CLOSE UP AND PERSONAL:
THE JIMMY RYCE ACT

Roy Whitsett and his wife Susan are typical middle class Americans. They live in a comfortable middle class house. They drive typical middle class cars and espouse solid American middle class values.

They are people who believe implicitly in justice, democracy, the rule of law and the most cherished institutions of the country.

But in the last seven years, Roy and Susan Whitsett have had their lives turned upside down and their faith in the government and the justice system shaken to its core.

Most of those in the media consider their story "yesterday's news." But it was today's news a few weeks ago when their son, Steven, made national headlines by participating in a helicopter escape from the Martin Treatment Center established in Florida to treat what are called Sexually Violent Predators.

Then, the Whitsetts were the center of attention for a horde of reporters asking if they gave their son the money for the escape, if they knew he was going to escape, and how they "felt."

Steven Whitsett and his accomplice were captured after a manhunt which included every law enforcement organization in the area, bullet proof vests, guns, SWAT teams, The helicopter escape was replaced within days by other "sexier" stories in the news. The reporters went home.

But Steven Whitsett and his family are still there. It's difficult to get the media to even pay attention to their story now. Helicopter escapes are hot news, but a family's decade of agony is not. Sex offenders are usually interesting to the public only as objects of hate; and their families...I suppose we'd all just rather not think about them.

But those families exist, and they are not all monsters who turned their children into the same thing. Some of them are like Susan and Roy Whitsett, baffled, crushed, and disapproving of what their child has done, but also astounded by the reaction of the media and the criminal justice system.

Susan Whitsett slid a colorful piece of paper across her dining room table at me as we were sitting, the three of us, sharing a Chinese carry out meal. I turned the piece of paper around so I could read it and noted the somewhat familiar style of a major news weekly. Susan Whitsett had drawn circles around sentences in red marker and written "absolute lie" at one point.

In the article, published by Time Magazine, Steven Whitsett was described as one of the most dangerous sexual predators in Florida. The article referred to Steven and the accomplice as ex-lovers and also stated that they had lived together.

"And, It's not as if this magazine was..." She paused, groping.

"The National Enquirer." I finished for her.

"Yes."

When Susan Whitsett tried to contact Time Magazine, they didn't even give her the dignity of a reply.

That night, that Whitsetts told me about the two offences that had gotten their son sentenced to eight years in prison. Neither of these offenses was violent, one was admitted to be consensual. Steven Whitsett turned himself in for the first offense and plead guilty to the second.

But, at the beginning of the summer, while Susan and Roy Whitsett, who loved and stood beside their son through it all, were waiting for a phone call from the prison to tell them when to come and get Steven, they received another sort of call entirely. It was from Steven alright, but it was to tell them that he had been taken in shackles and in a windowless van to Martin Correctional Institution await trial for civil commitment. under the Jimmy Ryce Act. There was a possibility that he would be confined for the rest of his life.

The Whitsetts phoned a dozen government officials. Some treated them as if they were too stupid to understand the complications of the Jimmy Ryce Act, others just admitted that the act was so new they didn't understand it themselves.

The Whitsett family is caught in the web of Florida's new sexual predator act. As one psychologist at the facility told me, "We're supposed to be getting the worst of the worst here. I don't know if we are or not."

The Whitsett's certainly don't think so, not at least in the case of their son, and no parent who has ever raised a less than perfect child could fail to empathize with them.