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Predecisional |
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Thursday, 05 January 2012 13:41 |
Transparency at the U.S. Justice Department
In the early days of the Obama administration, new Attorney General Eric Holder appeared on Capitol Hill to answer questions from Congress. After long questioning over Guantanamo, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz turned the conversation to the sexual exploitation of American children and funding for America's counter-child exploitation units, or ICACs.*
Congress had just passed the PROTECT Our Children Act of 2008, authorizing huge increases in funding for law enforcement. Wasserman Schultz wanted to know why Holder had not even asked Congress for that money, and whether he planned to ever do so.
Holder wrung his hands and promised to fight to get the funding into the next administration budget.
In late 2010, we decided to take the Obama Administration up on its passionate claims to be in favor of government transparency. We used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to ask the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to show us documents that might help explain whether anyone at DOJ was really asking... and whether anyone was obstructing.
The FOIA response below, which came 13 months later, is just one of the many useless and comically insulting responses we received. Documents that could shed light on the problem are actually being denied to the public on the grounds that they are "predecisional" (a legal concept that denies the public access to work products leading up to a final decision on the grounds that letting the public see them could have a negative, chilling effect on government employees).
The government censors did let one scrap slip through, though. In an email from DOJ to a Congressional staffer, you can see what matters more to them than getting resources into the hands of front-line law enforcement to rescue children: getting $30 million to the quasi-governmental National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in time for a media dog and pony show the next day.
* Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces
 DOJ FOIA Response to PROTECT 12-11
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Friday, 02 December 2011 21:33 |
Wrong on crime
By Grier Weeks
Originally published in the Daily Caller
January 1, 2011
To prison reformers, it probably seemed like an inspired strategy to recruit small-government partisans Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist to the cause.
After all, it would be hard to find a better example of bloated government than a correctional system that spends an estimated $70 billion a year to reliably deliver no correctional results whatsoever.
So why not just reframe the whole debate over crime and punishment? Shrinking America’s massive prison system might not only force the use of humane alternatives to incarceration, it could save taxpayers money too, right?
That’s the basic premise behind the new, Texas-based initiative Right on Crime, which says it wants “less crime for less money.” It proposes to shrink prison populations by using alternatives to incarceration.
Signatories to the campaign’s statement of principles include a star-studded cast of conservatives, including not only Gingrich and Norquist, but Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and legendary conservative organizer Richard Viguerie.
“The Right on Crime Campaign represents a seismic shift in the legislative landscape,” wrote Gingrich and Prison Fellowship Vice-President Pat Nolan recently in the Washington Post, “And it opens the way for a common-sense left-right agreement on an issue that has kept the parties apart for decades.”
This dubious détente comes after a punishing thirty-year political arms race between Republicans and Democrats on crime. Democrats, tired of being flogged as “soft on crime” liberals, went blow for blow with Republicans, jacking up sentences for drug crimes and “habitual offenders.” As a result, the U.S. prison population doubled in the eighties and then nearly again in the nineties.
Soon everyone was broke, and there was no cover left for any elected official who dared to suggest sentencing offenders to the loving arms of faith-based groups like Prison Fellowship. Now it’s perestroika time.
And that is why Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, told Right on Crime supporters in a keynote address, that it might not be such a good idea anymore to “just sort of reflexively be against what the idiots are for.”
Before you applaud this heartwarming bipartisanship, consider that, when it comes to crime, both parties have been idiots. And when liberal and conservative idiots join arms, it’s usually bad news for the rest of us.
At its root, Right on Crime’s self-styled “conservative case for reform” is not right on crime so much as it’s amoral on crime. To reduce justice to a taxpayer issue says nothing about your values and priorities on justice, or even how you propose to fight crime. It simply says you want to pay less.
I began my career 25 years ago opposing new prisons, and I’m still a proponent of alternative sentencing for nonviolent offenders. But for the past decade, I’ve worked in state legislatures across the U.S. to put people who hurt children into prison. Along the way, I’ve fought alongside and against politicians from both parties.
The idea that Right on Crime’s manifesto represents a departure from business as usual, as the group says, is absurd. Keeping a lid on corrections budgets has been business as usual in every state legislature for years.
Anyone who has tried to get meaningful state crime legislation passed knows the universal bipartisan compact between lawmakers of both parties. If the fiscal impact of a bill is significant—requiring, say, new prison beds—a formidable machinery is mobilized to stop it. When a bill is so popular it cannot be killed, it is watered down. This has given rise to a particularly fraudulent variety of crime bill, crafted to appear tough while doing very little at all.
Under business as usual, it doesn’t matter whether the proposed legislation would incarcerate predatory pedophiles, clear out backlogged rape kits or keep close tabs on paroled offenders. It’s rarely about protecting the innocent; it’s usually about protecting the taxpayer.
Which raises the question, is Right on Crime a serious prison reform effort, one willing to pay the costs of services, support and supervision for deinstitutionalized inmates? Or is it simply the most serious attempt we’ve seen yet to cut spending for prisons, parole and the courts?
At the end of the day, as any warden will tell you, there’s only one strategy that holds any realistic hope for dramatically reducing prison populations. We must dam and divert the rushing river carrying children from the child protection system through the juvenile justice system and into the prison system. As attorney Andrew Vachss has said, “child protection is crime control.”
Any manifesto worthy of a major party or ideology would be built upon this foundation.
If investing heavily in child protection sounds suspiciously liberal, maybe this will help. The first step is to remove hundreds of thousands of humans who are preying on children from civilized society—and put them behind bars for a very long time.
Until you care enough to do that, Right on Crime, don’t talk to me about saving money—or being conservative.
Grier Weeks is Executive Director of the National Association to Protect Children. |
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The ‘Butner Study’ Redux: A Report of the Incidence of Hands-on Child Victimization by Child Pornography Offenders |
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This study compared two groups of child pornography offenders participating in a voluntary treatment program:
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Read more...
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Friday, 02 December 2011 21:30 |
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Eric Holder’s dirty secret
By Grier Weeks
Originally published in the Daily Caller
January 1, 2011
A 2006 law that requires the U.S. Justice Department to deploy a high-tech system for catching child pornographers has identified hundreds of thousands of criminal suspects — and collected extensive evidence pointing to the locations of their child victims.
Yet, despite knowledge of this evidence, Attorney General Eric Holder has refused calls to take serious action.
Now, a Republican-controlled Judiciary Committee, and a government oversight panel on the warpath, could finally force Holder to explain two years of inaction that left thousands of children in danger.
Congress mandates action
To understand Holder’s outrageous failure to protect, some history is necessary.
Congressional interest in an online system for fighting child exploitation dates back to 2006, when Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) sponsored the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006.
Though Sensenbrenner’s legislation is best known for its focus on sex offender registries, a lesser-known provision mandated that the Attorney General deploy “technology modeled after” a Canadian law enforcement system designed by Microsoft.
In the wake of the Justice Department’s rejection of Microsoft’s offer to donate its Child Exploitation Tracking System (CETS) system (citing its prosecution of the company for antitrust violations), Congress ordered Justice to provide a substitute.
That technology was deployed, and nearly overnight U.S. law enforcement began seeing and sharing information on an estimated 300,000-500,000 suspects trafficking in horrific video and photographs of children being raped, abused and even tortured.
A shocking picture emerges
The existence of this new law enforcement system — and the shocking picture then emerging of the full magnitude of the crisis — was disclosed in several Congressional hearings from 2006-2008.
Law enforcement experts working closely with the online system (known as the ICAC Data Network or Operation Fairplay) showed Congress satellite maps of the U.S., plotting the location of traffickers. In one 2008 Senate briefing, agents went online live and gave a stunned audience a glimpse of the buzzing hive of domestic child pornography trafficking, as it happened in real time.
Top federal officials confirmed what the cyber cops were seeing online. When asked during House Energy and Commerce Committee hearings, Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher and FBI officials Raul Roldan and Arnold Bell estimated there were “hundreds of thousands” of individuals in the U.S. engaged in child pornography crimes. All of this prompted Committee Chairman Joe Barton (R-TX) to plead with the Bush administration to ask Congress for more funding.
“If we’re serious about this,” said Barton, “let’s put some muscle [behind it] . . . If I’ve got to put out a major forest fire, I don’t send one firefighter, no matter how good he is. I mobilize the entire operation.” (video)
Child rescue
There was something more explosive emerging, however, than revelations about how easy it had become to arrest perpetrators. Law enforcement was now learning to follow the trail of child pornography back through the Internet to the door of “dual offenders,” criminals who trafficked in child pornography and were also hands-on offenders. Conservative estimates indicated this was at least one in three child pornography possessors.
For the first time in history, the technology existed to detect and stop child sexual abuse on a massive scale. Americans got their first glimpse of this child rescue technology when Oprah Winfrey devoted a one-hour show to the issue in late 2008, featuring three Ohio girls who had been rescued using the online system. They had been drugged and sexually assaulted during sleepovers, never even knowing what had happened until police found and told them.
Eric Holder was confronted with this news immediately upon arriving at the Justice Department. On Capitol Hill, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) pressured him publicly and repeatedly to take bold action, which he vowed to do.
Privately, my organization, PROTECT, began briefing President-elect Obama’s transition team on the urgent need to take action on child rescues even before the inauguration. Throughout 2009, we held face-to-face meetings with officials all the way up the chain of command, ending with a half-hour meeting with Holder and his staff. From the Adam Walsh Act requirements to the law enforcement maps, he was fully briefed and knew lives were at stake.
One of our consistent requests to the Holder Justice Department was that they at least ask Congress for the full funding authorized under the PROTECT Act of 2008 for law enforcement. It was hard to convince Congress of the urgent need for child rescue funding, we explained, when the administration didn’t even care enough to ask for it.
Two years and three budgets later, it’s clear Eric Holder will not take action on these atrocities until he is forced to do so politically, and it’s long past time for Congress to do just that. There should be no excuses for a government that has the means to protect children from predation and exploitation, yet refuses to do so.
Congress needs to fully investigate what the Justice Department knew and when it knew it. It needs a full accounting of what evidence resides in Justice Department-sponsored databases that could locate both child predators and their victims. It needs to demand that the full resources of the federal government are immediately deployed for child rescue in every community across the U.S.
Every child victim who has been, or can be, identified should be brought to safety now, before they come to further, grievous harm.
Grier Weeks is Executive Director of the National Association to Protect Children. He testified before Congress on child exploitation in 2006, 2007 and 2008. |
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Friday, 02 December 2011 21:26 |
Extradite Dr. Phil now
By Grier Weeks
Originally published in the Daily Caller
February 9, 2011
Alaska authorities have charged a woman with child abuse for brutalizing a Russian boy she adopted, but federal authorities should be looking hard at charging television’s “Dr. Phil” McGraw for his role in the crimes.
Jessica Beagley, the 35-year-old wife of an Anchorage police officer, was featured on McGraw’s show forcing the seven-year-old boy to drink hot sauce, verbally assaulting him and then putting him in a cold shower for punishment. The abuse was so disturbing it caused audience members to cry and call for removal of children from Beagley’s home.
Holding the camera throughout the harrowing scene was Beagley’s 10-year-old daughter. The Associated Press reports that McGraw’s producers had asked Beagley to get them footage of her abusing the child, after she sent them a video describing the punishment she planned.
The “Dr. Phil” show sought the footage in order to capture “naturally occurring behaviors and interactions,” claims spokeswoman Stacey Luchs. Beagley and her attorney claim she believed she would get on the show for parenting help.
But McGraw’s producers wanted footage of actual abuse.
Having solicited and received the video, the show promoted it with lurid advertisements, featuring their gritty, child’s-eye-level camera work. McGraw then broadcast the boy’s humiliation on a show entitled, “Mommy Confessions.”
“What happens behind closed doors can be shocking,” McGraw promises his viewers, chin in hand. A split second later, piercing screams emerge from behind a shower curtain.
McGraw’s degenerate production has provoked a minor international incident, focusing attention on abuse by Americans of children adopted from overseas. “This video caused a huge wave of outrage in Russia,” says Andrey Bondarev of the Russian Consulate in Seattle.
An embassy press officer interviewed by ABC News says Russian authorities “are in contact with the U.S. officials regarding this case.” Another official, said to be an assistant to Russia’s Commissioner of Children’s Rights, told the Anchorage Daily News that “there is quite a big chance” of the boy and his twin brother being taken from their American siblings and returned to Russia if Beagley is convicted.
Despite all this, news reports appear blind to the obvious role McGraw played in commissioning the child abuse for his television show. Law enforcement authorities — made aware of the incident by the Russians, if by no one else — also seem to take for granted that television entertainment is an acceptable motive for inducing crimes against children.
No matter how you look at it, it seems clear that McGraw caused abuse to occur that might not otherwise have happened. On the day in question, one child was cruelly assaulted in a staged incident, while a second was forced to hold the camera and film her brother’s suffering for McGraw’s benefit.
Instead of immediately notifying Anchorage authorities of the abuse — and their own role in it — the McGraw show made the decision to take their ill-gotten gain and exploit it for commercial profit. Their actions further exacerbated the pain suffered by both child victims and their siblings, pain that is not over yet.
Phil McGraw should give up every penny of his foul profit immediately, in some arrangement that benefits these or other victims of abuse, without any chance of further contact or manipulation by him and his show. Then he should answer in a court of law, along with Beagley, for his role in this incident.
After that, maybe he can be extradited to Russia. You can see it from Alaska.
Grier Weeks is Executive Director of PROTECT (www.protect.org). |
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The PROTECT Lobby
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Our Mission
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The National Association to Protect Children is a national, pro-child, anti-crime membership association. We are founded on the belief that our first and most sacred obligation as parents, citizens, and members of the human species is the protection of children from harm.
PROTECT is a bipartisan pro-child, anti-crime lobby whose sole focus is making the protection of children a top political and policy priority at the national, state and local level.
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