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The knock on the door came at 9:30 pm. The armed officer announced a search. Within a few minutes, he found a copy of The Best Gay Erotica of 1996, a drag zine called My Comrade, and a Boyd McDonald anthology of sex histories, Scum. The apartment's occupant was handcuffed and taken away in an unmarked car. After nine weeks in jail, the prisoner had a hearing before a judge, who found him guilty. He spent the next two months locked in a cell.

This was not Tehran or Beijing. It was New York City last year. And thanks to a new law being cooked up in state legislatures, soon similar raids will occur all over America.

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Knocking on the door May 29, 1996 was a New York City parole officer. The apartment was home to Chris Farrell, a 38-year-old gay man, who was on parole after serving four years in prison for consensual sex with three teenagers. As part of his parole conditions, Farrell was prohibited from possessing pornography. Farrell thought he was following the rules: there was not a porno tape or skin magazine in his apartment.

At the hearing for his parole violation, the officer-- whose department vows "zero tolerance" for sex offenders- said he would have busted Farrell for having photo of Michaelangelo's David. The judge sided with cop, and ruled that the seized material was prohibited pornography. Farrell was bundled off to prison to spend the remainder of his sentence.

New York State could keep Farrell locked up only until his parole ended, six years after his four-to-six-year sentence had begun. But under proposed laws now under consideration in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, parole for most sex offenders-- including those convicted of completely consensual acts with teenagers-- would continue for life. In effect, every punishment for illegal sex, even where there was no victim, would be a life sentence.

From the pages of 1984

"I used to think that prisoners out on parole were free," says Rock Thatcher, a Phoenix man who has worked for years with homosexual prisoners. "Now I know that they're still serving their sentence, just in a different way." Parole boards, as many prisoners discover, have total control over their parolees. States can impose any condition. In recent years, for no class of offender-- not for killers, not for embezzlers, not for robbers who beat their victims to a pulp-- are parole rules harsher than for people who violate sex laws.

The list is long and varied. Parolees always lose the freedom to travel-- to leave the state, the county, or perhaps a 25-mile radius of their home. They may be subject to 24-hour electronic monitoring with an ankle bracelet, and nighttime curfews. They are barred from having any contact with minors, or from going near (say, within 100 yards) of a school, park, or playground.

Sex parolees are required to attend and pay for weekly "therapy." In California, paroled sex offenders can be forced to get "chemically castrated" with injections of Depo Provera, a suspected carcinogen. A recent trend is to require lie detector tests about sexual practices and fantasies, and to impose plethysmography, in which a man's penis is monitored to test his response to forbidden stimuli. Fail the tests and you can be declared "out of compliance" with your therapy and sent back to jail.

What parolees can read, with whom they can communicate, their living arrangements, and where they work all must be approved by the state. Sex parolees are often forbidden to own or operate a computer. Homes and work places can be searched at any time. Apartment dwellers may be forced to give up the key to the building door so that searches can occur without notice

Parole conditions often extend down to absurd minutiae, limited only by parole cop's whimsy and lust for control. In the case of Joe Power, a California man imprisoned for oral sex with a consenting 15-year-old, parole forbid him to have more than one item of junk food in his house. Presumably, two bags of potato chips would make Powers simply irresistible to teenage boys. The state nearly revoked Powers' parole when one day an officer found two candy bar wrappers in his wastebasket. A parole cop strolling through an Arizona man's home spotted an exercise video and ordered him to destroy it, lest the adult, leotarded instructor drive him to uncontrollable desire. Parolees live more intimately with Big Brother than Orwell could have imagined.

The purpose of these vague and all-encompassing parole requirements is to create impossible standards. What if the bus a paroled man needs to take to work comes within 100 yards of a school? What does it mean to have "no contact with persons under 18." Does it mean you risk years in prison by ordering fries at McDonalds? What if the bearded young man who asks you directions at a stoplight turns out to be 16? With 234,000 sex offenders in prison or on parole or probation in the US on any given day, there will be many opportunities to answer these questions.

The Catch-22 nature of these restrictions becomes clear upon considering that harsh parole rules are only one of range of new repressive tactics used against people who violate sex laws. Since 1994, every state has developed a public registry of sex offenders which feeds into a master federal database of names, addresses, photos, fingerprints, and DNA samples. Each state now offers public notification, in which the identities, home addresses, and photos of sex offenders are, variously: tacked up by police on telephone poles; released to schools, women's groups, and youth clubs; posted on the Internet; and flashed on television. In the resulting hysteria, parole conditions that would be hard to meet under the best circumstances become impossible. In Santa Rosa, California, last July, a man released from prison for sex with a boy found a hundred demonstrators picketing his apartment. He was sent back to prison after neighbors told police he was seen speaking to teenagers. "I swear I didn't communicate one word to any of those kids," Russell Markvardsen told an Oakland TV reporter. Whether he did or not remains unproved-- parole boards do not judge evidence by the standards of criminal trials, "beyond a reasonable doubt." Rather, they consider whether the charge was merely "probable." Under lifetime parole, a parolee's limited freedom depends on the whims of chance, neighbors, and hostile parole officers.

A perversion of parole

Parole was never intended to be like this. Traditionally, parole has been part carrot and part stick. It is imposed on prisoners as a condition of their release, during the time the state could have kept them locked up. Used this way, parole's restrictions have at least a colorable rationale, giving ex-inmates a way-station between prison's rigors and unstructured freedom. Parole had been part of a defined and limited punishment. You go to prison, pay your debt to society, and are allowed to come back into it.

But parole is radically different when imposed forever on a whole class of people. Parole then comes to look more like apartheid, the singling out a particular group as sub-citizens and sub-human. Lifetime sex parolees, like blacks in the old South Africa or American South, will live under a law that is separate and unequal, a law recognizing no rights or freedoms-- not the right to read, to express oneself, to travel, to associate or assemble. Most of all, sex parolees have no right to privacy. With lie detectors and plethysmographs in the hands of their captors, they lose rights even to their own minds and bodies.

The reason advocates give for lifetime parole is a high rate of recidivism among those who break sex laws. This high recidivism has become an article of faith, inscribed into the preamble of numerous laws. But it is a lie. John Gifford, spokesman for the New Hampshire Department of Corrections, where lifetime parole is likely to pass this year, tells The Guide that sex offenders have the lowest recidivism of any offenders in the state, nine percent. This figure is replicated in hundreds of other studies. A meta-analysis of 673 such studies by Dr. Margaret Alexander of the Oshkosh Institute shows that nearly 90 percent of once-caught sex offenders are never rearrested for a subsequent sex offense. By contrast, the FBI says that 74 percent of persons in prison for violence, drugs, or crimes against property are back in prison within four years.

A narrowly-focused totalitarianism is now emerging in the US, with its massive and growing systems of incarceration and surveillance. The repression targets artificially created categories of demonized people-- drug lords, terrorists, sex offenders. These groups are not officially defined by race, ethnicity, or religion-- straightforward repression on these grounds is now politically taboo, though of course it continues. Those targeted under this new totalitarianism are vulnerable because they are part of an artificial category having no history and no community. This gives politicians, ambitious professionals, and the media free hand to paint them into demonic form and set up repressive bureaucracies to grind out their humanity.

Author Profile:  Bill Andriette
Bill Andriette is features editor of The Guide
Email:	theguide@guidemag.com