May 29th is Joseph Allen’s birthday. Joseph is a dear friend and his is perhaps the most tragic case I have encountered. You can read about it here.
Here is Joseph’s prison address. A card from you would brighten his day!
Joseph Lee Allen #A293-486
Grafton Correctional Institution
2500 South Avon Beldon Road
Grafton, Ohio 44044-9802
Thank you!
-Bob
The NCRJ has long sponsored the case of Dan and Fran Keller.
“Beginning in 1991, Fran and Dan Keller, who ran a day care out of their Austin home, committed unspeakable acts against their charges — they put one in a swimming pool with a baby-eating shark; they forced the kids to watch as they dismembered an infant; they flew the children to Mexico, where they were raped by soldiers, before flying them back to the day care in time to be picked up by their parents.
“Except, possibly, just maybe, perhaps, none of that ever happened. Incredibly, even though the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Wednesday overturned the charges against Fran Keller because of “false evidence,” the court denied her claims of actual innocence.”
Read the full article by Craig Malisow in HoustonPress.
Lelaind knew he’d test positive for marijuana. But after spending the past few years bouncing in and out of jail, mostly for minor parole violations, he wasn’t afraid of another 30-day stretch. I can do that standing on my head, he thought.
That was in 2006, when Lelaind was 26 years old. He’s been kept under lock and key ever since. His problem wasn’t the drug bust itself. But the bust prompted the authorities to review Lelaind’s checkered past. As a teenager, he had been convicted for sexual abuse against a minor — and had served his time.
That fact, along with other aspects of his criminal and life history, were entered into the “Static-99,” a little-known but highly influential questionnaire that critics contend is being tragically misused. The test spit out a score that set him on the path to being locked up in a state psychiatric facility. Why? Because he might commit another crime in the future. He doesn’t know if he will ever be released.
Read the article by Peter Aldhous in Buzzfeed.
The “San Antonio Four” appeared in court Wednesday for the first time since they were convicted and sentenced for sexual assault in the late 90’s.
These four women — were sent to prison for more than a decade, after being accused of raping and threatening two young girls with a gun.
The four were let out about three years ago on bond, based on new evidence…now the defense says they have even more new evidence.
Read the article by Andrew Lofholm of News 4 San Antonio.
“Why did you write a book about the sex offender registry?”
“When I saw the research on the registry I was really shocked at how pointless it is. And it was shocking because usually, when you research something, there’s ambiguity—there are some good things and there are some bad things. But with the registry, there’s really no research that shows it’s effective at all.”
Read the interview with NCRJ Director Emily Horowitz in Slate.
“How did you arrive at taking up reform of the sex offender registry as a cause?
“Well, I’m interested in keeping kids safe and I’m also interested in when our fears don’t match reality. That began when I let my son ride the subway and everyone told me, “Don’t you watch ‘Law & Order’?” I was called “America’s worst mom” for trusting him on the subway, even though from my own personal experience, both as a New Yorker and as a reporter, I knew it’s really quite safe. So then I started hearing about other things that we worry about that are actually a lot safer than we think — for instance, in the suburbs, parents are driving their kids to the bus stop. Then I looked up the statistics and it turned out that only between 11 and 13 percent of kids are walking to school anymore — which, I walked to school when I was a kid. I looked up whether it’s really dangerous to wait at the bus stop and, in fact, the No. 1 way that kids die is as passengers in cars. So it seemed strange that we were obsessing about kidnapping and predators and such when the biggest danger to kids is putting them in the car and driving them to the mall.”
Read the interview with Lenore Skenazy in Salon.
“You have to feel a little sorry these days for professors married to their former students. They used to be respectable citizens—leaders in their fields, department chairs, maybe even a dean or two—and now they’re abusers of power avant la lettre. I suspect you can barely throw a stone on most campuses around the country without hitting a few of these neo-miscreants. Who knows what coercions they deployed back in the day to corral those students into submission; at least that’s the fear evinced by today’s new campus dating policies. And think how their kids must feel! A friend of mine is the offspring of such a coupling—does she look at her father a little differently now, I wonder.”
Read the article by Laura Kipnis in Chronicles of Higher Education.
“The situation on college campuses has become so dire that civil libertarians are calling for sexual assault investigations to be left to police and prosecutors. Despite the fact that conviction in a criminal court carries severe sentences and other harsh ramifications, frustrated and fearful students, parents, and lawyers seem prepared to risk criminal convictions in their search for investigatory and prosecutorial fairness.
“If the past is prologue, it is almost certain that the current campus sexual assault madness will burn itself out, leaving in its wake the wreckage of many young lives. My concern is how long it will be before sanity and decency return.”
Read the op-ed in the Boston Globe by NCRJ Advisor Harvey Silverglate.
“But backlash was brewing both among conservatives and feminists who were discovering, and already exaggerating, a scourge of child sexual abuse. By 1977, a paradigmatic pair, LA vice cop Lloyd Martin and feminist psychologist Judianne Densen-Gerber, was traveling the land stoking the claim that 1.2 million children were victimized annually in child prostitution and pornography. Martin told a Christian TV host that pedophiles hang around maternity wards in order to ‘grab the post-fetuses and sexually victimize them.’”
Read Judith Levine’s article in Boston Review.
Copyright 2008-2026 Bob Chatelle. Design by Fort Hill Design.
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