Posted on 08/29/2005 9:08:09 AM PDT by SmithL
Greg Grant is scheduled for surgery this morning, convinced that a cure for the deviant sexual fantasies that have ailed him for decades will arrive when a doctor makes a small incision and delicately plucks away his manhood.
Grant, 60, is one of 572 men confined at Atascadero State Hospital as sexually violent predators. The former resident of Santa Cruz is slated to become one of at least 14 men in the decade-old program for California's worst repeat sex offenders to have his testicles voluntarily removed -- a controversial procedure that studies say can extinguish the sexual impulses that lead many of these men to attack.
"I don't want anything to do with sex anymore," Grant said by telephone last week. "I've had so much of that I don't want any part of it -- good or bad. I want it gone."
The surgical castration puts the former car salesman at the center of a decades-old controversy over the surgery and its effectiveness in treating sex offenders.
If the operation goes as planned, Grant will return by nightfall to Atascadero, the 1950s-era hospital in bucolic Central California where he has been held for six years. He is adamant that his 1981 molestation of a 9-year-old boy in a Santa Cruz motel room, and two other attacks in the 1970s are the only times he crossed the line and hurt others in acting out a perverse sexual fantasy.
Grant hopes the surgery will not only end his deviant sexual impulses but also his imprisonment.
But Grant's sacrifice flies in the face of the state's emphasis on cognitive-behavioral therapy for sex offenders -- therapy he rejects as ineffective -- and its official opposition to surgical castration as a treatment.
Most of the medical staff at Atascadero are likely to recommend Grant's continued confinement in a program that indefinitely holds high-risk sex offenders after their prison terms to protect public safety. Doctors chide Grant's decision as the folly of a man who refuses to confront his demons.
"I think it's human nature to look for the quick cure, the instant pixie dust that will ensure I will never offend again," said Gabrielle Paladino, a clinical psychiatrist who runs three treatment groups in Atascadero's predator program. But, she added, "If you don't change your thinking, there's still going to be a problem."
Anecdotal evidence suggests Grant's surgery may add significant weight to his legal fight to be released from custody for the first time in 21 years. At least eight men have been released from the Atascadero program after undergoing surgical castration, known in medical parlance as bilateral orchiectomy, which prevents the body from producing the male hormone testosterone.
That far outnumbers the three who have gained their release by completing the four-phase relapse prevention therapy regimen that is the hospital program's cornerstone. Moreover, two of those three men were surgically castrated prior to their release, a fact that seems to have swayed doctors and judges on their behalf.
"As much as any one other factor, it opened the door," said Brian Matthews, the deputy Santa Clara public defender whose client, Brian DeVries, was the first man to win release from Atascadero by completing treatment.
But Grant, who on three occasions sexually molested boys in ways that mimicked his own sexual abuse as a child, is adamant his decision is more about personal relief than a calculated bid to win his freedom.
"If I were to get out today the first thing I would do is go have the surgery," he said.
Beyond Grant's drastic gesture lies a broader controversy about surgical castration in California. Critics say taxpayers are being soaked for millions of dollars due to the state's emphasis on therapy-based programs that ignore what could be a quicker, more permanent fix delivered in one visit to the doctor.
The state pays about $130,000 a year for each man housed in the Atascadero program, or about four times what it spends on each inmate in the prison system. That brings the cost of the Atascadero program to at least $74 million this year.
Grant's surgery will cost about $9,000, which he has collected through donations from friends and family because the state refuses to pay for the procedure. There will be other costs down the road, including the drugs he will take to ward off osteoporosis and other side effects.
A flurry of studies in the mid-20th century, most in Europe, including Nazi Germany, showed post-castration recidivism rates for repeat sex offenders between 2 percent and 10 percent, according to an exhaustive survey that was published this year in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law.
More recent studies put the recidivism rate at 14 percent for those who receive therapy.
The highest rate of post-surgical recidivism was recorded in a 1971 follow-up of 21 castrated sex offenders in Denmark, two of whom attacked again after obtaining testosterone injections from their doctors.
Six follow-up studies performed between 1952 and 1989 recorded a 3.3 percent recidivism rate on average, which the survey found was well below the 14 percent level most often linked to high-risk offenders treated through relapse-prevention therapy favored in California and other states.
"The studies all show that bilateral orchiectomy is more effective treatment -- by far," said Michael Aye, a Sacramento attorney who has represented about 30 sexually violent predators in California, including several men who have opted for surgical castration.
"They also suggest that the cost of confining people in this state who do not need to be confined is through the roof," he said.
Grant is absolute in believing he's on the cusp of a cure, bringing an end to his obsession with boys and sex that dominated his life for decades, after being triggered one night in 1972 while he viewed "Midnight Cowboy" at a drive-in theater.
He is so confident because he has conquered his demons before. For nearly five years at Atascadero, Grant received daily injections of so-called chemical castration drugs, whose testosterone-lowering effects mimic those of the surgery he's about to undergo.
"All the fantasies stopped," he said. "For the first time in 25 years, I could concentrate on other things."
But in 2003, doctors at Atascadero ordered a halt to his daily treatments with Depo-Provera due to concerns about severe osteoporosis, the weakening of the bones related to loss of male hormone.
Lately, Grant says, the old obsessions that dominated him day and night for more than two decades have begun to resurface.
"I want this to stop," he said.
The thought of those feelings returning with such all-consuming force is a lot scarier than offering up a precious part of his anatomy, Grant says.
"If they want to put big chain link fence around me with razor wire on top of it, OK, I'll accept that," he said. "But I want to feel like a normal person again. I want my life back."
The cure I have for this guy's problem would take years to implement, and at it's completion, you just feed the pieces to the alligators.
It's no cure but it is a start.
rusty toe nail clippers follwed by a bottle of rubbing alchohol to sanitize the wound.
I have always said that the death penalty is an enormous deterrent to those who are deathed.
I guess this is a good thing, this man seems serious about fixing his sick condition.
You just saved us $8999.83 !!
If anyone wants to know why our federal, state, and local taxes are out of control, this is a prime example...
ITMT, why can't we merely give the inmates a bunch of vegetable seeds and tents, and air drop them onto Devil's Island of 'Papillion' fame, or somewhere similar?
Thats correct.
Poster #2 has the correct prescription... the dose may vary with weight.
Unless they can castrate his brain, I doubt if this will help.
I thought they tried this in Scandinavia in the 1930s and it was shown to be ineffective.
Chemical or actual castration doesn't work, according to my neighbor who worked on the panel reviewing the release requests of sexual predators.
He assures me that predators will go through any surgery or any rehabilitation in order to get out and re-offend.
And he's a good liberal.
It seems that the guy has already changed his thinking. Now he needs impulse control. And even if the castration medically does nothing, he believes it does. If he believes his impulses are gone, then they are effectively gone.
I know there's no sympathy for those deviants who have already harmed innocents. Those types should perhaps never be free to harm anyone again, castrated or not.
But I wonder, what about those who haven't yet acted on their perverted thoughts and impulses? For example, those who are still young, and struggling to overcome a problem that was not caused by anything they did.
If chemical treatments can be made to work, it would be good for men who have not yet entered the "justice" system because they haven't hurt anyone, but their desires are strong enough that they need strong help.
What say you?
All he has to do is get some doctor to prescribe him testosterone, and he's back in business.
They should remove everything below the ribs and plunk him on a scateboard.
I'm a big fan of castration. I personally believe that a simple castration will pretty much guarantee the guy will stop the activity.
It is all about human motivation. And the sexual motivation is only part of what gets removed when the testicles are removed. There wouldn't even be a need for prison time. Hack 'em off and put him on the street.
What will work ( to satisfy those against capital punishment) is the following:
(1) castration...followed immediatly by a..
(2) frontal lobotomy.
End of problem.
The guy's got balls, I'll grant him that...
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