PACOIMA — When Robert Lee Donaldson stood before a judge in 1982, he faced a newly revised criminal justice system designed to get tough on child molesters.
Furious over painful cases of criminals who were freed only to find new victims, politicians abolished laws that had sent offenders to state mental hospitals until they were presumed to be cured.
Rather than treatment, Donaldson got the maximum prison term possible, 16 years for raping a 15-year-old boy in Pacoima.
But along with the certainty that he would not be released too soon, the new law guaranteed something else--that Donaldson, through good behavior in prison, largely controlled the date of his freedom.
He served 9 1/2 years and was automatically paroled without a hearing. Today, police say they have firm evidence that Donaldson returned in August to the neighborhood where he had been accused of raping three youths a decade ago to prey once again, abducting and raping three more, each of whom was walking to school. Warrants have been issued for the arrest of Donaldson, who is at large.
It wasn't supposed to happen this way.
"The way the system operates now doesn't afford as much protection as it would have before," said Jerome DiMaggio, the state's parole administrator for northern Los Angeles County. "There are many other cases like Donaldson that are a danger to the community. There are a lot of guys like him out there."
DiMaggio has called Donaldson's release a "flaw in the system."
The California system has shifted from an emphasis on treatment to imprisonment, but without enough data to create the proper balance, said psychiatrist Craig Nelson, treatment director for the Sex Offender Treatment and Evaluation Project at Atascadero State Hospital. Today, experts seldom speak of a "cure" for sex offenders. Much like treatment for alcoholics, psychiatrists now try to alter offenders' behavior patterns and train them to stay away from high-risk situations.
"It's kind of a pendulum swing," Nelson said. "If the last big offender came out of a treatment program, there's a big hue and cry to do away with treatment. If he comes out of prison and re-offends, then they say, 'of course he re-offended, he needs treatment.' "
At age 34, Donaldson has been in juvenile or adult detention for most of the past 20 years for attempted murder, robbery, sexual abuse of children and parole violations.
Donaldson's sentence was a byproduct of the case of Theodore Frank, the convicted child molester who raped, tortured and murdered a 2 1/2-year-old Camarillo girl six weeks after his release from a state mental hospital.
The Legislature in 1982 abolished the state's Mentally Disordered Sex Offender law that had sent Frank to a hospital instead of prison.
Now, sex convicts like Donaldson go through the determinate sentencing process. They serve a set time, can reduce it through good behavior and are paroled automatically.
Studies show that 51% of the sex offenders paroled in 1990 were returned to custody by 1992, according to the state Department of Corrections. More than half of them, 58%, came back for sex offenses.
Public policy continues to focus on tougher sentences. A new law taking effect in January will sentence three-time repeat offenders to 25 years to life and require potential parolees to be reviewed by the state Board of Prison Terms before release.
With the exception of two small experimental programs, there is no longer any comprehensive attempt to treat or alter the behaviors of California's 8,277 imprisoned sex offenders or the 4,681 on parole, according to Department of Corrections officials.
"We need to do something with these people while they are in," said Gary Lowe, who directs an experimental sex crimes treatment program for the Department of Corrections. "Incarceration keeps them off the street and keeps them from re-offending, which is a lot. But eventually, they have to come out."
Lowe's 4-year-old project monitors and treats risky sex-offender parolees, but hasn't made it south to Los Angeles County, where there are 20,193 registered sex offenders.
So far, he said, about 15% to 17% of the estimated 300 parolees to pass through Lowe's treatment have been taken back into custody, the vast majority of them for violating its strict parole rules. About 5% of the 300 were charged with sexual offenses, he said.
"We've got a lot of eyes on these guys," Lowe said. "We find a guy with pornographic material, we get him off the street. If we find a rapist out after dark and he's not supposed to be, we take him in."
But the program works, in part, because parole officers are assigned a maximum of 35 parolees. The norm for Los Angeles County averages 80 to 100 per officer, according to DiMaggio.
In a little-known provision of the law that eliminated hospital terms for sex offenders, Atascadero has been charged with studying new treatments for sex offenders and tracking their repeat-offense rates.
