Research on sex offender laws and their effects on people and society

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In early 2010, I was looking at plans to attend the second annual conference of Reform Sex Offender Laws to be held that coming June in Washington, DC. As I thought about wanting to have my car so I could visit friends on other parts of the East Coast, it occurred to me to drive instead of fly. But the thought of driving 3,000 miles with nothing to do along the way was not so attractive. So I conceived a plan to use the trip in connection with my research. The idea was to get a picture of what it means to be a registered person in 21st-Century America by meeting with people all around the country who are living that experience on a day-to-day basis.

Since 2007, my research on sex offender laws has primarily been based on studying news articles, legal documents, and government reports. While I did conduct a few interviews and met with a few registered people, the work was largely disconnected from the world it was about. So in April 2010, I sent out an e-mail to 173 contacts in the “registry activism” community, asking if they would be willing to meet with me if I set out on a trip around the country to interview people who are on the registry, as well as their family members and people designated as victims.

The response was overwhelming. I sent out my e-mail at 7 am. Replies started coming in after ten minutes, and by the end of the day I’d heard back from 47 people. Within ten days I’d had replies from 67 people in 34 US states. Almost all of them invited me to meet with them and several offered to set up meetings with others in their areas. With such a response, there was no longer any question about taking the trip. I started packing.

What I write about in this preliminary report barely scratches the surface of what I’ve experienced on this trip. This report mainly took shape from looking through my notes to find pictures that I could use because they didn’t show faces of people who are not public activists. I then wrote this report around those pictures. But the vast majority of the interviews have no pictures that can be shown. There are some tastes of those interviews in brief descriptions of some of the people I’ve met. Behind those descriptions and other cases are many stories of life and pain that have not made it into this stage of reporting on my trip.  

I set off on May 10, and finished writing my draft of this preliminary report on August 2, exactly twelve weeks later. In this time, I have participated in 53 meetings in ten states plus the District of Columbia. Forty-seven of those meetings were set up by myself specifically for this trip, while the other six were meetings that were being held by others that I had an opportunity to attend. Mostly, those were activist meetings, but one was a meeting in a judge’s chambers that I was invited to attend by the man I’d interviewed the day before.

Map showing locations of 53 meetings that I set up or participated in so far on the Registry Road Trip in May through July, 2010. (View larger.)

Trip statistics as of July 31, 2010:

• States with meetings: 11 (in chronological order: California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, DC, Maryland, Pennsylvania)
• People interviewed:
  • 46 people prosecuted for sex crime, almost all on the registry
    • 45 male, 1 female
    • 11 who were under 18 years of age at time of charges (2 under 18 at time of interview, specifically 13 and 15)
    • 2 who were Catholic priests at time of charges
  • 19 mothers and 9 fathers of people prosecuted for sex crime
    • 2 of whose children were under 18 at time of charges (1 under 18 at time of interview, specifically 14)
  • 7 wives or ex-wives
  • 3 daughters
  • 3 sisters
  • 8 people with non-family relationships
  • 4 people designated as victims of sex crimes, all of whom object to that designation
  • 8 pedophiles* (7 of whom included in prosecuted people above)
  • 4 sex offender treatment providers
  • 1 activist not otherwise related to registry
  • 1 lawyer
  • 1 clergyman
  • 1 person advocating harsher sex laws
• Legal cases discussed: 67
• Interviews recorded: 45 video, 5 audio
• Hours of recordings (mostly interviews, but also some activist meetings): 45.5 video, 9.5 audio
• Pages of documents scanned on this trip (mostly treatment manuals and case files): 1,214

* A pedophile is a person with a sexual attraction to children.  

To all the people who met with me and allowed me to interview you, thank you for your hospitality and for speaking with me in such depth about the dark moments of your life.

To all the people who invited me to meet with you but that I did not get to see, I’m sorry. You can see how busy I’ve been. I just have not been able to go everywhere I wanted to. There are many people with touching stories that I wanted to hear, but I just have not been able to see you all within the limits of this trip.

As I made my way across the country, not knowing the nature of what I would find at each stop, I found it became impossible to plan meetings a week or more in advance, as I originally thought I would. This meant, my scheduling often took the form of, “Hi, I’m going to be in your city tomorrow. Can you meet with me in the afternoon?” I apologize for these last-minute arrangements, and I thank you for accommodating me with them when you could.

To people who recognize yourselves in something that is written or shown in this report, please let me know if you see anything that is not completely accurate or that has any possibility of identifying you against your wishes. I have been very careful to be accurate and to disguise the identities of all people who did not give me permission otherwise. Let me know if I have made any errors in this regard.

The descriptions of any cases mentioned here are very brief, just one or a few sentences culled from interviews that usually lasted an hour or more. Most of the people I interviewed are not even mentioned at all, even though many of you have very important stories that need to be told. Please note this is my preliminary report. I will continue to do what I can to bring public awareness to what I am learning. Perhaps I’ll put together a collection of more complete accounts of a larger number of cases. Going through the dozens of hours of recordings will be a huge job, so it will take some time to get to that.  

	GPS tracking device on ankle of 13-year-old boy.

We are told that the purpose of the sex laws is to protect children, so it is most troubling when we see children suffering as a result of those laws. Eleven of my interviews were with people who had been charged with sex crimes when they were themselves juveniles (i.e., under 18). Two additional interviews were with the parents of juvenile sex offenders. In three of those cases, the charged people were still juveniles at the time of my interviews. All thirteen were male.

It’s important not to assume just because the accused were young that they were just innocent, playful children. Three of the 13 juvenile cases involved allegations of use of force. One young man that I interviewed started out saying he’d been falsely charged at age 13 of having anal intercourse with his seven-year-old step-brother. But as we talked at greater length, he admitted that it was “possible” that he had played sexually with the younger boy, that if he played sexually with him, it was possible that he anally penetrated him, and that since he was usually cruel to the boy in other ways, if he anally penetrated him it was probably done against his will. It took a while to sink in that this man was essentially admitting to me that when he was a young teenager he had raped a seven-year-old boy.

Patriotic expressions of a seven-year-old boy. Seven years later, I found this in his case file as he was behind bars on dubious charges of sex play with his step-brother.

Just as with any legal case, unfortunately, it’s also important not to assume that a conviction means the crime actually took place. In four of the 13 juvenile cases, the people I interviewed claimed the charges were false. In the most poignant of these, the people interviewed included the victim herself. She told me that she was a six-year-old tomboy when she took a fall that caused bleeding in her crotch. Her 13-year-old brother took care of her and cleaned her up. When a school nurse saw the bleeding and counselors asked if her brother had touched her, her “yes” referred to that care, but was interpreted differently. Her brother spent the rest of his youth in jail for rape and she didn’t see him again until she was in her early 20s. She is now trying to help him get off the registry. It’s always hard to know whether a recanting victim is telling the truth or making up a new story to protect the guilty, but what she said to me was haunting. She told me that I was the first person who ever asked her what actually happened that day.

So juvenile cases, just like adult ones, can involve force and can involve claims of false accusations. But in seven of the 13 juvenile cases that I interviewed about, people told me straightforwardly about consensual sex play among kids. The younger parties involved were sometimes quite young, as young as four, and the age differences were as large as seven years. In general, I didn’t hear people making excuses for their behavior or claiming they’d done nothing wrong. The crimes in these seven cases were, as described by the people who committed them (or by the mother in one of the cases):

• An eleven-year-old boy got oral sex from and had anal intercourse with his nine-year-old step-brother. Later, there was also a nonconsensual act, in which he surreptitiously licked his six-year-old step-sister’s vagina while she slept. The boy spent three months in juvenile jail awaiting court action. He was sentenced to 20 years probation and lifetime public registration, and has gone back to jail a number of times on probation violations.
• A twelve-year-old boy offered his half-sister, six, some candy if she would show him her vagina. She showed it to him and then he showed her his penis. He spent a month in juvenile jail awaiting trial, then took a plea deal for 20 years probation. He is on the public registry.
• A 13-year-old boy was prosecuted for sexual battery for slapping a girl in school on the butt, but was not handed harsh consequences. Later, while still 13, he was caught sucking the penis of his four-year-old nephew. For the second incident, he spent the next five years in juvenile jail, after which he is on probation for ten years and on the public registry for the rest of his life.
• A 13-year-old boy visited the home of a friend, an 11-year-old girl. They went to her room and “made out,” in which they both took their pants down and touched each other’s genitals. He spent 2½ years in juvenile jail, and will be on probation until he is 33. He is on the public registry.
• A 13-year-old boy played a game of truth or dare with a group of boys and girls from age seven to 18, in which an eleven-year-old girl gave him oral sex. He spent 1½ years in juvenile jail, after which he was put on the public registry.
• A 16-year-old boy was walking on a wooded trail near his home and an eleven-year-old girl that he knew came up and asked if she could give him oral sex. He agreed and she did it for about five seconds and then stopped. He was sentenced to a youth detention camp (“boot camp”) and is now on the public registry.
• A 17-year-old boy had mutual masturbation with and gave oral sex to two young male friends, eleven and twelve years old. He was sentenced to ten years probation and is on the public registry.

Some of the things these boys did were shocking, while others were, to the extent we can believe the descriptions given, normal childhood or adolescent play and exploration. It’s amazing that we live in a world that likes to pretend that children aren’t interested in sex, and then we punish them mercilessly when they show us that’s not true.  

	Special driver’s license issued to registered people in Louisiana.

One of the things I’ve been looking for on this trip is the lengths the government goes to in order to publicly shame people on the registry besides their appearance on the sex offender website. I didn’t see a lot of this, but found two examples. In Louisiana, registered people are issued a special driver’s license with “Sex Offender” in large, red type under the picture. I can’t imagine how it must feel to present this ID to a clerk at the grocery store.

In a small town, I encountered a young gay man who told me that in his early 20s he gave oral sex to a fellow who claimed to be 18 years old, but was actually 15. When he was convicted for this, his probation officer required him to make a sign to warn people away and post it on the lawn of his mother’s home where he lived. He had completed probation when I visited him, and he showed me the sign leaning backwards against a tree in his backyard. He told me he wants to get rid of it, but his probation officer told him he had to keep it. I don’t know what jurisdiction a probation officer continues to have over a man after he is off probation, but this man apparently lives in fear of violating the officer’s orders even after his probation is over.

Sign made by a young man in a small town and displayed on his lawn on orders from his probation officer.

 

Another thing I’ve been looking out for on this trip is how people are affected financially by being on the registry. Most people complained of great difficulty finding and keeping employment, and some told stories of being accepted for jobs only to get a phone call after the company had done a background check, telling them not to bother showing up.

Before my trip, I’d heard of people thrown into homelessness by being on the registry. One of my first meetings was with a man in California who had contacted me earlier through my website. When I met with him, it turned out that he was living out of his immobile car parked in a shopping center parking lot. It seemed there must be more people in his circumstances, but how would I find them? Florida has been famous in the past few years for a group of registered people living under a bridge in Miami. Recently, that encampment was broken up and I wondered what became of the people who had lived there. With the help of David Lind at Pure Mercy, I found out.

The men who lived under the bridge weren’t there because they chose that place on their own. When Miami introduced strict residency restrictions on registered people, it became illegal for them to reside almost anywhere in the jurisdiction. While some people on the registry were able to relocate out of the area, those on probation or parole did not have that freedom. So it was probation and parole officers who first started instructing their charges to go live under the bridge. It was one of the few places in Miami that was far enough from schools and parks that registered people could live there. No matter that there was nowhere under the bridge for people to actually live. That was a problem for the registered people assigned to live there to figure out.

When the bridge encampment attracted international publicity, the government closed it down. This meant that probation and parole officers had to find new places to assign their clients to live. I was able to visit two such places. One was the front steps of the probation and parole office itself. The other was a corner of a warehouse parking lot in an industrial area. For the second place, when it rains the man sits in the nearby bus shelter.

The Florida Department of Correction’s slogan, Commitment to Excellence, is underscored by two parolees sleeping on its doorstep, the location assigned to them as their residence by their parole officers. The sign and men are at the far right side of the building in the inset in the top-right corner of the photograph. If you look closely you can see another man sitting up next to the left-hand entrance to the building.

Left: Encampment of registered man in the corner of an industrial parking lot, the residence assigned to him by his parole officer. Right: Bus shelter available for the man when it rains. (Click each picture to view larger.)

Some people have been able to rise above the oppressive circumstances of the registry and acquire a certain amount of financial success. I’ve interviewed two such people so far on this trip. They were both modestly successful businessmen before they were arrested on their sex charges. They lost their businesses when they went to prison, but were able to apply their skills to starting over when they got out. One was resourceful enough to take advantage of his special knowledge of the circumstances of registered people and their difficulty finding housing, and started a business acquiring residential properties and renting rooms in them to other registered people. The other man used his previous experience to start a contracting business that now employs three other people. After our interview, I spent the following day tagging along to his work sites. It appeared to me that both his employees and clients, as well as other people in the community, like him and hold him in high regard. One young man he recently hired considers him an important mentor and feels that the fact he is on the registry is a reason to mistrust the government. 

One of the most startling observations on this trip was an entire community of registered people, about a hundred men living together in a mobile home park where they feel safe from the glaring stares of the outside world. The place is run by Florida Justice Transitions, which coordinates shared accommodations in single-wide trailers with other services, such as sex offender treatment, polygraph testing, alcoholic anonymous meetings, optional religious services, and assistance getting social security cards and other documentation. They take applications from men in prison who need a place to go when they are released.

The mobile home park of Florida Justice Transitions. Clockwise from top left: Entrance. A residence. Clubhouse. Basketball court. (Click each picture to view larger.)

It was a strange feeling walking around this place. It is essentially a leper colony, a ghetto for sex criminals. Women are rarely seen, and children, never. Yet there was a certain serenity about it. I imagine that for men who feel ostracized in the general community, this is a place of comfort, where people understand each other, and quietly support each other. On the day that I was there, when I left to get lunch I saw a young man walking across the street to the convenience store, a GPS tracking unit clearly visible on his ankle. What a difference the boundary of this place must be for him, I thought. Outside, he is a suspicious threat; inside, he is among peers.

I’d heard this place described before as a community of pedophiles, and I wondered what kind of men live there. I only conducted one in-depth interview there, so I didn’t get to know many of the men very well. But I did get to observe a therapy session and to have some conversations with a few men. From this, I at least learned the nature of the crimes, as told by them, that several are there for:

• When one man was 18 and drunk at a party, he allowed a 12-year-old girl to put his hand in her pants.
• After a sleepover of 30 of his children’s friends at a man’s home, one of the girls said that he had touched her crotch. He was drunk and doesn’t remember doing it, but he told me that if she said so, then it must have happened.
• A man who acknowledged having been a pedophile was caught soliciting sex online from a police officer acting as a juvenile, and was also charged with possession of child pornography.
• A man who went online seeking ideas for dealing with problems with his teenage son, chatted with what he believed was a 14-year-old boy and arranged to meet him. He says he had no sexual intentions whatsoever, but because the “boy” (actually a police officer) had said that his uncle sometimes masturbated him and he liked it, the chat was considered a sexual solicitation.
• A man in his 30s was dating a 17-year-old girl he’d been introduced to by her mother. They had sex one time before she turned 18. Two years later, when they engaged to get married, a family feud brought out the previous illegal nature of the relationship.
• A man was watching adult pornography and masturbating at 2 am when a seven-year-old girl, a friend of his daughter’s who was sleeping over, walked into his room. He didn’t stop masturbating when he saw her. He told me that he didn’t touch her, but was falsely accused of fingering her vagina. He spent three years in prison and eight in civil commitment.
• A gay man engaged in consensual sexual activity with a mentally retarded male friend of his family.
• A 26-year-old man had had a 15-year-old girlfriend when he was 23, for which he spent two years in prison.
• One man raped an adult woman and spent 18 years in prison for it, one of the few people I’ve met on this trip who is on the registry for a forced sex act.

For most of this trip, I have been going to meetings that I arranged with people individually. But in a few cases, I instead attended meetings set up independently of me, where I was just an observer. These meetings were very interesting. I had never been to a meeting of “registry activists” before, and while I was on my way to what I thought would be my first one, the national RSOL conference in Washington, I found myself sitting in on two meetings of RSOL state chapters before I got there.

	Staff meeting of Citizens for Change – New Mexico in Albuquerque, May 2010. Left to right: Don, Lloyd Swartz, Alice Benson.

New Mexico. In Albuquerque, I actually attended two meetings. On a Saturday, there was a staff meeting, where six organizers of Citizens for Change – New Mexico discussed strategy and upcoming activities. The general meeting on the following day, attended by about 15 people, got into more details on work to be done by individuals. It was fascinating to hear about their successful work in lobbying the state legislature in order to stop passage of proposed new measures against registered people. One item on the agenda at this meeting was discussion of actions to be taken in response to a letter recently mailed to registered people in Albuquerque, notifying them of new restrictions on their use of the public libraries¹.

In addition to observing the business of these meetings, I was able to arrange to conduct four in-depth interviews with members of the organization. Two of these interviews were with individuals who are themselves on the registry. One of them is included in the list of juvenile cases above. The other was a man who had fondled the breasts of his eleven-year-old step-daughter. Another interview was with the parents of a man who is in prison for what they say was a false accusation by his ex-wife of sexually touching her daughter. The fourth interview was with the widow of a minister who got involved in this issue after she kept up the visits that her husband had been making to a parishioner who was in prison for sexual activity with his daughter. In addition to these interviews, the organizers of the general meeting went around the room and asked people who were willing to briefly tell their stories of why they were there.

A short time after my visit to Albuquerque, CFC-NM split into two organizations. One of the them kept the name, CFC – New Mexico, and emphasizes emotional and spiritual support of people adversely affected by harsh sex laws. The other took on the name, RSOL – New Mexico, and is focused primarily on legislative action to change those laws. It so happens that the three people in the photograph above are the ones that started RSOL-NM, so that photograph is now also a picture of the organizers of that new group.

	Mary Sue, coordinator of Texas Voices, opens their first Houston meeting in May 2010.

Texas. The timing worked out for me to be in Houston when Texas Voices was holding its first meeting in that part of the state. This was no small get-together. More than 100 people filled a hotel meeting room to capacity to learn about the activities of this organization in lobbying the state legislature to vote down proposed new measures against registered people. People attending were provided with a handout of materials that included:

• Texas Voices: Pursuing Balanced Sex Offender Laws to Better Serve Public Safety, a flier explaining the principles and objectives of the organization
• Talking / Writing Points Phrases
• Interim Study, suggested materials for members to use in writing to politicians
• Sample letters to politicians

After discussing the work of the organization, the second half of the meeting was dedicated to legal matters of registered people and people on parole for sex crimes. First, Bill Habern² gave a talk about his many years of tireless work on this issue. Then he and a panel of lawyers from his firm went into more legal specifics and took questions from the audience. I made a video recording of both presentations, which had a lot of valuable information, especially for parolees, and I’m looking into the technical aspects of posting those videos here for others to benefit from.

Legal panel from the firm of Habern, O’Neil, & Pawgan at Texas Voices meeting in Houston in May 2010: Bill Habern, Michelle Belanger (legal assistant), David O'Neil, Scott Pawgan.

As in Albuquerque, I conducted four interviews in connection with this meeting. One was with the parents of a man who is in prison on a probation violation from his case of having consensual sex with a 15-year-old girl when he was 23. Under his probation conditions, he was not allowed to leave his county of residence to be at his son’s birth and he has never been allowed to see his son. Another was with the parents of a man who is on parole after spending 1½ years in jail for a series of sexually explicit chats online with a 15-year-old girl when he was 22. The third came about from a serendipitous meeting in the hotel lobby after wrapping up the previous interview, and is described below under A Different Perspective. The last interview was with the only woman on the registry I have interviewed so far, who is there because she gave oral sex to two teenage boys.

	RSOL co-founder Paul Shannon welcomes Kelly Piercy, head of Georgians for Reform, to the podium at the opening of the second annual conference of Reform Sex Offender Laws in Washington, DC in June 2010.

National. After traveling through and conducting interviews in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina, I finally arrived at the destination that had motivated this trip in the first place. After working with RSOL for three years and becoming part of its administrative team late last year, I finally had a chance to meet many of its organizers face-to-face.

The second annual conference of Reform Sex Offender Laws (RSOL) was held at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church in Washington, DC, at the end of June. St. Stephen’s Church has a history of openness and inclusiveness, having been the first racially integrated Episcopal church in Washington in the 1950s, and in 1974, the first Episcopal church in the US to have a woman priest lead a public service.³ Since we were meeting in a church, we had an unusual conference schedule that included all day Saturday, but was limited to the afternoon on Sunday. One hundred people attended from 25 US states.⁴ The weekend program was supplemented with a day of lobbying Congress on the following Monday.

Program for the 2010 RSOL conference. (Click to read.)

The line-up of speakers was incredible. I wouldn’t expect to find at an activist conference a representative of the US Justice Department or a former prosecutor who helped to write the laws that the people are gathered to work against. But the appearance of Gary Dennis and Tom Morgan showed that there are people in (or formerly in) the government who understand that these laws are not working as intended. Sociology professor Chrysanthi Leon spoke about her research on sex offenders and the (in)effectiveness of the registry and other measures in place to deter sex crimes.⁵ Amy Borror from the office of the Ohio Public Defender offered pointers on lobbying Congress about registration.⁶ Connecticut defense attorney Norm Pattis excited the crowd by railing against unconstitutional laws and suggesting strategies both for defending individual cases and working for broader changes in the laws as they currently stand.⁷

The packet of materials provided to participants included a useful collection of information on sex offender laws. These were helpful both to novices who need to learn the basics themselves and for state organizers who need materials for educating their own new members and members of the public.

•	The Adam Walsh Act: A Disaster in the Making, Sex Offender Solutions & Education Network (Brochure)
•	Facts!: Regarding Sex Offender Issues, Sex Offender Solutions & Education Network (Brochure)
•	My Family IS Just Like Your Family, Sex Offender Solutions & Education Network (Brochure)
•	What You Should Know about Sex Offenders, Reform Sex Offender Laws
•	Registry Talking Points, Reform Sex Offender Laws, June 13, 2010

The packet of materials used in lobbying meetings on Monday was the same as the conference packet, plus an additional CD. This CD was such a useful collection of information that I provide a separate background report about it.

	Karen Kristopher of Centers for Decency

In Houston, I had the opportunity to meet Karen Kristopher, a woman who works on the issue of sex crime from a different perspective. She is the only person I’ve met who actively advocates for a stricter registry, but it was about time that I met someone like her because she appears to represent at least an important segment of the public viewpoint. I was anxious to interview her because SOL Research is not about promoting one particular point of view, but about examining all sides of the issue and reporting factual information. I don’t think I can do her justice by interpreting what she said, so I will just excerpt from her remarks and let them stand on their own. The following is an edited summary; please see the verbatim transcript for more details.

I’m with Centers for Decency and I’m also the founder of the Houston-Area Association for Decency.

I think the sex offender registry is a valuable tool. I’ve been dealing with the real estate brokers in Houston about when they sell a piece of property and disclose the rate of the sex offenders near the home, when there’s little girls in the family, little children. It has its place, certainly. I think it’s an indicator of what’s happening in that neighborhood. But there is no neighborhood, no zip code, in Houston, that is without a sex offender.

The bigger problem is the sex predators that have not been caught, and they’re everywhere. The 700,000 people on the registry, that’s just a tiny part of the number of sex predators that are roaming across this country. Those who are not convicted of a sex crime yet. They are just out there. They attack their victims, on average, 113 times before they’re arrested the first time.

[I asked if she knows how many such people there are.] No. It’s just countless. What they usually do, they start with women their own age, and they get younger and younger. This is what’s happening.

At Centers for Decency, we’re trying to promote morality and decency. We’re hoping to have stronger family values because it’s strong family values that is keeping this country together, and if that unravels then the United States of America will have more cultural decline, and cultural decline is not good for the fellas or the girls, or anyone. We all have a lot to address.

Much of this trip has been a grueling experience. Sometimes each interview seemed like just another opportunity to break my heart. As I walked up to one person’s door after another, I found myself asking what I was doing and whether I really wanted to go on. Walking out into the darkness of the night after an interview that I had got to by following directions from Google, I would look around and realize I had no idea where I was, nothing familiar around me to connect to.

One of the most difficult feelings to deal with has been helplessness. Interviewing a 13-year-old boy with a GPS monitor on his ankle or a man living in a corner of an industrial parking lot, I wanted to do more than just listen. When I collected documents from people, I wished that I could offer some hope that I might find a key that could wake them from their nightmare, but if there was such a key, would I know it when I saw it? Sometimes I felt guilty for taking up people’s time.

Again and again, I found the reactions of people to my showing up to be gratitude. People were grateful to know that I cared, to know that I did not judge them or hate them for things they or their loved ones had done. Sometimes people said they’d never told the whole story to anyone else before, and they were grateful that someone was interested in hearing it.

I eventually came to see that even if I never am able to do anything useful with this set of interviews, I am doing something worthwhile just by going around and sitting down to talk with people. Many registered people and their families feel so isolated and afraid. Numerous times I was told what a great relief it was to talk with someone who cared. I am proud of the moments of comfort and peace that I have brought into a few people’s lives with this trip. Maybe there is nothing more than that that I need to accomplish.