413047-Underground-Commercial-Sex-Economy

Treatment
Stakeholders from the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force reported that offenders would
often admit they had a problem and needed help. One of these offenders in our sample described relief at
being apprehended, since he did not possess the willpower to stop collecting himself:
When I was thinking about it, I knew it was wrong. But I felt like I was on drugs. I felt like
the tiger had me by the tail. I felt like I should stop it, but I couldn’t. I said thank you to
the government, they said for what—I said for stopping me. (D20)
Three offenders (14 percent) cited the need for child pornography treatment outside of prison. Two of the
offenders (10 percent) knew they would be reported to law enforcement if they sought clinical help:
I think there needs to be a way for people to get services prior to being arrested. One of
my problems, I knew too much. I knew if I went to get help, I’d get arrested. … There was
always the temptation that I could just stop. (C7)
Two offenders wanted to be transferred to facilities with sex offender programming. For prisons with
these programs, offenders reported that treatment is only available a few years prior to release. One
offender, convicted for sexual exploitation of a child, recommended that prisons create therapy groups:
I think it would be helpful if they had a forum—maybe a group of men that met and
shared their stories with one another. They have something like this in sex offender
management program[s]—but you don’t get there until one to two years from release. I
think it’d be great if they had something in between—just like AA (Alcoholics
Anonymous), NA (Narcotics Anonymous). (B2)
Investigation and Adjudication Process
There’s so many of us, we’re going to outnumber everyone. It’s like shooting fish in a
barrel with a nuke. (A12)
Offenders’ descriptions of their experiences with the courts largely focused on their surprise about the
long sentence lengths, especially in comparison to contact offenses. As one offender stated:
The one thing I can say is that you’ll get more time for images than committing the act
itself. … My attorney is pleading against that. According to the way the bylines read, they
consider the images more detrimental than the act. (D22)
Only three (14 percent) of the offenders went to trial, with the rest presumably taking a plea deal. When
asked why they pleaded, many offenders stated they knew they would not win and feared the upper end of
the mandatory sentence. As one offender described, “I felt underneath the system and that I didn’t have a
choice in the matter” (F5). Another offender, who collected child pornography for one year before being
arrested, was surprised at how the “system” depicted him as a monster:
The whole system was a nightmare and I never had any trouble with law in my life. I’m
not a violent person, I would never conceive of touching a child—not part of who I am, I
cannot go there. It blew me away how the system made a monster out of me and tried me
as a monster and never questioned that I was never incarcerated before. (F5)
One offender, who would lie in chat rooms to “appear experienced” and “develop rapport,” expressed
frustration about how law enforcement took his IRC exchanges at face value, though his statements
contradicted each other and were therefore, in his estimation, clearly fabricated:
Law enforcement said I did this, they took chat out of context. This one says someone ten
[years old], this one thirteen [years old]. This one said I molested my nephew, but I don’t
have a nephew. (A12)
Another offender did not understand how law enforcement obtained images, since he believed that he was
not sharing his collection on a P2P network:
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