Law Views Molesters as Criminals, but ‘Cure’ Still Sought

For 40 years, child molesters in California were treated as “sexual psychopaths,” but considered curable.

One of them was Theodore F. Frank, a model patient. Despite his extensive record of torture and sexual assault of children, Frank was pronounced cured and released in January, 1978.

Six weeks later, Frank raped and strangled 2-year-old Amy Sue Seitz of Camarillo after torturing her with pliers.

The system changed. For the past seven years, child molesters in California have been treated as criminals and sentenced to prison.

One of them was Warren James Bland, convicted under tough new laws designed to punish criminals while protecting society.

Despite his extensive record of torture and sexual assault of children, Bland served only 4 1/2 years. He was released in January, 1986.

Less than a year later, according to charges filed in Riverside Municipal Court, Bland raped and strangled 7-year-old Phoebe Ho of South Pasadena. Marks on her body indicate Phoebe may have been tortured with pliers.

Bland is also suspected of the subsequent murder of an 81-year-old San Diego woman and the rape and murder of 14-year-old Wendy Osborn of Placentia.

Despite the similarities of the Bland and Frank cases, authorities say that the legal system today protects society better than when child molesters were treated as mentally ill. However, attempts to find a successful method of treatment for sex offenders persist, and a state Department of Mental Health pilot program has recently sent its first experimental patients back into society.

Frank’s case, authorities say, was the epitome of what often went wrong with the old approach.

But Bland’s case, they say, is an exception to the new system, and resulted from a plea bargain prosecutors agreed to erather than risk losing the case.

Since the Legislature increased prison terms in 1980 and abolished state hospital programs for the “mentally disordered sex offender” (MDSO) in 1981, prison sentences of up to 127 years have been imposed for child molesting.

As recently as 1979 only 57 child molesters were in California prisons. Today there are 2,535 in prison for lewd and lascivious acts against children under 14, and hundreds more for other sex offenses against children.

Yet in the midst of this tough, new approach, there remain efforts to find a successful psychological treatment to control sex offenders.

One such experimental program mandated by the Legislature is under way at Atascadero State Hospital in Atascadero, where both Frank and Bland were treated. The program is open to volunteers who agree both to treatment during the last two years of their prison sentences and to follow-up studies after their release.

The first two sex offenders to finish that new counseling and therapy program were released from custody in December.

“I think we have four (sex offenders) out now,” said psychologist Janice K. Marques, who helped design Atascadero’s Sex Offender Treatment and Evaluation Project. Two more were due to be released in February, she said.

“If it works as well as we think it will, we’ll be real pleased,” Marques said. “We want to find out how can we predict who will re-offend.”

The program is a more intensive, individualized approach than the MDSO program that preceded it, Marques said. It also takes a different tack.

“We’re not saying: ‘We’re going to change you, Mr. Sex Offender, and you’re never going to want to do it again,’ then leave them with the impression they’re cured,” Marques said. “We emphasized this is a lifelong project.”

Patients are told that even after leaving the hospital they may be aroused by “the idea of having sex with kids,” she said. But the program strives to help the molester “deal with what we call a ‘lapse,’ like wanting to buy a kiddie porn magazine. That’s a very dangerous sign.”

Under the MDSO program, Marques said, when a patient convinced the staff he was cured, he was released early. That created an incentive to tell therapists what they wanted to hear, a tactic used by Frank.

The new program provides no incentive for patients to lie because lying will not earn them early release, Marques said.

Whether that will provide better results remains to be seen.

“We’ve only just started,” Marques said. “There is not a lot of outcome data yet. . . . At least it’s well received among experts.”

Others give little credence to therapeutic approaches.

“Most people sense that child molesting is a disease, but it’s not,” said Irving Prager, the former Ventura County deputy district attorney who prosecuted Frank. “One of the frightening things we don’t like to face is that just like heterosexual, bisexual and homosexual, pedophile is a sexual orientation.

“You can’t change a person’s sexual orientation,” he said. “The sexual urge is so strong that eventually (he) will seek to satisfy it.”

Prager believes that research for a treatment should continue, with one condition: “We should not conduct the experiment with people out on the street.”

Since 1939, mental facilities such as Atascadero had treated sex offenders as “sick persons” rather than as criminals. In 1976, however, the state Supreme Court ruled patients were being unconstitutionally confined for indefinite periods.

As a result, the Legislature limited confinement to terms no longer than if the patients had been sentenced to prison. Consequently, sex offenders were released, cured or not.

MDSOs also were winning early release by convincing overworked and understaffed hospital authorities that they had been cured. In 1978 there were more than 1,000 MDSOs at Atascadero. The hospital staff had only three psychiatrists and two psychologists.

By contrast, the current experimental treatment program involves only 46 sex offenders and one psychiatrist assisted by a staff of 42 psychologists, social workers, therapists, nurses and psychiatric technicians.

Following several brutal murders committed by released sex offenders in the late 1970s, public outrage resulted in a dramatic revamping of the law.

The MDSO classification was abolished. Mandatory prison sentences were imposed.

Also, the state began requiring molesters to provide blood and saliva samples upon release from prison to compare later with evidence obtained in child molestation cases. This enables authorities to almost positively rule out suspects and to determine “to a very high probability” whether a certain individual committed the crime, said a state Department of Justice official.

Extended Prison Time

In some cases involving multiple counts of molestation, judges are now required to add the sentences together to extend prison time served. Additional prison time can be added for a variety of aggravating circumstances, such as the infliction of substantial physical harm, the use of a weapon and for prior convictions.

“We’ve got a sentence of 127 years (for) a guy in Ventura who will never see the outside,” said state Sen. H. L. Richardson (R-Arcadia), author of the sentencing reform bill.

Meanwhile, prosecutors became increasingly sophisticated in handling such cases. Specially trained prosecutors are better able to deal with the trauma suffered by child molestation victims.

“These cases are among the best prosecuted,” said Steven White, head of the state Department of Justice’s criminal division. “There used to be a much lower conviction rate. It used to be below the general conviction rate.”

How then can the case of Warren James Bland be explained?

Bland had an extensive record of rape and child molestation and had spent 16 years in prison or mental hospitals when he was convicted in 1981 for oral copulation and a lewd act on an 11-year-old boy, whom he also tortured with pliers. Bland was sentenced to nine years in prison.

While behind bars, Bland reduced his sentence with good behavior and prison work and was paroled on Jan. 20, 1986, to Alhambra.

He could have been sentenced to 37 years, but lawyers familiar with the case recall that the prosecution was weakened by possible challenges to the boy’s testimony. The reason: appellate courts were beginning to rule that the testimony of hypnotized witnesses was inadmissible, and the district attorney on the case chose to plea bargain rather than risk a reversal on appeal.

The 11-year-old victim had been hypnotized by a police hypnotist before Bland was arrested. State law now prohibits the testimony of hypnotized witnesses.

‘A Good Deal’

“It was a crap shoot,” recalled Bland’s defense attorney Frank DiSabatino. “I think it was a good deal for everybody all the way around. They got their guy off the streets, and my guy didn’t do a lot of time.”

Complained Richardson:

“There’s no way in the world you are going to get around judges and prosecutors who don’t optimize their sentencing. If this guy had imposed upon him the sentencing capable of being imposed on him, he would still be in the slammer . . . “

According to prosecutors, Bland’s case points up a shortcoming in current law.

“As a practical matter in California, a 10-year sentence means a person will be out in five years,” said David L. Himelson of the Orange County district attorney’s child abuse and sexual assault unit. “Nobody can take that away, unless (the inmate) is bad enough to have his good time credits taken away.”

White, of the attorney general’s office, feels that some sentences are inadequate.

“They are probably adequate for the offenders getting the 30-, 60- 90-year sentences,” White said. “But for the unusual case, where the first-time violent sex offender (is sentenced to) about six years for the sex offense itself and three years for enhancement, half-time is just 4 1/2 years and that is not adequate.”

Legislation permitting inmates to effectively halve their sentences was largely the result of prison overcrowding, White said, adding that inmates were expected to reduce their sentences by “doing something right” while behind bars.

But the system developed differently, he said, and now “you have to screw up” to lose good-time credits.

Do Well in Institutions

Researchers have found that child molesters “tend to do very well in institutional settings,” White said. Therefore, staying out of trouble in prison is not necessarily an indication a molester will obey the law once returned to society in proximity to children, he said.

Once child molesters are released, they remain on parole for at least a year. They also have a lifetime requirement to register with local police as sex offenders.

“Parole is the only time you have a handle on any of these guys,” White said. After that some of them move without re-registering, he added.

Although molesters run the risk of being returned to prison for failing to register, “the chances they will be caught and punished are relatively slim,” White said.

Richardson, who was outraged to learn that Bland had been released after serving only 4 1/2 years, said the lengthy sentences provided by his legislation are the only guarantee of protection.

“The option is taking a chance and putting them (child molesters) back into the community again,” he said. “But you are taking a chance with another young child.”

Prager concurred.

“How do you turn a pedophile into a non-pedophile?” Prager asked. “The answer is nobody knows how to do that. The real solution is simply separation.

“Let’s say a man molests only 10 kids a year. During the year you keep in him prison, there are 10 children who won’t be molested.”