POV

Knock on door

-Hey, Gary? -Hey, what? -Hey, was that your friends on the bikes a little while ago? -Yeah. -Hey, listen, if they don't like sex offenders, they don't need to come in our park. I don't need them badmouthing us, talking about pedophiles. All right? I don't need that. If they can't be respectful, they don't need to come in the park. -All right, Bill. -All right, man. I grew up in a really brutal household. There was a lot of physical abuse, emotional abuse. On my 15th birthday, my father woke me up and kicked me out of the house, and that was the last time I've seen anybody in my family. I was 15 years old with a grocery bag full of clothes, and that was it. And I was thumbing down the highway, trying to figure out what to do next, and this guy picked me up. It didn't take him very long to figure out what was going on, and he gave me a place to stay and a job, you know, on the condition that I kept going to school. There was this girl, Susan, that I met, and we fell in love. And we got pregnant. Just kind of blew me away. I was still a kid, but now I'm gonna have a kid. It was amazing. I mean, up until that point, my biggest concern was putting gas in my car. You know, what was I gonna have for dinner. And now there's something depending on me. It was... it was an awakening. It really was. -So how are you all doing? You guys have been here for about, well, some of you for years, and some of you just got here. Let's start with you. You've been here a very short time. What do you think of this place? -I mean, I enjoy living here. I mean, the rent's not killing us or anything like that. -Was it an adjustment from prison? -Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it definitely took some adjustment just getting used to living outside and stuff like that. -How long do you think it takes to kind of decompress? -I've decompressed a lot, but I wouldn't say that I'm totally there yet, you know. -Okay, okay. -You know, I still got some quirks. -I've been out for six years, I'm still decompressing. -Really? -Yes, sir. -Wow. -That's why I like being here in the park. I'm fairly insulated, and I can still branch out and go do what I got to do, but, here, I'm kind of insulated. Everybody's been through what I've been through, so, you know, there's that understanding. You know, people can talk and stop on the street, instead of just saying "hi," they stop and talk about what they're going through. -Yeah. I've been able to open up more here 'cause I've never had that opportunity before. So that's actually a very good thing for me. -The strength is when the camaraderie, and, you know, that's what makes this place work. I'm only here a couple hours a week. It's you guys being there for each other that makes the difference. -I easily get bored. That's one of the big problems for me, if I start to get bored, I start looking for some trouble to get into. Idle hands, tools of the devil. An average day, I would go to work for six, seven hours. I would come home, I would either play computer games or surf the Internet or look at pornography until I feel asleep. That was my life. I was choosing unhealthy things, specifically the pornography, to spend time with. Between the first time I had sex and the time I got arrested, any girlfriend that I had, it was always me trying to push them towards sex. I had convinced myself in my head that, you know, everybody else is having sex. When I finally had a girl that I was interested in, she rejected me. Um... So I got really angry that night. I didn't have anything else to do, and I... I borrowed a car from family that was there... and drove all the way to Mexico. I drove around for maybe two or three hours looking for the red-light district. I couldn't find a prostitute. I'd just get angrier and angrier and angrier. Finally... I found this little girl. And she was walking with her cousin, and I grabbed her, and I threw her into the car, and I drove off. They were closer to his house, and the little cousin ran over to the house. And... And his uncle or whoever it was, they hop in a car, and they start chasing me all over Kingdom Come. Finally, I'm able to lose them. Um... And... Um... That's when I did my -- I did those -- I raped her. -Florida Justice Transitions is a program designed to transition felons or at-risk populations in general back into society so that they may become productive citizens. All of the staff here are sex offenders that have been through the program themselves, and they want to give back. I was convicted of solicitation via the Internet, and I came here out of prison because I needed a place to live and I didn't have anybody. I didn't know what my family thought at that time. I wasn't speaking to them. I got quite involved immediately, and took it over from Nancy due to her health failing. And so she asked me if would help, and I came in and helped for a while. And then I took it over from her. A typical resident, when they come into our program, they generally stay for the life of their probation. And the counseling provided by Don Sweeney is essentially a two-year program. A sex offender in the state of Florida is an individual who committed a sex crime, which is a very large list of things that could qualify somebody to be actually labeled as a registered sex offender. The typical reaction of a normal citizen is, "Well, we don't care. You know, they committed the crime, so we don't care if they die." -I spend nine hours a day working at a back-breaking job for $9 an hour. But those are the people that are gonna hire you, the guys who need the help in a high-turnover job and are gonna pay very little money for... -Yeah. -...the effort. -Well, what do you do to change it? -The change is unlikely. You're just gonna have to do what you did in prison and do what you got to do to survive on a day-to-day basis. That's all you can do. -I disagree. I think you have to take it outside yourself and look at the bigger picture. Nobody's gonna stand up and fight for us. That's why we've got to do something about it now. I was convicted of attempted capital sexual battery, and I spent a total of 12 years incarcerated. I'm in maintenance and security here, so I get up every morning, and I go to the office to see if there's any maintenance issues that popped up over night. If there are, I'll handle them. If they're not, then I go back to rebuilding the trailers. There's a lot of people out in the world that don't think very rationally about how to handle us, so you get a lot of vigilantes, you get a lot of people that want to come in here, starting trouble, or they're a little drunk, so they want to come in here and start trouble with the baby rapers, as they call us. And so it's my job to make sure that our residents are safe. 9:15. I have to write down my time, my mileage, everywhere I'm going. I have a little green dot on the computer that will tell them where I am any time, but I still have to write all this down. It's silly. Sorry about Waldo, Lloyd. -Yeah, well... -This is gonna sound like a really stupid question. What the hell is that? -That was in my dryer when I went to put my clothes in. It's a sack of rats. -Somebody left it there? -It was just sitting in my dryer. I thought it might be a little bag of socks or something. -I grew up in an extremely abusive home. When I was six years old, there was a babysitter that used to fondle me, my brother, do things to us sexually. She would threaten that if I didn't do what she wanted me to do, then she would tell my parents that I didn't behave, and then I knew I was gonna get a beating. So I got a choice between feeling good or feeling pain. So I would always choose to feel good. She would get us naked, she would do things to us with her panties. She would masturbate us, she would rub her vagina on our faces. That kind of thing. And we didn't tell our parents a whole lot of anything. We were more scared of our parents. This same babysitter, she had brought this doll over, it was a stuffed doll -- life-sized to us at the time. And she cut a hole in the thing where the vagina should be. And showed my brother how to have intercourse with this doll. Well, my mother walked in and saw my brother doing this one day, and she ended up putting Tabasco sauce on my brother's penis and then making him go sit out on the curb. And, I mean, to this day, I can remember that kid howling 'cause he was in so much pain. I mean, she put Tabasco sauce on his penis. She didn't ask him, "Where did you learn that?" She just punished him. So, no, we didn't talk about it. Well, I was raised outside of Chicago. That's where I met Susan. I was actually 16 and she was 15 when we got pregnant. I didn't know what to do, so I joined the Navy. You know, I can do 20 years in the Navy and retire and learn a trade, whatever, but at least that way, the family would be taken care of. So I did that. Then we got married and had the baby. It was the most joyous and happiest time of my life. I mean, there's a baby. This is a piece of me, we did this. This is -- It was so cool. It was really cool. Um...about a year after he was born, we went to Chicago for Christmas. And we were driving down Highway 10, I think it was, and my car broke down.

It was 2

00 in the morning. Got a one-year-old son and my wife in the car. So I was gonna go get some help rather than carry the baby around. And when I came back from getting some help -- because, of course, back then, there was no cellphones or anything -- and when I came back from... making a phone call, there was a tractor trailer sitting on top of my Volkswagen. And... They were killed. Sorry. They were killed by a drunk driver. The guy was sleeping with a bottle of Jack Daniel's in his lap.

Chuckles

It was 2

They fined him $500 and took away his license for six months. I went on a 20-year spin-off. I just... tried to kill myself for 20 years. I did everything I could extreme. I got into drugs, I got into partying... everything dangerous that I could do. And I just stopped really caring. -All right, everybody. You guys ready? What would you like to talk about today? -I feel I'm set up for failure every day. -Yeah? -I got a probation officer telling my job, "Why did you hire a sex offender?" -I was hired back in 1983 to treat the victims of sexual abuse. What was going on was, once the system came in and started breaking up the family and arresting the perpetrator, the kids realized that the family wasn't gonna get any help, then they would recant. Recant means they would say, "Oh, I made it up." Then, they'd release the offender from jail, and the civil child-protection authorities would move in and take the kid and put the child in foster care, the victim. My job was to make sure the kids didn't recant. I found out by just listening to them that if I was willing to talk to their offenders and try to help them somehow, they wouldn't recant. And my only obligation was to go to the jail and visit the offender and try to help them get some treatment. But there was no treatment. So that forced me to start counseling for the men. All right. You take care of yourself. -All right, buddy. I'll see you. -Bye-bye now. -Is that what that is? -That's what this is. -My dad said, "You're gonna help me clean my room." And I said, "Okay." You know, like, "I get to go with Daddy!" And my little sister, she's four years younger than me, she was still a baby in a little play pen. So we went down the hall and went to the bedroom, and he locked the door. -We have that one, too. -And he said, "You know that you're daddy's girl and I love you, and I just want to share this with you." I know there were other men my mom dated that did things to us as well. But the only two men that I remember is my dad and Glen. One day, Glen had raped me, you know, because I was already damaged goods, so it wouldn't matter if one more man did. And... I remember laying there, crying, and he slapped me and told me that if he wanted everyone to know what he was doing to me, he would take... this ho and put me in the street. And I shut up. I didn't say anything else. But after that... it caused my body -- It's all I can tell you is it caused my body to want those same feelings. And I didn't know how to make myself feel those feeling except for to act the same thing on someone else. So I did, with my cousins. And my aunt tore off a tree branch and whipped me and whipped me and whipped me and told me that I was going to Hell. That was my second-grade year, 'cause they took us away that year. -Like you, they don't have a whole lot of eloquent words or speeches, but sometimes we have a wake-up call in our life. And we read this, it's really wild. -And I went to five different homes between second grade and fifth grade. I started craving sex all the time, with anybody. It got to the point to where... it didn't matter who you were. And when I was 11, I was sleeping with this 16-year-old boy. I didn't have a menstrual, so they took me to the thing. They told me that... they'd have to give me some medicine to help me sleep to give me an exam. When I woke up, I was bleeding again, so I was like, "Oh, okay, you know." I'm 11 years old, I don't know. They told me that I had just been sick and everything, and I was fine now. I still slept around, still did everything, but it did come back, they told me that all of my insides were messed up from being messed with when I was little. That I would never carry a child. That day, they had gave me an abortion, and I didn't know.

Indistinct conversations

Laughs

It was 2

-Electronic monitoring is a device that the offender carries on their waist or in their pockets that reports to a satellite. And their probation officer can see at any time of the day or night where they are. It does pinpoint to within three feet of where they are. All sex offenders have to go report to the sex offender registry, and it tells the sheriff's department where they live, where they work, what car they're driving, what e-mail address they have, and if they're going to school, what school they're going to. And they have to do that a minimum of twice a year every single year. Anybody that lives in the community can go to the sheriff's department website and see who's living next door to them. They also have applications on cellphones now, and people have it. It's called Offender Locator, right here. And if you press on it, it will ask you, "Use current location?" And then it searches. And there you go. It brings up anybody within a radius of where we're currently at. And it reports their names. It gives their picture. It shows any aliases. It gives their current address. It gives their crime -- what crime they committed. The date of the crime. Gender, date of birth, height, weight, hair color, and eye color. -I was arrested in one of those Internet stings. I replied to a Craigslist ad for sex for a 30-year-old woman. -30? -30 was the age in the ad. -And you were 22 at the time? -Yes. I had responded to several ads that night. That was the only one that replied back to me. We started talking. She said she wanted to include her 14-year-old daughter. -You mean bring her along or -- -Well, I was going to their place, so, like, she wanted me to have sex with the daughter, and I was saying stuff, what I would like to do with the mother. And she -- they keep pushing. And it's -- in hindsight, it's so obvious, their tactics -- they're so childish, but I was caught up in it. All that shows up in the police report is the one thing she got me to say about the daughter, she pressured me into saying that, and I still showed up. And it was a sting, got arrested. -You know, you're very smart. You got a masters degree. So this is about kind of an emotional immaturity that you got suckered into something. Do you look at it as, like, an addiction piece or...? -I would just kind of look for attention with -- I'd just talk to people online, usually just chit-chatty stuff, talk about food. Just attention. And that night, I wanted attention and... -There are a lot of young kids that got sucked into the Internet sex law-enforcement stings, which are increasing in frequency. That's pure entrapment. They're not child molesters. They're not. That's what they're being labeled. That's a testament to how desperate they are to keep the sex offender machine going. So now they're manufacturing them. They'll spend money on the prison system, which is the moneymaker for politicians and governments now. You can take out stock on Wall Street in prisons in Florida. -Prison was awful. The food is horrendous. They -- The guards treat you horribly. But I made some friends in there. My mother wrote me every single day. My girlfriend wrote me multiple times a week. My friends, my professors, my father. So I got a lot of mail. So I... I was fortunate. June 26th was my sentencing hearing. The state attorney, who was supposed to be against me, didn't have anything to say. He said, "Whatever you want to do, Judge." You could tell he didn't really want to send me away, but he's got a job to do. So the judge took it on himself. And when it came down to sentencing, he gave me one year, one day in prison, three years probation. So unlike most people, he actually gave me less than the cap. So then they sent me seven hours north to a prison camp away from my family. -I met Richard. That was in August. October 1st, I found out I was pregnant. Wasn't supposed to get pregnant. So I didn't do anything to keep from getting pregnant. My grandma told me I couldn't live with her. My grandmother and my aunts, 'cause they're from, you know, that time of life where you have to be married to have a baby. So I went and told Richard that we were having a baby, we have to get married. I married him November 13, I left him December 6 of the same year. He tried to run me over with the car, he blew a rod through my motor, and got me kicked out of my trailer all in the same night. I was, what, three, four months pregnant, had nothing. And the next year, I wound up marrying Steve. Dustin was born in May of '94. I can't remember what his first words were. I really can't remember when he first took his first steps. I was drinking, and secretly drinking, and that's the worst kind, because you're always trying to hide everything and trying to be so perfect that you don't want anybody to know. When Dustin was two years old, I'd started talking and seeing my daddy again. And had started sleeping with my dad again. And then... I was talking to guys and stuff online and was going to those naturalist and nudist websites, and I had met this guy. We'd been talking for, like, two or three months. And he knew my story about my dad. He knew that I was sleeping with my dad. And he had talked to Dustin a couple of times. Dustin was eight. And didn't think nothing of it. And then one time... it had gotten really bad with me and my dad, and I had told my dad that I couldn't do it any more. And I was crying to Dominic, was the guy, then on the computer. And Dominic told me, he said, "Well, Tracy," he said, "there's one thing we can do." And he said, "I'll take care of you. I'll take care of Dustin." He said, "I'll send you the money," you know. He said, "I'll Western Union you. I have money to get here." He said, "All you have to do..." He said, "All you have to do is ask Dustin if he'll have sex with you and let me watch. And it will be okay if he says yes." And I kept thinking... how much I loved Dustin and how much I knew he loved me. And I was like, "I can't do that." And I kept drinking. And he kept talking, and he kept telling me, "I'll take care of you, You'll be okay. You'll be away from him. He won't do it again. It'll never happen again." So one night, I was sitting there, and Dustin was sitting there. And I took him, and I said, "Dustin," I said, "I love you." And he said, "I know, Mama." I've never, ever, ever told this to, like, to nobody.

Sobs

It was 2

He was my baby. He was my baby. And I took that trust... that he had in me. -I came from a household where I never really learned how to care, and then... once I finally cared about something, it just got snatched away from me. So I figured the thing to do was just stop giving a

bleep

It was 2

And then I met a woman, Stephanie, and she had a daughter when I met her. That was -- I should have never gotten married. We should -- But, you know, you think you're doing the right thing. Because of the experience with the babysitter, I developed this, I don't know if you want to call it a fetish with women's panties. And when this first started, it was my mother's panties. And my father would find out, and I would get beat up. And I really was ashamed. It was this horrible, dirty thing. Matter of fact, I once let my girl, Stephanie, think I was cheating on her rather than tell her the truth because she found a pair of panties in the bed. And one day, the daughter was having a sleep-over, and all the wives were out partying.

About 2

00 in the morning, I was in my bedroom, smoking a joint, watching pornography, and masturbating. And all of a sudden, this little girl walked into my room to get a glass of water. The next day, talked to her mother about it, told her what had happened. They said that I touched their daughter despite the fact that the daughter said I never did. So I got five years of probation for that. About four and a half years into that probation, I got a dirty urine for smoking pot, and that was all they needed to send me to prison. And then right around the same time, when I went to prison, my girlfriend was at work, and her 12-year-old daughter came into my bedroom and said, "Look, Billy, I can wear my mommy's panties." And that kind of threw me over the edge, and I started masturbating in front of her, and that was my second conviction. I was definitely guilty there. She's a 12-year-old girl. She didn't need to be exposed to that. I'm the adult. I'm supposed to take control of that situation and not abuse it. -Well, my name is Will. I was convicted of two counts of lewd and lascivious molestation, one against an eight-year-old, and one against a 13-year-old. They were completely different in terms of approach, but what it really boiled down to was it was a couple of crimes of opportunity. The first was someone I knew. We were roughhousing a little bit, but in my mind, he could say yes. -Children do want to play, and roughhousing's okay and wrestling. They're not thinking along sexual lines, so they're just innocently going along with it, you know. And if they like you, right? -Yeah, I don't know your crime or you all that well, but I think it would be really interesting a year from now to ask you that same question and see if you still think it was a crime of opportunity. There was a lot of set-up that I wasn't aware of. There was a lot of fantasy that I wasn't aware of. -Mm-hmm. -I swore to God it was a crime of opportunity. It presented itself, and I capitalized. And I found out through a lot of therapy and a lot of talking to friends and a lot of thinking that I set it all up without even knowing it. And there's the things they call SUDs -- seemingly unimportant decisions -- things we make, "Why did I go this way to work today," whatever it is. And, I mean, I didn't know it. It took years and years for me to figure it out. But a year from now, I'd be really interested to see how you answer that same question. -What about relationships? Were you in a healthy adult relationship at the time? -I was in an extraordinarily unhealthy relationship. -So that was a piece of the puzzle as well. -Yeah. Well, first of all, it was with a female, which was a mistake right from the bat. But -- because I'm not -- I'm not heterosexual. -So you were trying to be something you weren't. -Yes. -So it was a way for you to break out and accept who you were. -Right. -Yeah, it's not an excuse, I agree. -No, no, not at all. -But it is part of the puzzle. -But you have to -- you have to look at the causes, because if you don't identify causes, you can't address them, and... -Now that you've taken care of that problem, 'cause you're brutally honest about it, and you've come full circle and accepted who you are and you're not afraid of the subject matter any more. -No. -That's half the battle right there. -The state of Florida has this program called the Jimmy Ryce Center. And it's where they send sex offenders after their prison sentence until they determine that they're not probably gonna go commit more crimes. They send you to Jimmy Ryce for what they call long-term control, care, and treatment. They have this machine called a PPG. And, basically, what it is is a wire with a meter, some sort of a sensor attached to your penis. And then that's hooked to a computer, and they show you pornographic images somewhere akin to your crimes. And the idea is to measure your penis growth, you know, through arousal. Another one they would use would be taste. You'd have to taste something horrible. Or even, sometimes, pain. They'd take a thumbtack and stick it in your thumb or a rubber band and snap it on your wrist or something like that. And the idea is to try to separate sexual arousal with deviant behaviors. I spent eight and a half years there. I've always told people that there wasn't a single day that I wanted to be there, but I was there. There was nothing I could do about it. And I figured, you know, despite the fact that I was already 40, it was time for me to grow up. -Dustin was still eight, and we had enrolled him in the YMCA. One day, I went to go pick him up, and they told me, "We can't let you have Dustin. He's not here." I said, "What do you mean, I can't have him? Where's he at?" And the woman pulled me in the room, and she told me what he had said. Him and a bunch of little boys were all talking, and they were talking about sex, like 9-, 10-year-old boys do. And... He had said he had had sex before. And they said, "No, you haven't." And he said, yeah, he had. He had had sex with his mom. And they got the counselors and everything, and they took him. And... They took him to, like... Like a group home, juvenile place. And they let me go see him with supervision and stuff. And... one thing that I hated about my father is 'cause he would never tell me he was sorry or that I was right and that he was wrong for what he did. And I didn't want to do that to Dustin. So one of the first things I did when I seen him is I gave him a hug and I told him that I wasn't mad. I was actually... I was glad it was over. I didn't have -- I could... breathe. If I can -- I don't know if I can say that, but it was like... everything that I was running -- and I didn't even know that I was running from -- was over. You know, he was safe now, and it was over. And I called -- they called -- The court people called Steve. And the last day I seen him, they let me take him out to the little park where they had... And... they had these swings, and he was sitting on my lap, and I told him. I said, "Dustin, I love you so much." And I said, "I'm so sorry for hurting you. And for doing everything." I said, "Not just for that, but for everything, from putting you through everything that I've done to you -- the places, the people -- everything." And I said, "I'm not mad at you. You did right. You did what you should have done, and I'm proud of you." And those were the last words I got to say to him. And they just left. I was supposed to see him the next morning. I didn't know those were gonna be my last words. But I wanted him to know, because my whole life, I wanted my dad to tell me that. My whole life, I waited for that, or for my mom to tell me she was sorry, that she loved me. And I wasn't gonna make him go through that same thing. I turned myself in, went in, signed the paperwork. I said, "Whatever my son said I did, print it out, I'll sign it." The only thing I asked was if they would please put a stipulation to where I could have contact with my son. -There's no healing in this business. Once you convict the offender and send him off to prison, the system disappears for the victim and the family. There's no help. So nobody's really working on what happened or what people think. I don't want to demonize the victim business. It's almost like a religion in this country, but there's something wrong with it. They only perceive women as victims. They refuse to accept that men are victims. They don't even want to go near the fact that the sex offenders are victims. -You don't want to go with us both? -No. Offenders will continue to act out until they are stopped and they understand their behavior. So if you look at it mathematically, treating one offender might prevent 10 more victims from being created. They have to really be retrained and change the way they live and think about their own histories and their own dysfunctional families and their own addiction issues so they can go out and make some real changes in their own communities. I see it a little more of a sociological issue than law enforcement, which is more of a containment issue. All we want to do is punish, castrate them, and make their lives miserable. And, you know, a lot of people would say they deserve it -- and maybe they do. But I'm a counselor. I believe in doing what is gonna help, not hurt. I drove down to Mexico and raped a five-year-old girl. I was having... relationship issues at the time. And I... went down there looking for a prostitute. And when I didn't find that, um... my thinking led me to just start looking for any female I could find. -Was it kind of revenge against your partner, who had broken your heart and let you down? -It was probably revenge against all women at that time. -All women? Okay, so there is an anger component to it. -Oh, yes, it was. -You believe it's something that was escalating? -Yes, absolutely, I do. -Did you ever try to, like, tell your parents or talk to your best friend? -I was afraid -- scared

bleep

About 2

Afraid to even talk about it with them because, like someone else has mentioned, you know, I wasn't sure if just voicing these thoughts and stuff was gonna get me locked up. -It is an issue. People that get in situations just don't know where to turn. That is an issue. -Right. -I agree with that. -And within nine months of my previous release, I also started to view child pornography. -Mm-hmm. -Both with rape pornography and child pornography. -So this wasn't like exactly a new theme for you? -No, it wasn't. -It was something that was always ongoing. -Yes, it has always been something in the pornography that I'd watch. I know that some fantasies that I've had... violence against women have been a real big thing about it. And one of the things -- one of the things for me is sharing that. I do that with a very select group of people because some of it can be quite disturbing to other people, and I'd have to feel comfortable that they're not gonna... um... That it's not gonna change their opinion of me. People like me -- and I mean the violent people like me -- there should be some labeling on us. There needs to be, for my tier, which I would say is one of the higher tiers of sex offenders, there needs to be some labeling so the police, so some people maybe in their community know. Not to punish them, not to bring them down, but for a way to help them make sure they don't re-offend. I would like to be a professor at a university, teaching film studies and publishing articles and books. I've got to get my PhD. The professor thing is still possible. It's just gonna be harder now. The school administrations might not want me, so I've just got to make my work that much better and try to sell myself. I like to think of myself as this, like, angry leftist punk guy, but like, I don't know. I try to be loving to the people close to me. I try to do right by them. I guess I'm a brutal feminist. It's a bizarre thing, especially in America because it's still seen as negative or seen as this radical thing where you think women are better than men. And all feminism means is you believe men and women are equal. As a felon, I can't vote, and I don't really care. There's not gonna be a politician that is gonna agree with my views anyway, so it's not a huge deal. I'm always gonna be the loser. Sometimes it still feels like I wake up and I'm like, "Is this real? Is this a dream?" Like, it sounds like a clich, but I've had days where I was like, "Oh, this can't possibly be real." And it is. And I have to deal with all these restrictions. But then I think of other people who got off a lot worse than I do, and I can't help but feel a little fortunate, because no one got as light a sentence on my charges as I did. Everyone's getting, I think, between 4 and 12 years, and I got one. But I have to register as a sex offender for the rest of my life. -I was sentenced to 11 years in prison for lewd and lascivious sexual battery on my eight-year-old son. And a lot of circumstances around it. But... I was talking to a gentleman on the Internet, and he kept telling me that if I asked Dustin for permission, that it would be okay. And somewhere in my twisted way of thinking and... -Did your dad ask you permission or pretend to give you control? -I was Daddy's little girl. -Mm-hmm. -And that was his way of showing me that he loved me. -And that's how he groomed you? -Mm-hmm. -And he got you to, you know, respond, "Sure, Daddy." -So... -So that's why you would believe that. -Yeah. -You were groomed the same way. -Right. But it created my son to offend when he was 13. On a three-year-old little boy. And he got sentenced to a year in juvie. And now he's in prison for... armed robbery, all behind trickle effects. He never got therapy. I didn't get therapy. My father never got therapy. -It's a cycle of dysfunctional, almost addictive behavior passed down. It was a family trait, and everybody in the family is affected by it. -Mm-hmm. -Do you feel that, you know, the powers that be, the gods of the universe are trying to help you sort all this out, or do you still feel yourself as a victim being punished? -No, I don't see myself as a victim. It's like the other day, a guy made a comment in class about, you know, sex offender being monsters. And not everyone is. And I don't bel-- And I don't believe that sex offender are monsters. -Have you met any monsters in the Palace? -No, just me. Anybody that can take something -- in my mind, this is how I feel. I took away the most innocent thing out of my son and created and taught him things that he should have never known. I think that if I would have been able to have had someone allow me to speak what I really wanted to or, you know, help me learn that that's not the way it's supposed to be... or -- you know what, I can't even -- I can't... Just to be able to get help with it to where it doesn't wind up being everything that you see and then you don't know the difference anymore, and that's your life. And that's the only avenue that you know, so that's what you do. Not everybody goes that route. But that's the part that I held onto because that was my dad, and my dad loved me. So since my dad loved me, then it was okay. But my son wrote my probation officer and asked to have contact with me, that he had forgiven me. And that he would like to rebuild his relationship with me. So I'm working on that now, on a motion for that. Um... I'm in college. And just got my first 4.0 ever. Ever! And... It's not as bad as it was. -I made some changes in my life, I made some changes in my thinking, you know, how I respond to the world, how I react to the world. I had one counselor that took me in her office for six months, and we would sit down for an hour and a half so she could teach me how to cry, 'cause I couldn't cry. You know, my parents beat all that out of me. There was no crying. That made it worse. I didn't even cry when my son was killed. But I've learned how to do that. I've learned how to interact with people. You know, I appreciate being able to socialize. I believe this is Mr. Pack. Right out here is Haines Road, and I sit on my porch in the morning, and I have my cup of coffee. It's nice and quiet. And one day, I guess about six months ago, this gentleman came flying up in his truck, pointed a gun at me, telling me that if I stalked his daughters, he was going to kill me. And I'm... I don't know who this man is, I don't know who his daughters are, I don't know what he's talking about, so I asked him. He thought I was stalking his daughters 'cause they walk down this road to go to school. And, honestly, I never even noticed them. There's a lot of people that walk up and down the street. I don't pay attention to them, especially in the morning. In the morning, I'm thinking about what my day's gonna be. And, you know, when I talked to him, we actually sat down, we had a cup of coffee together. He turned out to be a nice guy. And once he saw that I wasn't this monster that he thought I was, he's actually been back to the house a couple of times and had a beer and we had dinner one night. -No street light and no city lights. We always bitch about the system. Probation this, this, this. Get mad at society. Society doesn't -- They don't know any better. They don't get any other story because most of us, we don't want to go and talk about this. You know, we did this bad thing, and we still have this bad self-image. Most of us got a low self-esteem issue that pretty much led to what we were doing in the first place. They're not gonna hear anything unless we tell it. We have to humanize ourselves, 'cause we're not human beings to them, we're a title, we're a monster, we're a bogeyman -- whatever it is. There's 120 people living in this park. That's 120 ambassadors that every day have an opportunity to open somebody's eyes. Every day. The only way that's gonna happen is you've got to go out and let people see that you're a human being. -There's only two things that we can do in life when things go wrong. We're either part of the problem or a part of the solution. Hello. -Hi, Nancy. -You got a minute for an old friend? -Sure. Come on in. -My own son was arrested. You don't believe it's gonna ever happen in your family. And I took, I guess, my anxiety and tried to replace it with another energy, and thus was born the Florida Justice. It's 20 years ago, so much time has passed. And everything's kind of moved on except for one thing -- that stigma. I can only ask you, "Do you have a child?" -We have a son. -You think he's perfect? -Mm-hmm. -Sure. There's not a mother in the world that doesn't hold that little child and think, "Thank God." It's the most wonderful present in the whole world. But that child grows up, and that child does something bad. He makes a mistake. Just one. Never to be forgiven. -I got the curtains at Home Depot. -Whoo! -They'll come and burn you at the stake. -Get another beer. -Oh, yeah.

Indistinct conversations