The New Yorker:

The psychologist Kay Jackson worked with many incarcerated sex offenders. Fearing one patient’s impending homecoming, she agonized over whether to warn the police.

By Lawrence Wright

Jackson committed what some would call a betrayal of trust and others would call an act of heroism. Donald Chapman says, “I’ve served my time and now I should be left alone.”Photograph by Eileen Travell
On November 17, 1992, the elderly parents of Donald Arthur Chapman drove to Avenel, New Jersey, to bring their son home. Donald Chapman had been away since 1980, when he turned himself in to police and confessed to kidnapping and raping a young woman. Few of the Chapmans’ neighbors knew the details of his crime. There had been little publicity and no trial, and Chapman’s homecoming failed to stir much interest in the handsome, middle-class town of Wyckoff, where he had grown up and his parents still lived.

Avenel is twelve miles south of Newark on Route 1, past a go-go cocktail lounge and a XXX video store. Until recently, a billboard advertising the Hot Tub Club in the Post Road Inn (“Get Wet! $26.95”) marked the turnoff to the Adult Diagnostic and Treatment Center, one of the largest facilities in the world devoted exclusively to the treatment of sex offenders. It is set beside the towering walls of the old Rahway (now East Jersey) state prison, which was built at the turn of the century. The Avenel center, which opened in 1976, looks like many maximum-security prisons constructed in the last several decades: it is smaller and lower-slung than the Big Houses of the past, and has bunkerlike window slits and high chain-link fences topped with coils of razor wire. Inside, however, there is a culture radically different from the one at Rahway. From the beginning, the philosophy behind Avenel was that it would be run by therapists, not by corrections officials. The old way of thinking, at Rahway, was that most sex offenders were untreatable psychopaths. The offenders were often given indeterminate sentences, so that they could be locked away for as long as they were considered dangerous, which could be their entire lives. The new way of thinking, at Avenel, was that compulsive, repetitive sex offenders were different from other kinds of criminals, and that their behavior could be controlled by the use of therapeutic techniques similar to those used in the treatment of alcoholics and drug addicts. 

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