California Cripples Women's Children's and Family Rights
October 25, 2007|
California Cripples Women’s Children’s and Family Rights
“Science Based” Law Reform 1923 - 2000
The Kinsey Reports: 1948 to Today
A Work in Progress:
J.A. Reisman, Ph.D.
&
RSVP America
L.L. Jeffrey, Ed.d
Principal Investigator
2002
www.rsvpamerica.org & www.drjudithreisman.org
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California Cripples Women’s, Children’s & Family Rights
A Preliminary Historical Overview of The Penal Code
All obstructions to the execution of the laws…serve…to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a…small but artful and enterprising minority of the community…rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plan as digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.
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[I]n the course of time and things….cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.
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[R]esist with care the spirit of innovation….which will…undermine what cannot be directly overthrown. In all the changes to which you may be invited, remember that time and habit are at least as necessary to fix the true character of governments … [C]hanges [based upon] mere hypothesis and opinion, expose to [society] perpetual change, from the endless variety of hypothesis and opinion…[1]
Excerpt from George Washington’s “Farewell Address,” September 17, 1796
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Kinsey: Crimes & Consequences (JA Reisman) provides an overview of the development of the American Law Institute’s (ALI) Model Penal Code (MPC) at the national level. In January 2001, under the direction of researcher Dr. L. Jeffrey, RSVPAmerica, began to examine in greater depth the history of the ALI Model Penal Code (hereafter cited as the ALI/MPC) and its impact on state penal reform. The evidence of Kinsey’s role in deconstructing the rights of women, children and the family in state laws began to dramatically emerge.
Kinsey, who died in 1956, is praised by the North American Man-Boy Love Association, stating all pedophiles should “know Kinsey’s work and hold it dear…[for] implicit in Kinsey is the struggle we fight today."[2]
Reisman and Jeffrey confirm Kinsey’s work as the basis for weakened laws and cultural norms that have helped foster a sharp rise in sex crimes against children, noting that 58,200 abductions by non-family members were recorded by the FBI in 1999, most of which involved sexual victimization.
The research question was posed over 200 years ago by President George Washington.
That is, did “a…small but artful and enterprising minority of the [legal] community” usurp “for themselves the reins of government” by “obstructions to the execution of the laws”? Claiming the need for “innovation” and simple “restatement’ of the laws, did a group of “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” establish the ALI/MPC as a means of subverting the nation’s criminal and moral laws in order to undemocratically implant their own “hypotheses and opinion” as the law of the land?
The particular focus of RSVP is, at this time, the way in which the ALI/MPC reshaped the legal status of American women and children. The RSVP investigation has examined state laws, reform commission reports, bar review journals, and other primary source documents.
California’s history in relation to the ALI Model Penal Code is unique. A full decade was spent rewriting the California penal code to conform to the ALI model. Yet, the final ALI/MPC based product was rejected by the California State Legislature both in 1968 and again in 1973.
At the time of this writing it appears that in 1978 the ALI/MPC recommendations became one of the first official acts of Jerry Brown, the then newly elected California Governor.
Credit for California’s revolutionary penal change goes to a group of law professors headed by University of California, Berkeley law and criminology professor, Arthur Sherry. According to UCLA researcherW.L. Gordon, the California group were “law professors from the prestigious law schools who had either participated in the drafting of the MPC, or shared its outlook.”[3] Sherry claims that the California Governor and the legislature initiated the push for legal change. What he doesn’t mention is that the public sought tougher, not lighter penalties for crimes, especially sexual crimes against children.
Crime and crime control were important political issues receiving extensive public exposure, and the recently published Proposed Official Draft of the Model Penal Code was beginning to be recognized as a useful example of what could be accomplished by a comprehensive study of the whole body of the substantive criminal law.[4]
Sanford J. Fox, the sole draftsman for the New Hampshire Criminal Code cites other influences on California’s embrace of the ALI/MPC.
There is undoubtedly an element of ‘me-too-isim’ involved as well. The Model Penal Code and the enactment of new codes by several states during the recent past have exerted a strong influence to reevaluate a body of law which many have known to require revision…Of central historical importance is the background of the Model Penal Code. Several documents which demonstrate major ideational roots of the Code…make it clear that the thinking at Columbia and Chicago in the 1930’s played a decisive historical role.”[5]
ACLU founder and Kinsey attorney Morris Ernst revealed the political strategy was to quietly insert the Kinsey data to draft penal changes from New York to California. Writing in “Law” in the Saturday Review, (March 13, 1948) Ernst explains;
Rockefeller, Indiana University, and the Kinsey staff have made an outstanding contribution to….law which touches on marriage, the home, and personal behavior patterns related to sexual drives or suppression. The Kinsey contribution must eventually affect all our sexual legal folkways…. Are we ready for a national pattern?….Kinsey and his staff are wise enough not to hint, even, at any answers …[and use] no adjectives. Not a single passing comment should be made on the effect of the data on present laws, or the effect of the existence of the present laws on the data. Others must take on that chore. It’s time now for a staff of lawyers, with zeal and wisdom equal to the Kinsey group, to study the material…the Kinsey Research Magnificent.”[6]
“A Staff of Lawyers:” The Revision Committee
In 1963, the “staff of lawyers” entitled, the California Joint Legislative Committee for the Revision of the Penal Code was organized, including 10 men, divided equally from both houses of the legislature. The revision staff was made up of “a staff of lawyers, with zeal and wisdom” law school professors from UC Berkeley, University of Southern California and Stanford University. In addition there was an advisory board of two district attorneys, two criminal defense attorneys, two judges, Professor Arthur Sherry, and a representative from the Attorney General’s office.
As was the case with the national ALI/MPC draft, no active prosecutors participated in either the California revision staff or the advisory board. Each member of the staff was assigned individual research and drafting responsibilities. When their product of 18 months work was brought to the California board, the board’s response was unfavorable. Sherry, indignant for himself and his staff, wrote:
[I]ts product at first inspection struck most of the members of the Board, unfamiliar with the Model Penal Code or any other contemporary criminal law revision as a strange and baffling departure from all of the familiar landmarks of conventional law. The style of the Model Penal Code, its rigorously logical order and its general abandonment of common law terminology does pose difficulties for anyone whose entire educational and professional experience has been circumscribed by the eighteenth century common law concepts still preserved in the criminal law of California. The staff, of course, was greatly influenced by the Model Penal Code.[7]
In 1969, the “staff of lawyers” were dismissed, and a former Deputy Attorney General was appointed to redirect the reform process. The UCLA Law Review devoted its April 1972 issue to a “Student Symposium on the Proposed California Criminal Code.” They described the current California Penal Code, which was based on an 1872 enactment, as “outdated, unmanageably lengthy, and internally inconsistent.”[8]
According to Professor Sherry, "it seemed apparent to the staff that the Model Penal Code provided the most useful and efficient base from which to attack this disorderly body of law." (pp. 434-435). Their “efficient” draft on sex offenses "assumed that in almost all offenses, a maximum term of five years would be adequate and would best serve the goals of modern correctional practice" (p. 437).
To do this, sex felonies would be demoted to lesser crimes and/or penalties, while they proposed stripping the law of most if not all of its misdemeanor criminal sanctions, substituting the non-criminal offense of "infraction" punishable by fine, or some other non-custodial restraint. In fact, Kinsey’s friend, psychiatrist Karl Bowman, reported that by late 1950 the 1955 MPC view of sex offenders had been quietly gaining converts in California.
Bowman claimed that the average period of confinement for “child molesting, incest, exhibitionism, window peeping, sadism and certain homosexual crimes” was “about eighteen months.” Additional staff could reduce that “to fourteen months” opined an optimistic California Mental Health Progress Report 4, in 1963. Sex crimes of sadism, incest and child abuse were pronounced trivial in the larger scheme of things.[9]
Since other states had relied on the Kinsey-based ALI/MPC to lighten sex offense penalties beginning in 1956, similar changes were acceptable to a majority of California legislators. In fact, the undoing of the California committee resulted from their drug regulation proposals. (p. 438). They proposed supplying marijuana to a person under 18, cultivation of and possession of over a pound of marijuana be classed as a misdemeanor and over 10 pounds a 3rd degree felony. (p. 439).
Public reaction was strong-The California District Attorney's Association resolutely opposed the revision project, and made a strong commitment to the defense of the current Penal Code. The culpability provisions were ridiculed by prosecutors who "purported not to be able to understand them." (p. 441). Replacing the M'Naghten Rule with a definition drawn from the Model Penal Code was attacked because it would "turn criminal trials over to the psychiatrists." (p. 441) The sentencing proposals were rejected because their lower maximum terms were described as a threat to the public safety. (p. 441)
The second MPC reform proposal was also rejected by the Legislature in 1973.
Post 1973 Acceptance of the New Code
Although the California legislature did not accept law reforms based on the ALI/MPC at that time, they did so, apparently in 1974, and all California laws now reflect the Kinsey Reports assertion that children are sexual from birth, hence entitled as juveniles to sexual information, education and training in sexual freedom. Psychological opinion and therapy, although never proven to be a scientific discipline, have been elevated to the critical determinant in assessing the child predator, effectively overturning the power of the jury and judge with superior sexperts.
The two terms of Jerry Brown as governor of California may shed light on the leniency of California law towards child predators. Pat Brown, Jerry Brown’s father was governor of California during Kinsey’s tenure, and was visited by and advised by Alfred Kinsey on the need to eliminate or lighten sex law penalties on many occasions.
Indeed, Kinsey’s extensive “expert” testimony to the Subcommittee on Sex Crimes of the California General Assembly in 1949 may be seen as a turning point in California’s treatment of sex offenders. Kinsey lied to the legislators, saying his research found children unharmed by sexual abuse. He then called for widespread parole of all sex offenders and lenient penalties at a time when the public was demanding that sex offenders be permanently removed from society. Kinsey’s influence can be seen in that while the legislature rejected the MPC proposed by the committee, they accepted the liberalization of sex laws. The legislative rejection may be laid at the feet of the Code’s call for a wide-open use of drugs.
By 1970, the sole control for the sex offender’s future was in the hands of the California Adult Authority, an administrative agency composed of eight members chosen by the governor and approved by the State Senate. According to writer, Louis Barnett, Chairman of the National Foundation to Fight Political Corruption, Governor Brown was very fond of appointing controversial figures whose connections to pornography, organized crime, and disregard for the law was flagrant.[10]
Were probation denied, the judge could only sentence the offender to the term prescribed by law. Once this was done, the governor-appointed Adult Authority then had discretion to determine the exact length of imprisonment and parole within this term.[11]
As noted, the California District Attorney’s Association objected to the proposed reforms, noting that “..a definition drawn from the Model Penal Code would ‘turn criminal trials over to the psychiatrists.’”[12] The ALI/MPC chief author, Herbert Wechsler, scorned the American system of governance requiring a trial by jury. In his call for law reform in the Harvard Law Review, Wechsler writes,
It is widely urged that the responsibility for the determination of the treatment of offenders should not, in any case, be vested in the courts; that judges have no special expertise or insight in this area that warrants giving them decisive voice; and that they should be superseded by a dispositions board that might include the judge but would draw personnel of equal weight from social work, psychiatry, penology, and education.[13]
Wechsler’s bias has been proven unsound by multiple studies reported at a conference held in San Diego in April, 1999. Professor of Law, Neil Vidmar, of Duke University reported on a literature review and his own empirical study with two colleagues that the jury system over the last 25 years has remained effective. He referred to Alan Dershowitz’s book, The Abuse Excuse, as perpetuating a false “belief based on no systematic evidence whatsoever” regarding jury attitudes towards acquittal. Dershowitz reports an “overwhelming view about the jury and its competence and its diligence was supported by the trial judges.”[14]
There was high agreement between trial judges and jury verdicts, juries are able to understand and act on complex trial evidence, and juries are adept at critical assessment of experts and their testimony. Vidmar concludes that there is substantial support for the jury system from a systematic examination of current research.[15]
California Law 2001
After careful examination of the current California Penal Code, in 2001 it appears that, as in most other post-common law states, no fixed law provides a clear felony offense for sex with a child unless it is proven that the act is against the child’s will by means of force and violence. Massive confusion exists in the degrees and sub degrees which must be labeled by the police and the victim.
Richard H, Kuh, a working New York prosecutor,[16] complimented the authors of the MPC on many aids the MPC provided to prosecutors, However, he complained about the heavily weighted academic and social science advisors as well as the missing working prosecutors. Kuh was especially concerned about the legal confusion the ALI/MPC was creating in all our states. He worried:
If the [ALI/MPC] draftsmen wish to force trial judges to stop and puzzle over abstruse wording, that discipline can do no harm. But…[this is] linguistic embroidery to which lay jurors would inevitably be exposed….awkward phrases and shrouded concepts bother me; for instructions in the law—jury charges—are delivered to jurors orally, and may go on for hours. [And] if a verdict is to be reached, the jurors must all end up as of one mind, convinced beyond a reasonable doubt. Nor can the Code’s protagonists—if they are, at this time, to be realists—respond, “these definitions are not for the jury; the judge may simplify them, using his own words when he charges.” Trial judges do not like to be reversed, and the safe course for them is to charge the law precisely as the legislature has handed it down.[17]
Kuh says the ALI/MPC models fuse further with “mental gymnastics” such as
….a twenty-one page discussion…[which] contains so many conditions modifying other provisions, which in turn have modified still others, that limitations of space make adequate description impossible.[18]
These “conditions modifying other provisions, which in turn have modified still others” are seen in bold relief in the California child abuse statutes. A child of any age who allegedly willingly submits to “unlawful sexual intercourse” appears to be only guaranteed a misdemeanor penalty should the aggressor be found guilty. (See attached chart, California Law: 2001).
This puts the smallest children (up to age 13) in the position of having to prove force if they are to make the offense a felony punishable under section 269. If the child cannot prove force, a common problem in child sexual abuse, or her tenderness of years create such intimidation in those circumstances that s/he is unable to establish the facts of the trauma, her/his rape can be penalized either as a misdemeanor or a felony. Prior to 1950 the laws were fixed favoring explicit protection for children.
Provocative teens commonly called “jail bait,” and men genuinely feared that ravishing a child, with or without his/her “consent” would result in significant imprisonment—Hence fewer men and boys engaged in sex with children. Today, it may be said that on the evidence women and children boys and girls suffer under the ALI/MPC definitions of sexual abuse. However, it appears that adult women tend to fare better under the “lightened” rape laws than do children. (Indeed, since 1958, convictions for “statutory rape” of children are no longer even counted in the FBI rape statistics.)[19]
While 261 (2), 289 and 288 (3) punish offenders with “3, 6, or 8 years” for forcible rape and rape with an object, etc., (hence a felony) only a) children 0-13 who are raped by men over 23 years old can see their rapists receive 15 years to life. Even here the sentence may be “suspended” with a “report from a psychiatrist or psychologist or treatment program (288.1).
“Awkward phrases and shrouded concepts “ abound in the California statutes on rape (statutory rape is no longer a category of offense). Continuous sexual abuse, defined as three or more acts of substantial sexual contact including with a foreign object or by oral copulation with a child under 14 in not less than three months, is a felony (288.5).
The pattern established by the ALI/MPC is reflected in current California law-- lightening penalties for sex offenses is enabled through redefinition and reclassification of the crime and the criminal. What was a felony under common law is devalued to a misdemeanor and the level of injury is calculated and commonly must be proven by massive battery by the victim.
The current California law also reflects the concept of rape as having conditions that modify other provisions, which in turn are modified by still other provisions. The defense of rape as peer sex play, first articulated by Kinsey was introduced into law by the ALI/MPC. An age differential between the aggressor and his victim determines the severity of the crime and the resultant penalty. In the case of aggravated sexual assault (a felony), the aggressor must be ten years older than his victim. This means that when a 19 year old rapes or sodomies an 11 year old child, it would be not be aggravated sexual assault but the lesser crime of unlawful sexual intercourse, either a misdemeanor or a felony (261.5(D).
In 1980, when the UCLA Law Review argues that the concept of “statutory rape” has an inherent gender bias, and is therefore unconstitutional, the Kinsey Institute’s tome on sex offenders is the premiere citation for the argument.[20] Promoting the Kinsey Report’s position that children need and want sex, Eidson writes that youngsters between the ages of 12 and 15 are often willing, if not seductive. Protection should be achieved without punishing many blameless men. Based on factual statistics of rape, it is a strange argument indeed that protecting women is a “sexist assumption.”[21]
Layers of protection for the predator—not the victim—are firmly enmeshed in California law. The plea bargaining process often provides the offender the option of pleading guilty to a lesser offense and avoiding prosecution for his felonious behavior.
A “Findlaw” search of the California penal codes for “pornography” locates only two references to children and pornography, neither of which appear to provide proper protection to children from pornography. Section 666. 8 states “Showing child pornography to a minor prior to or during the commission or attempted commission of any lewd or lascivious act with the minor (subd. (a), Sec. 667.15, Pen. C.)” are illegal. However, children are commonly induced into a “consensual” rape via “adult” not “child” pornography, suggesting a “misdemeanor” while showing children pornography without engaging in criminal sexual acts would be legal under this law.[22]
Seducing a child under 16 into prostitution can result in three, six, or eight years, incarceration with no lower age (10 years, 5 years) stipulated (266h: b). Law enforcement data have long established the fact that prostitution of children and their use in pornography go hand in hand. Both are illegal and the latter can follow a child forever into her or his adulthood, despite his or her recovery from prostitution. Perhaps because California is the epicenter of the pornography industry, the laws addressing children in association with “pornography” appear vague at best.
At the time of this writing it appears that California does not have child pornography statutes designed to protect children from this form of exploitation. On a federal level we find: Section 2252A. Certain activities relating to material constituting or containing child pornography
a) Mailing or distributing child pornography shall be fined and imprisoned for not less than 5 years nor more than 30 years.
b) Or is fined or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both, but, if the felon was guilty prior of child sexual abuse activities it is 2 years to 10 years
c) person was an adult at the time the material was produced; and (3) the defendant did not advertise, promote, present, describe, or distribute the material in such a manner as to convey the impression that it is or contains a visual depiction of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct. (d) Affirmative Defense. - It shall be an affirmative defense to a charge of violating subsection (a)(5) that the defendant - (1) possessed less than three images of child pornography; and (2) promptly and in good faith, and without retaining or allowing any person, other than a law enforcement agency, to access any image or copy thereof - (A) took reasonable steps to destroy each such image; or (B) reported the matter to a law enforcement agency and afforded that agency access to each such image.
Section 1470. Transfer of obscene material to minors
Whoever, using the mail or any facility or means of interstate or foreign commerce, knowingly transfers obscene matter to another individual who has not attained the age of 16 years, knowing that such other individual has not attained the age of 16 years, or attempts to do so, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both.
Therapy Replaces Penalization
Therapy for predators has replaced long term or permanent incarceration, as reflected in section 1000.30, where taxpayers fund “treatment to child sexual abuse perpetrators.
1000.30. The Office of Criminal Justice Planning shall…establish a pilot project for a period of two years…to provide treatment to child sexual abuse perpetrators, including intrafamilial and pedophiliac abusers, and including abusers who are incarcerated, as well as those who are not. (c)…Nothing in this section prohibits the use by district attorneys of counseling and other treatment programs as a diversion from prosecution. In pilot counties, diversion services shall be integrated with the services provided under this chapter.
Taxpayers are further burdened with the coordination of services to child predators from “county mental health, welfare department, district attorney, juvenile court, superior court, municipal court, probation department, and private child welfare service agencies participating in and coordinating case referral, case management, and service delivery to the ‘target population.’” This section (1000.30) suggests that counseling and treatment programs are used as a diversion from prosecution, at the district attorney’s discretion.
The provisions of Criminal Code Reform in the states have left a clear trail of skyrocketing violent crime, illegitimacy and juvenile delinquency. By its own admission, the California State Legislature has acknowledged that current programs to address sex crime are ineffective. Penal Code section 13885 begins,
The Legislature hereby finds that a substantial and disproportionate amount of sexual offenses are committed against the people of California by a relatively small number of multiple and repeat sex offenders.
Section 999i adds,
The Legislature hereby finds that repeat sexual offenders present a clear and present danger to the mental and physical well-being of the citizens of the State of California, especially of its children.
The Criminal Justice System is very careful not to infringe on the offenders freedom, but is very willing to establish complex and expensive programs at the tax payers expense, and the multiple victims’ violations, to “target and monitor chronic repeat violent sex offenders before the commission of additional sexual offenses.” [13885.1(b)]
Louise Viets Frisbie reported on the “Atascadero [California] study of 1,921 treated ‘“sexual psychopath”’ patients.” Most of the sex offenders served under two or three years in prison, receiving psychological counseling and treatment throughout their tenure. Frisbie seemed pleased that most of the paroled sex felons were not caught and returned to prison. However, by the end of the 5-year study, 34.5%, of paroled molesters of boys, 18.2%, of paroled molesters of girls and 46.8%. “voyeurs, transvestites and lewd persons” had been convicted of additional sexual offenses.
Moreover, while Frisbie argued that sex offenders did not increase the severity of their crimes, the data did not support that claim. One reason, among many, was that 11% of exhibitionists, the least “dangerous” of all offenders, “shifted to a more serious offense (bodily contact)” Frisbie does not reveal the nature of the contact, rape, molestation, adult or child victim(s)?[23] And the report again frames these offenders not as felons or criminals but as the therapeutic model requires, as “patients” of the state.
Kinsey Perjures Himself before the California Legislative Assembly Subcommittee on Sex Crimes in 1949
In 1981, President Ronald Reagan, California’s former Governor, wrote that the swift and severe punishment once shown to predators had been completely removed showing empathy and favoritism to criminal predators. In his Preface to California’s 1981 “Crime Victims Handbook,” Reagan charged that the cost of violence in our society can be traced to a criminals’ rights mentality promoted by the criminal justice system since the 1950s.
For the past thirty years justice has been unreasonably tilted in favor of criminals and against their innocent victims. This tragic era can fairly be described as a period when victims were forgotten and crimes were ignored.[24]
What had happened to California, and the nation, was that the passage of tough “sexual psychopath” laws during the 1930s-1940s had been wholly derailed by those pressing for a Kinseyan Model Penal Code, officially released in 1955. Several sex-murders of children had caused public outrage and demands for eliminating any paroles or early release time for sex offenders. The shift to criminals rights can be traced via the Kinsey Reports but California offers an example via excerpts from Kinsey’s testimony before the California Legislative Assembly Subcommittee on Sex Crimes in 1949, a year after the release of his Male volume:
DR. KINSEY: For the last 11 years we have had a research project, as you know, underway at the university on human sexual behavior .... [providing] a picture typical in the population as a whole as well as a special study of the persons who have been involved with the law as sex offenders. Indiana University supports the research, by the medical division of The Rockefeller Foundation, and by the medical division of the National Research Council at Washington .... we find that 95 percent of the [male] population has in actuality engaged in sexual activities, which are contrary to the law.
MR. BECK: What are your recommendations .... at the present time?
DR. KINSEY: .... by lessening the penalty—still arresting, still convicting, but by lessening the penalty....
MR. BECK: You mean by granting parole?
DR. KINSEY: They [New York] grant parole immediately in 80 percent of…sex cases....50 percent of the older men, are incapable of sexual performance anyway.
MR. BECK: I think that’s the answer.[25]
Since 86% to 87% of the Kinsey Report males were homosexuals other sexually aberrant groups, prisoners or boys sexually violated for his data, Kinsey perjured himself by testifying to the California committee that the Kinsey Reports represented, “a picture typical in the population as a whole.”[26] The impotent elder sex offender was also false, for Kinsey knew his favorite subject was a “sixty-three-year old, quiet, soft-spoken...fellow” who was an active child rapist who bragged that he raped 800 infants and children, kin and non kin, many for the Kinsey Male report.[27] This Kinsey did not tell the Assembly Interim Committee on Judicial System and Judicial Process of the California Legislature — during an era when the future U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Earl Warren, was serving as Governor of California.
Kinsey refers to The New York Mayor's Committee for the Study of Sex Offenses, (1939) and the subsequent New York sex offender program more than a dozen times in just 18 pages of his testimony. The New York Mayor's study--in which ALI author and Kinsey colleague Morris Ploscowe was named as “Consultant,” resulted in probation for 80% of sex offenders. Kinsey claims that although no laws were changed, enforcement changed (was reduced) dramatically, and that everyone was pleased, the legislature, law enforcement and the public at large. He claims the New York City “experiment” (his word) “has been going on 5 or six years. New York State has had a full time commission for 1 1/2 years.” This he says, "I know, because they came immediately to me.”[28]
Of the Kinsey influence on radicalizing sex laws state by state, co-author Wardell Pomeroy wrote::
Kinsey…carried on an elaborate study of the procedures involved in the handling of sex offenders ... As a result of this work...Kinsey could point to some concrete results in state legislatures. In California, for example, the lawmakers appropriated $75,000 per year for a study of sex offenders, supplementing his own work, and placed it under the direction of Kinsey’s friend Dr. Karl Bowman.... [whose] research program made abundant use of our material.... Kinsey himself met with the California legislature’s committee on sex laws, and he prepared special documentary material for the consideration of several other committees. Governor Pat Brown, whom he came to know well, worked with him closely in developing the state’s program. In 1952 Kinsey collaborated with an Illinois State legislative committee which was working on a revision of sex laws in that state. He spent much time in gathering factual data for the committee’s use. This action followed a pattern he had already established with legislative committees and special research groups set by the governments of New Jersey, New York, Delaware, Wyoming and Oregon.[29]
The Kinsey colleagues stressed the harmlessness of the convicted sex offender, the allegedly rare recidivism by the rapist and hence the need to view these acts as transitory in the offender’s life. The New York Times reported Kinsey’s keynote speech to The American Correction Association, September 28, 1955, claiming the sex offender “…was least likely to repeat his crime after release from prison.” The famous psychiatrist and MPC consultant, Manfred Guttmacher echoed Ploscowe and Kinsey saying,
[I]t is [wrongly] believed that sex offenders ….tend to be recidivists… among sex offenders there is little tendency toward repetitiveness … Paedophilia is one of the most frequent types of sex offense but recidivism is low.”[30]
Now, while Kinsey told the California legislators in 1949 that recidivism was rare among sex offenders, the Report of the Mayor's Committee for the Study of Sex Offenses in 1939, for which “Mr. Morris Ploscowe…throughout the entire study served as Consultant to the Committee,”[31] reported a 52% recidivism for forcible rape, 43% for incest, 34% for statutory rape, and 42% for sodomy. While Kinsey’s data alleged that there was no such thing as “normal” sexual behavior, still, few normal Americans would consider these to be low or acceptable rates of recapture—all within a ten-year window.[32] And data addressed further on finds a cure rate for sex offenders as unsupported.
The New York Committee (which Pomeroy claims Kinsey aided in their deliberations) concluded that that "sex [crime] is only a sideline to their major criminal activities," since the rapists’ prior arrests (they claim) were often not for sex crime. Hence, the Committee deduces that because “only” 34% of sex offenders reappeared in a police line-up within a decade, this "is convincing proof that sex crime is not habitual behavior with the majority of sex offenders."[33]
In any case, this is clear evidence that Ploscowe had knowledge of the high rates of sex criminal recidivism 10 years prior to the ALI/MPC. (As an aside, Kinsey colleague, psychiatrist, Karl Bowman also was a consultant to the New York Committee as well as providing “Kinseyan” testimony to the California committee.)