole. The first treatment was in New Mexico, where I initially was on parole, and attendance was a requirement of my limited freedom. There were two different kinds of therapies in Albuquerque, but I didn’t get to choose which one to enroll in. My parole officer assigned a therapist, whom I’ll call Brenda, a few months after I was released from prison.
Her practice was in the low parts of the Northeast Heights, in a nondescript one-story office suite near a large abandoned strip mall. There was very little advertising outside her practice; I don’t believe her name was even on the door, just a suite number. I was told this was for our protection.
After months of isolation owing to my parole restrictions, I was desperate for some sense of community and wanted to wholeheartedly embrace treatment. I was looking forward to talking to a professional, and not one that carried a gun and wore riot gear around me. Yet almost immediately, I didn’t like Brenda. For a while I pretended to like her; I was respectful and civil in my interactions with her, but the more time I spent with her, the more she felt like simply an extension of my parole officer, whom I hated. In my eyes, she saw her role as just an added layer of surveillance for us, the undesirables on her caseload. It did not feel like constructive therapy.
This is not to say that she did not help me. After a few months of diligently attending what she sold as therapy, she put me in touch with an employer who hired lots of people on the sex offender registry. It was a good job and allowed me to keep one of my part-time jobs as well. Brenda, to her credit, recognized that I was intelligent and a hard worker.
Before I knew the term or methods, I realized that Brenda’s form of therapy was largely based on externalities—on using outside pressure to get a person to behave in her intended way. It is the same sort of thinking that dominates the premise behind incarceration in the first place, so it wasn’t too surprising to encounter it as part of parole—except that it was in an environment where I was putatively free. Even if it was a limited freedom.
Every group session started with an individual check-in, similar to AA, but instead of confessing to the group how many days you had remained sober, you had to say your offense and what high-risk situations you had put yourself in during the previous week. To this day, I cannot remember half my group members’ names, but I can tell you what they did.
I also quickly realized—a survival instinct kicking in, you might say—that while Brenda was inquisitive, she only cared to ask the questions that, if answered in the affirmative, could get a person in a lot of fucking trouble: How much pornography have you watched this week? Are you thinking about your victim when you masturbate? Your officer says they found a cell phone near your bunk in the shelter, and nobody is confessing to it. Are you sure it isn’t yours?
Normal questions like that. Naturally, nobody gave her the answers she wanted.
The other crucial thing I noticed was that this form of treatment, or at least the kind Brenda offered, seemed very ineffective. In the entire time I was enrolled in her treatment, for a period of approximately ten months, we only had one person graduate from it. Brenda had nothing to do with this: He had fulfilled his obligations to probation and parole and was discharged from supervision, meaning his attendance at treatment was no longer mandatory.
Our therapist was deeply concerned when he stopped attending regularly and would comment on her concern to the rest of us, behind his back, on the days he didn’t attend. He had been attending her therapy for years, and while I understood that everyone internalizes treatment at a different rate, her concern seemed more an indictment of her therapy than a true reflection of a lack of progress on his part. On the days he did attend, voluntarily, she needled him as to what he had been doing and why he felt he didn’t need the group anymore. In front of everyone.
I remember thinking, if we could never be trusted to be unsupervised, what was the point of releasing us from prison?
During that same period, we also had three people fail treatment. Or, in other words, get sent back to prison or jail. One guy was caught with a cell phone. The second guy tested positive for methamphetamine. The third guy was me. I was sent back to jail, after fourteen months of active parole, for possessing a laptop I hadn’t disclosed to my parole officer. I remember feeling tremendous amounts of shame that I couldn’t last more than a year and a half out of prison.
After 112 days in the Bernalillo County Jail, I was released in the middle of the night and told I had seven days to report to Benton County Probation and Parole in Oregon. My New Mexico parole officer revoked my interstate compact, which allowed me to serve my parole there, and sent me to live in a state where I had no residence, job, or familial connections. This was in September 2020.
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It wasn’t until June 2023 that I was able to enroll in another form of sex offender–specific treatment. Right away I could tell this one was going to be different. It was called cognitive-based treatment, and there we weren’t labeled as sex offenders but as individuals on the registry. Despite the fact that the therapy was held inside the same building that housed the Benton County probation and parole offices, it felt like much more than just an extension of supervision and surveillance. One of the main reasons it was held inside the probation and parole building, and why it took so long for me to be enrolled in court-ordered therapy in Oregon, was because the therapist was contracted from another county to facilitate this treatment. Benton County itself did not have a single state-licensed treatment provider, I was told.
It didn’t take long for me to feel that this treatment had real value. I actually looked forward to my group sessions after my initial individual intake. In one of our opening group sessions, we had to go around and say what our initial assumptions or opinions were of treatment in the first place. Had we undergone any sort of treatment or therapy prior to this? What had we actually thought about treatment before we’d been ordered to do it? Did we have any apprehensions or concerns?
When it was my turn, I told my therapist that I was apprehensive, both because sessions were taking place inside of the probation and parole building, and because I had learned she was a former juvenile probation officer. I also told her about an earlier group session with Brenda that I felt accurately summed up what my previous treatment experience had been like. It went something like this. . . .
A couple months before my parole was revoked in New Mexico and I was sent back to jail, I was doing a normal check-in with the group Brenda led. After I finished, she called me out in front of the whole group and said that they were going to circle back to me. She had some questions for me about lies she accused me of having told her. It was incredibly embarrassing. But I had seen her do this before to other members of the group—that is, call them out and shame them—so her behavior wasn’t exactly out of character. Still, I didn’t have any idea what she could be referring to.
When she circled back to me, she accused me of lying about my crime: that I had told her I was on parole for X, but I was really on parole for Y. She had met with my parole officer and he had told her I was on supervision for Y, an entirely different sex crime and set of circumstances than what I had told her.
I was shocked and upset. I could believe that my parole officer would be capable of something like this. What I couldn’t believe was that my therapist could be so blatantly obtuse. For one, she was in possession of my entire case file, including all the original police reports and official documentation for my crime. I knew this. She knew this. I told her that my parole officer was a liar and urged her to read the police report if she didn’t believe me.
She said she intended to and asked me if there was anything I’d like to confess before she did. I was trying my best to not get emotional; I shook my head. So then she read the report. Out loud, to the entire group. After about five minutes of mortifying recitation, she stopped and exhaled and said something exculpatory of him like, “While that’s not what your PO said at all. . . .” I remember feeling vindicated and saying, “Right, because he is a liar.”
The only people who expressed any sort of reasonableness about this were my fellow group members. They said they knew how awful my parole officer was. But I didn’t receive an apology from Brenda for her mistake; she didn’t offer to clear this up with my parole officer, let alone offer to speak with his supervisor about how incredibly unprofessional it was that he didn’t even know the details of his own cases. Not to mention actively spreading lies about people to other professionals.
No. She proceeded as if this was just another day in therapy.
I told that story to my cognitive therapist in Benton County, and she said that shame-based therapies were very popular at one time but quickly fell out of favor because of how ineffective they are. She assured us that her therapy was not shame-based and that she was surprised to hear that the method was still being implemented in some states. It was the first time I realized that there was a name for the type of treatment I had undergone in New Mexico.
As opposed to the therapy I underwent in New Mexico, I felt that cognitive-based therapy was far more effective. We learned actual thinking errors that connected us, sexual-based offenders, into a broader society. We weren’t treated exceptionally, meaning sex wasn’t dealt with so distinctly and removed from all the other elements of our humanity. All the components of leading a healthy lifestyle—emotional, mental, physical, spiritual, and, yes, sexual—were presented to us as intertwined and connected. I learned emotional regulation techniques and how being unbalanced emotionally is a path of destruction for me. My therapist also encouraged my writing and validated it as a way to be anti-authoritarian without harming anyone.
Our numbers bore out the effectiveness of this approach as well. Admittedly, we were a small sample size, but in the six months that I was in therapy, one of us went back to jail on a so-called technical violation, and two of us graduated. One of the members who graduated this time was me. In December 2023 I graduated treatment, and in March 2024 I had my supervision discharged for fulfilling all my court-ordered obligations.
I am deeply grateful for cognitive-based therapy because it grounded me. It gave me an experience and a space to be open and honest and to change my thinking. Coupled with the alcohol and drug treatment I was also voluntarily undergoing, it helped me see myself as more than a sex offender. Instead of treatment that perpetrated a pariah status, cognitive-based treatment paved the way for me to see myself more clearly, as a person who has worth.
Image: Jr Korpa/Unsplash