by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
It’s an indication of how far behind I’ve fallen in my
journal writing and movie blog-posting that it’s taken me this long to find the
time to comment on a film I saw last week: a PBS-TV documentary showing of the
movie Pervert Park. Made by the
husband-and-wife team of Lasse and Frida Barkfors, Pervert Park is the colloquial name — the people who live there
call it that themselves — of a facility called Florida Justice Transitions.
It’s a home for people who’ve been convicted of sex crimes for which they’ve
been forced to register as sex offenders, which under the law in Florida, California
and most other states sets severe restrictions on how far they can live from a
school, a public park or any other place where children are likely to
congregate. (These restrictions apply even to people whose crimes involved
exclusively adult victims.) It’s basically a series of trailers on a plot of
land far enough away from any of the prohibited areas, and the inmates help
maintain the place and grow food for it to help cover the costs of housing
them. “Although many of their crimes are unspeakable, what do we, as a
community, gain from our willful silence?,” the Barkfors explain in a statement
accompanying the film. “If we hope to curb the cycle and culture of sexual
violence, is there value in exploring the lives of sex offenders, regardless of
how heartbreaking and difficult it might be?”
Pervert Park zeroes in on the in-house therapist who tries to
work with these people and get them back into a state where they could be part
of society again, and a handful of the inmates who tell their stories on camera.
The therapist is Don Sweeney, who since the film was made in 2013 (though the
copyright date is 2014) has retired to Italy with his wife, and the inmates
include Patrick Naughton, who unable to find either a long-term relationship
with a woman or a prostitute when he wanted one, went to Mexico and kidnapped
and raped a pre-pubescent girl; Will Fuery, Jr., who as a child was seduced by
his babysitter and went on as an adult to expose himself to a teenage girl and
get a long prison sentence; Tracy Hutchinson, the one woman featured on the
show, who as a girl was regularly molested by her father, who insisted on
restarting their sexual relationship when she was an adult with a son of her
own, Dustin, and who was convicted of molesting Dustin at the behest of a man
who promised to get her out of her dad’s home but only if she’d have sex with
her son and let him watch; and what’s probably the most heartbreaking story of
all, Jamie Turner, a young, attractive, personable man who got caught in an
online sex sting in which he thought he was cruising a 30-year-old woman while
the “woman” — really a police operative — kept trying to get him to confess a
lascivious interest in her (nonexistent) daughter. He’s a film student who
already had a masters’ degree when he was caught and was working towards a
Ph.D., and one gets the impression that his only “sex crime” was thinking with his dick — and if
thinking with your dick was a crime, at least three-quarters of all males would
be behind bars.
The fact that the inmates the Barkfors chose to profile run the
gamut from thought-criminals like Jamie (who was clearly busted based on what
he was, or may have been, thinking
rather than anything he actually did) to people like Patrick who really did
something pretty loathsome (no matter how good he is at justifying it onscreen)
itself sends a message that the “sex criminal” label encompasses a wide range
of conduct and that a one-size-fits-all condemnation is neither accurate nor
just. The Barkfors said their purpose in making the film was to show that even
“the lowest of the low” have some
positive qualities, and it makes the currently unfashionable case that the
purpose of criminal justice ought to be to rehabilitate the offenders rather
than simply to punish or segregate them from the rest of the population. (One
man in the film rather sadly confesses that when he was arrested for molesting
two boys, he was in a relationship with a woman but one that wasn’t satisfying
for him because he was Gay.) One interesting thing about Pervert Park is that, as much as I’ve ridiculed the “vampire”
theory of sex crime when it’s been presented on shows like Law and
Order: Special Victims Unit — the idea that
the victims of molestation grow up to be molesters themselves — enough of the
people interviewed in Pervert Park
were themselves victimized as kids that it seems a lot more believable to me
since I’ve seen this film. (At the same time that’s frequently used as an
excuse to be even tougher on sex
criminals in general and child molesters in particular: the argument that being
molested has “destroyed their souls” and therefore we have to lock them up and
keep them incarcerated to protect the public against the actions those
“destroyed souls” will lead them to.) Tracy’s interview mentions that her son
Dustin — the one she molested to get away from the dad who molested her —
sexually assaulted a three-year-old boy when he was 13 and then at 19 was
arrested for armed robbery. Though cut down by about 18 minutes from the
Bankfors’ original cut (and I’d like to see the full version sometime), Pervert
Park on the PBS “P.O.V.” (short for “point
of view”) series is a compelling documentary and a wrenching bit of complexity
ascribed to a subject most people don’t think is complex at all — “He had sex
with a kid? Lock him up and throw the key away!”
