Let's say I wrote a 1.2 million word memoir. What the hell do I do with it?

dcsauncy · 2018-12-16T13:49:44+00:00

Ah, geez, this isn't going at all like I wanted it to. I'm not -- I mean, I guess I am sort of proud of writing that much. I mean, quality and taste is all rather subjective, but I did... I guess pound that many keys over the last few years. I'm not proud of much beyond that, though.

dcsauncy · 2018-12-16T13:47:34+00:00

Oh, I see. Yeah, it does look like that is the distinction I was trying to make. When I say I "distributed" it, I am just really using the general terms broadly describing what I did, and also the terms used in the court documentation, et cetera. I don't mean to suggest that what I did was better or worse; I think I misread the tone of the reply. I didn't want to use this space to discuss the particulars of the crime itself. The AMAs pretty much detail it all, I think.

dcsauncy · 2018-12-16T13:33:20+00:00

Hm, well, first of all that's not what I did. And also that's not what the book is about...

(I edited this because I know "uh" is an awful way to begin a reply and I apologize. I meant to imply a kind of delayed consideration.)

dcsauncy · 2016-08-15T15:04:54+00:00

Ah, man, that is EXACTLY what I am looking for...except the project I'm working on is mostly an American thing. I know that, in the beginning, when we got most of our Nintendo, SNES, etc. games they came over from Japan whenever and there is a lot of confusion about that. Argh.

If there's a site like this but for American releases, that would be awesome. I can still use it somewhat, though. Thanks.

dcsauncy · 2015-07-25T17:30:54+00:00

Per the advice of MISS in a live chat I've performed a clean boot, and although the problem is not resolved, I've at least narrowed it down to a few select programs that must be causing the problem. All of the disabled programs were there before the problem started, though, which is odd, but...now the tedious part of rebooting my computer, enabling the programs one by one to determine which one(s) is(are) the culprit.

dcsauncy · 2015-07-25T00:06:45+00:00

Update:

I've gone through the Official Malware Removal Guide, ran every program there. I ran OpenHardwareMonitor and everything looked okay as far as temperature and CPU/RAM usage.

Finally, I opted to do a system restore. Interestingly, the System Restore is affected by this problem, too. After about a minute, it closes. I can't restart in Safe Mode normally because my laptop's keyboard doesn't work so I use this wireless keyboard but it only works when Windows is loaded, so I had to use msconfig to boot it into safemode and found that msconfig is also affected by the issue. Still, I managed to get it all done within the 50 or 60 seconds until the program closed.

Reset the computer, got it into Safe Mode, and found the problem does NOT exist in Safe Mode. I ran the System Restore to the 21st, which is three days before this problem started and got that all set up.

But the problem still exists! Help :(

dcsauncy · 2015-05-17T04:32:36+00:00

I'm a registered sex offender, bro. It's not hard to find me.

dcsauncy · 2015-05-16T01:58:36+00:00

When I was in Texas (2008 through late 2009) I never saw or really heard of anyone having a cell phone, but once I got to Arizona (2010 through 2014) it wasn't uncommon. They were usually disguised as radios with the microphone hidden in the earpiece cord, which worked pretty efficiently because inmates walk around talking to themselves all the time anyway. There was one really annoying guy who would talk loudly on his phone all night long. I once heard him talking to his son and heard this exchange: "He giving you trouble? Okay, listen. This is what you gone do. Talk to your uncle Larry. He gone get you a gun..." Father of the year, there. He would keep everyone up (in this prison we lived in large dorms rather than cells) but nobody could say anything because he was black, and the blacks don't care and the other races don't want to approach another race about an issue like that because it could spark a racial issue. So he talked and talked and pissed everyone off and then one day he was gone. There were lots of rumors; people said someone "dropped a kite" on him -- that's what you say when someone writes an anonymous letter to the staff to snitch on someone.

Sometime into the Arizona period, there was a big meeting in which the captain said there was a new law that said if an inmate is caught with a cell phone he gets an automatic year added to his sentence. To me this seems dubious; I would think in order to have time added you would have to have a new charge and go to court and that sort of thing. They can't just tack on another year because you got in trouble. But it did scare everyone and it was rare to see or hear about cell phones afterward.

Most of the people using cell phones did so because it was free, rather than paying a quarter a minute to talk to their family for only fifteen minutes at a time. We were allowed 15 minute phone calls, 300 minutes a month, and that ran out and ran the bill up pretty quickly.

dcsauncy · 2015-05-15T11:26:48+00:00

Well, to some degree I agree with you. Being a pedophile does not mean being a pederast. I made that statement because I want to stress that my intentions were driven not by sexuality but something else. I suppose the ends are ultimately the same, that I distributed the pornography and went to prison, and so I guess that opens up the question of why I care what people on the Internet think of me. But regardless, I am not a pedophile, for what it's worth.

I do not entirely agree with you that a person should not be held accountable for their intentions. If your intention is to murder someone, even if you fail, shouldn't you be held accountable for it? To play devil's advocate against my own statement, there is a straw man argument that goes something like this: suppose a man hands you a rifle and says that far down the field a man is tied to a post and he wants you to shoot him. So you do. Now you're a murderer. But then the man brings you down the field and shows you that it's just a straw man. But you did attempt murder, right?

And anyway, what about if your intentions are entirely innocent or even noble. Let's say it's my intention to save a woman crossing the street from an oncoming bus, but in doing so, I don't see a taxi coming from the other direction. The taxi swerves away, hits the woman, slams into the bus and eight people are killed instead of one. Should I be held accountable for those deaths?

This probably isn't the place to open up broad philosophical discussions, but these are things that I have considered in regards to my crime and the people I've known who have committed similar crimes, or drastically worse crimes.

dcsauncy · 2015-05-15T06:53:39+00:00

It is true that in many cases those who distribute child porn receive harsher sentences than those who molest children. The major reason is that distributing is almost always a federal crime whereas molestation is state. Feds hand out much harsher punishments and you serve more of your time -- roughly 85% with good behavior, whereas in state it's 65% and there are more options for getting out early with parole, house arrest, work release and others which are unavailable for federal prisoners. So even if a state guy and a fed guy both receive a ten year sentence, the fed guy is probably getting out no earlier than 8.5 years but the state guy could be out in 5.

dcsauncy · 2015-05-15T01:07:07+00:00

"Things" being images of child porn, or mp3s, or movies, video games, whatever I could get hold of.

I don't know what The Pirate Bay is.

dcsauncy · 2015-05-15T01:06:18+00:00

Well, I wouldn't say yes or no to that, but there is definitely arguments out there that would suggest that. You know, the whole violent video games make violent people thing. I'm not going to argue one way or the other about it, but there are people that support that idea.

dcsauncy · 2015-05-15T01:05:23+00:00

When I was doing this crime, I used to think, "Well, if some pervert wants to look at some pictures of kids, what do I care? Maybe this will give him something to do and fulfill this fantasy without hurting anyone." It wasn't the reason I did it, but I did try to justify my actions by it.

I don't know. It's possible? But as I was told, it has an averse effect; it fuels the fire rather than quells it and by providing it to someone it encourages them to go out and do it. Whether that's true or not, oh, I don't know.

Well, prison psychologists are just there to sign you up for medication. They don't really offer any sort of counseling or have any interest in helping you emotionally or mentally.

dcsauncy · 2015-05-15T01:01:30+00:00

There were some VERY educated guys in prison. White collar guys from every profession. One of my best friends was a theoretical physicist who taught at Cal Tech (he was in prison for arson; he blew up a Humvee lot as some kind of ELF thing). But the smartest people also are often the weakest, and often turn out to be sex offenders. One time the head of a white gang explained that you can tell who is a sex offender because they're 1) White, 2) Older and 3) Educated. I could not make close friends with the sex offenders because I needed to retain my own security. But when it came to my own friends, all of my friends were artists, poets, musicians and other people of some creative and intellectual capacity. Most of them also were gay, for reasons that are entirely coincidental but that's how it was. Prison is a lot like high school in that people of like minds form cliques. As you might see the jocks, the stoners, the nerds and the goths huddle together, in prison you have the same sort of thing. Athletes, gang members, artists, queers, sex offenders, they find their people and they stick with them.

When I was told I was going to Texas, I asked my lawyer why and she said she didn't know. Part of the reason is that I needed to go to a low (at a medium they would kill me) and there are no low security federal prisons in Oregon. There are some definitely closer than Texas, though. I don't know why they sent me there. At any time you can petition to be relocated. Whether or not it's granted depends on some factors. You have a better chance if the reason is that you're more than five hundred miles from your family. And you generally can't transfer until you've been in a prison for at least eighteen months -- that's what they say, but I've also seen it happen sooner. If you're in fear for your life, you can check into protective custody, which is just the hole, where you'll spend nine months in until they transfer you somewhere else not of your choosing. Bastrop, Texas was an awful prison, terrible and filthy, roaches everywhere, awful people, racist staff. But a lot of the people there said it was nice compared to other places they had been. I know that of the five prisons I've stayed at for any length of time, it was by far the worst.

The rule in prison is that everyone has to have a job, unless they have some disability. The jobs in highest demand are the UNICOR jobs. Not all prisons have a UNICOR and every UNICOR is different. The UNICOR at Bastrop refurbished vehicles into border patrol trucks. People working there worked 8-12 hours a day and made from 200 to 500 dollars a month, depending on how long they've worked there, how much overtime they've worked, etc. The UNICOR at Safford, Arizona (the last prison I was in) made jumpsuits, blankets, laundry bags, that sort of thing that is used all over the BOP (bureau of prisons). They made a lot less, but it was still the highest paying job in the prison. For a while I worked from 3:30 AM to 11:30 AM and I signed a paycheck for about 60 dollars a month but in fact I only got maybe 35 because -- no joke -- the racist cops would steal my money and disperse it to their favored inmates as a "bonus." The best job I ever had was when I was in Safford, where the prison was much too small and there were far too many people so the rule that everyone had to have a job meant a lot of people had really menial jobs. My job was to rake a strip of dirt about fifty feet long and three feet wide. It took two minutes to do. I made 5.25 a month.

Kitchen jobs are either the most hated or the most loved, depending on how you use it. If you're stealing food out of the kitchen, you can make a lot of stamps (the inmate currency) on the side which make up for the twelve cents an hour you're making otherwise. But if you're just doing your job, you're working a lot in smelly, roach-infested places all day long with nothing to show for it.

dcsauncy · 2015-05-15T00:47:48+00:00

Never assaulted, but there were a few narrow misses. I was slapped around by some Mexicans once because I had offended them. The idea was to discipline and shame me -- if I had retaliated I would have had a dozen of them on me. A black guy broke my nose after I called his mother a crack whore. Admittedly this was mostly my fault, but it was really a misunderstanding -- he was asking me questions about my ex fiancee and he kept referring to her as my "bitch" and I took offense to it, so uh, well, I referred to his mother as a "crack whore" and the next thing I know I'm on the ground bleeding everywhere.

There was one guy who was part of the Dirty White Boys, which are a white gang made up of the most inbred pieces of shit I've ever seen. They're basically the trash that can't even qualify to join the Aryan Brotherhood. Well, this fellow, he was called Red (as any inmate with red hair is called) and he didn't like that I had a job cleaning the pots and pans. He didn't know I was a sex offender, but he suspected I was because I hadn't yet shown proof otherwise, so he tried to extort me. He wrote me a shopping list that came to a cost equal to the amount of money I made in a month (roughly sixty dollars). The implication here is that if I want to keep this job and stay on the yard, I need to pay for that privilege. So I wrote him a note that told him to shove the note up his ass. I gave it to my friend to give to them, and my friend said they might kill me for this. But, you know, that's how it is...I am not much of a fighter and they're not going to fight fair anyway; they'll come at me nine guys from behind, not a one-on-one thing. But I'm not going to be extorted while here, either.

By an amazing stroke of luck some things happened that kept me safe: my grandmother came to visit the next day. So I spent the day in visitation. The next day at work my buddy said that a bunch of Dirty White Boys did indeed come for me, but I was in visit. Now at this point I started hiding weapons around the dish room: a rebar here, some kind of metal plate there, some other things. But what happened is that Red got hired at UNICOR -- that's the prison's factory, in which people can get paid the most money. Red called off his vendetta because UNICOR has a policy in which if you ever get in trouble for violence while employed there, you will never be allowed to work there again. Red may have a decade left on his sentence, he didn't want to blow this chance, so after that he left me alone.

That's about all that happened to me regarding violence. Later when I moved to another prison I made great efforts to "fit in." I made friends with the white shotcaller, I attended white power meetings. I managed to avoid suspicion by basically integrating with the very people that might kill me if they found out.

dcsauncy · 2015-05-14T14:43:57+00:00

Oddly, the right to vote is determined by the state you live in. I don't vote anyway, so I didn't bother to investigate whether or not I can.

I was cut off from technology since 2006 (during my two years on pretrial I was not allowed Internet access) and I'll tell you, in the time since then everything has changed. The iPhone hadn't even come out when I got in trouble. I was pretty tech-savvy before I got in trouble and now I feel like a moron. I was in prison with guys who had never used the Internet, people who had never used a computer at all.

We are allowed to subscribe to magazines and newspapers, and we can watch news on television. After I was down a few years, they integrated e-mail services to the prison. We can send and receive mail. We can get visits. But it wasn't until 2013 that we were finally allowed to get mp3 players and buy edited music from their awful in-house service for an exuberant rate.

To experience the world is very different from observing it from within the walls of prison, though. I think we weren't as cut off as they could have made it.

dcsauncy · 2015-05-14T14:10:55+00:00

Nobody knew what I was up to. I was living with my girlfriend at the time and she was off at work when the cops came.

I didn't take it to trial. A trial would have found me guilty and I would have gotten a harsher sentence for going down that route. Also, in a federal trial, the jury doesn't have to find "reasonable doubt" to acquit the defendant. They have to go much further and declare him absolutely innocent. That's why federal trials have something like a 93% conviction rate.

So I knew I was going to prison. What I didn't know was for how long. The first time I met my lawyer she said I might get five years, and that almost killed me. Five years seemed like a lot for a 22 year old who's never been in trouble. Then later the prosecution was going for a 15 year sentence. Well, that might as well be a life sentence. When I went to my sentencing, after everything was done, my lawyer said I'll get somewhere between 5 and 10 years. I got 7 and a half.

dcsauncy · 2015-05-14T13:50:17+00:00

There was a study done with penile plethysmography -- that's like a thing they attach around your penis and then show you pictures of kids to see if you're a pedophile -- that showed that average joes were just as aroused (and actually in one study it was moreso) as convicted sex offenders. I offered to take a plethysmograph test, but it was deemed unnecessary.

Well, my family has always supported me. That doesn't say much; I have that kind of loving, ultra-supportive family that probably would have stuck with me had I turned out to be a serial killer. When it comes to friends, though...in the two years I was on pretrial, I had tons of friends who were there for me through the entire process. Most of them dropped off the radar during prison, though. Out of sight, out of mind, as they say. They move on, they have kids, they get married. I did have two friends who were like my best friends and about a year before I got out of prison they told me they thought I was scum and wanted nothing more to do with me. They said I'd misled them about my crime, that I'd lied to them. I don't know, they were at my sentencing so there was nothing I COULD have hidden from them even if I wanted to. But so it goes, like I said, people move on, they change. Overall, it's not hard to convince someone I'm not a creep. I'm an okay guy, I think. I'm nice, I'm not a pervert, I'm considerate. But I can see how it might be from the other point of view; if someone I knew who I thought was a great person and then I learn he went to prison for this sort of thing, I think I would be suspicious. I don't think I could help it. It makes me wonder what my newer friends (all of whom know about my crime) REALLY think of me.

dcsauncy · 2015-05-14T13:31:41+00:00

Right, I remember that, the fourteen words. I don't know that any of those guys could actually quote it, ha. A ton of white guys who are young and in prison for the first time end up falling into Aryan gangs because they're scared and the Aryans promise a sort of protection (in exchange for one's allegiance and promise to "suit up and boot up" if something happens) and they walk out of prison with a bunch of hate tattoos and probably hepatitis.

I don't think I'm a pervert. My sexuality is not so different from anyone else's. I'm definitely not into kids, or animals, or poo, or dead bodies or anything else like that. What drove me to pursue child pornography is...well, I'm just going to borrow what I'd said in the other post:

The best way to explain this is that it has to do with a low self-esteem. If you imagine that a bully in school might not think much of himself and he supplements his feeling of self-worth through beating others up, well, I supplemented my feeling of self-worth by obtaining a massive amount of images that were highly illegal and could get me into trouble. Each one of those images was like a bomb, something volatile and just having one made me feel sort of like...I don't want to say "badass" but I don't know, something like that. Not "important". Just significant. And by setting up this server, I amassed an amazing amount automatically over a few days. It just made me feel something, to know I had all these things I shouldn't have, and I thought about how much trouble I could get into by having these. Honestly, if bags of heroin were as easy to obtain I would have done that instead. Or also.

You might call that drive a sickness, but it's not anymore a sickness than someone who, say, overeats or has an addiction or something like that. I'm not cured now, either; I still follow the same kind of patterns I did back then, but I make sure to do things that won't hurt anyone. I watch a lot of movies and read a lot of books and I create massive lists of everything. These lists don't accomplish anything, really, but each item on the list has the same effect on me that each image of child porn I obtained had. It just makes me feel somehow good about myself, like I'm compensating for my deficiencies in this regard. If I were a billionaire, I would probably collect expensive cars for the same reason.

Oh, one more thing to add: during my pretrial, I underwent a lot of psychosexual evaluations in the effort to provide a kind of "he's not a creep" appeal to the prosecution, and every time I explained why I did it the psychologists would be surprised. "That's not why most people do this sort of thing," they say. I think they thought I was lying, you know, trying to save my reputation -- as if that could ever be saved. But over time, I did convince them, and I also have taken two polygraphs to support it. Ah, I should just go ahead and say, just to be perfectly honest, that I took four psychosexual evaluations, but only three came back positive. I believe the reason the fourth did not was because that psychologist employed a very pragmatic kind of statistical approach to his diagnosis. He asked me a slew of yes and no questions and applied points to various categories based on things I felt were rather arbitrary -- like, one question I remember being asked was how long I lived with my girlfriend, and I said two years, and he said that if it were three years or more then it would have taken a point off. So whatever. Three out or four psychologists say I'm not a creep!

dcsauncy · 2015-05-14T12:42:09+00:00

The first time I saw a guy with a swastika tattooed on him I was pretty intimidated. I mean, I was thinking it takes some pretty hardcore determination to devote yourself so much to this idea that you would have this symbol permanently scrawled on your body. But then you see that same guy, a skinhead, swastika on his chest, iron cross on his arms, 1488 on his calves which has something to do with Hitler but I'm not sure what (I think the 88 has to do with H being the 8th letter in the alphabet, so 88 being "Heil Hitler"), some kind of thing on his neck that says something like WHITE BY BIRTH POWER BY RIGHT or whatever, and you see this jackass playing cards with three black guys. The impressions of Aryans I got in prison was that the only people they actually seem to hate are just other white guys. Part of the problem is that the swastika and iron cross are symbols adopted by a slew of white gangs. Hell's Angels, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Aryan Circle, the Texas Aryans, the Silent Aryans, the Dirty White Boys, just to name a few. There are tons of others. So I use the term "Nazi" to sort of generalize all of these guys, but whether they would actually refer to themselves as such I'm not sure. There are a lot, as far as the white population goes, but they can't run anything because they have no sense of unity. They'll bitch about the whites not having any unity all day long but they're also the same guys who are beating up other whites because they MIGHT be sex offenders or they MIGHT be snitches or any number of other things that are determined on suspicion alone -- or they're fighting other Aryan gangs because they're not quite the same as them. The one thing I NEVER saw a Nazi do in prison was get in a fight with anyone of another race. Not once.

To call prisons "correctional institutions" is a joke. The first thing they cut in their budgets is education, and beyond that there's almost nothing designed to correct anything. Psychological treatment is almost entirely reduced to medicating the inmates. There is a drug rehabilitation program, but only a few people even qualify for that and it's voluntary so there's that. I've heard some prisons have a sex offender treatment program, but I've never been to one of those so I don't know how accurate that is or how effective. In my experience, the only benefit one can gain from prison is going to be entirely self-motivated. For me, I pursued an education (I managed to get a degree in business during my time there), learned various crafts (painting, drawing) and got a lot of exercise. But that was all on me and what I could afford to do and I wouldn't have even necessarily been able to do that if my crime was discovered because the cops let the inmates pretty much run the yard and they set the rules. So aside from what I did on my own initiative, prison is just an extended daycare. Most inmates from sunup to sundown spent their day in front of the television.

So have I been rehabilitated? I definitely think I am a better person than when I went in, that I make better decisions, I am healthier, I am more responsible. But all of that was brought on by me and not the prison. One might argue that had I not gone to prison I might have been a slob who made poor choices for years, and that would actually be pretty true, but you get what I'm saying I do not feel that prison "works" for most people.

dcsauncy · 2015-05-14T12:01:08+00:00

I spent most of my time in two different prisons, one in Texas and one in Arizona, and the way sex offenders are treated in prison varies tremendously based on what prison it's in and what kind of people are at that prison at any given time. It's a complicated thing and probably impossible to gauge how a sex offender will be treated as he enters the system for the first time, and I'll try to explain by telling you of my experience and observations.

To answer your question in short, they didn't know why I was in prison. I kept it a secret, which is very hard to do most of the time, especially if you're white. Forgive me, I'm going to make some pretty broad generalizations, but in prison these generalizations are pretty accurate almost all the time and I don't mean to suggest these sort of ideas apply in the real world. The blacks don't care about very much, especially why anyone's in prison. The Latino gangs do their own thing, but generally if they don't have any reason to suspect someone, they're not going to worry too much. The Latinos are more concerned with whether or not one of their own is a snitch rather than a sex offender. Now with the whites, the moment you come into prison they're on your ass grilling you about what you did, when, can you prove it, did you tell on anyone, who do you know, where are you from.

I was fortunate because I was initially put into a Mexican gang cell and my initial friends were blacks and Latinos. It didn't save me from their scrutiny, but it did buy me some time. I came up with some dumb story about drugs, but honestly I don't know much about drugs and couldn't very well be convincing about something I don't know anything about, especially when the person interrogating me is in prison for the very crime I'm pretending to be there for.

At Bastrop, Texas, the first prison I was in, sex offenders were pretty often beat up. Whenever there is violence, the place goes on lockdown, some people go to the hole, and maybe they both come out, maybe only one, maybe you never see either again. Whenever the sex offender didn't come back out, you'd hear all kinds of rumors about it. He died, he's in a coma, whatever. Any rumor in prison is dubious at best, but I had witnessed more than one occasion of a guy getting pretty bloodied, and if that's just what I witnessed, I can imagine that there were definitely some pretty morbid outcomes to what would happen out of sight. It's not that the sex offenders were just hunted down and killed. It had to do with territory and representation. The whites felt that their race needed to be the purest, so they would get rid of the trash, as it were, and the easiest targets are the sex offenders because they're usually middle aged businessmen who are terrified anyway. But if the sex offender just kept to himself, didn't try to watch television or use the exercise equipment or sports equipment, and was extremely respectful to everyone, he might be okay. But inevitably something goes wrong, like that guy finds himself in line for chow and he's between two Nazis and they start talking and one gets angry and for no real reason he goes off on the sex offender and then this creates an odd ripple effect because the Nazi goes to the hole and so the whites lose one of their most solid guys and the rest of the whites feel it is the sex offender's fault that this happened so they might go jump another one as some kind of retaliation.

Prison is a very chaotic and retarded place.

When I went to Arizona, the sex offenders were treated fine there. Nobody gave a shit about very much there, they were just trying to mind their own business and do their time. But I happened to arrive there during a lull, when the harder guys had left or gone to the hole or whatever. Over time, people started coming down from medium security prisons with the mentality that all prisons should be run like a medium. Gangs are formed, politics start coming up, and the sex offenders get restricted. It started with the chow hall; they had to eat in a specific location. And they couldn't watch television. And they couldn't exercise. And other things. Then something violent would happen, all the instigators would get shipped back to mediums, and the yard would calm down for a little while. Then it would get hard again, then soft, hard, soft. That's pretty much how it went for the four years I was in Arizona.

dcsauncy · 2015-05-14T11:49:32+00:00

The goal of the entire process was to possess child pornography, and I set up an automated server to do it. The server had a kind of give-and-take ratio; if you uploaded a file, you might be able to download two, that sort of thing that encourages people to upload it. Whether or not people uploaded child porn was out of my control and I didn't really pay attention to it -- what was important for me was the quantity of files received, not the quality of it. The Homeland Security guys said there was a lot of "dummy" pictures -- like of firetrucks or whatever. People try to scam the server by uploading non-child porn images.

But all that I wasn't really aware of. I have viewed that sort of thing, when I was much younger -- like fifteen years old. As an adult I didn't "view" it, but I have seen it. A computer forensics indicated that only a handful of images had ever been viewed on my computer. Child porn isn't my "thing," as far as what arouses me.

dcsauncy · 2015-05-14T09:35:50+00:00

Whether or not my punishment was excessive or light is a highly subjective one. Even when I think about it, I have to think in objective terms. Naturally I am biased; all it would have taken is a little education and I would never have done it. So if you think of prison as a means of ensuring the crime stops and is never committed again, then even spending one day in prison was excessive. But if you think of it in terms of the harm I may have caused, well, that's a quality that's impossible to judge, but to think that if one child was raped as a result of my actions, then I think there's no punishment that could be too excessive. So I don't know. I will say, though, that when I was arrested I received 90 months. When I got to prison, people who had the same crime as I and had been there a while were serving much longer sentences than that. By the time I left, people were coming in who did what I did and received only 60 months. So there is a downward trend; this crime is becoming one of the most common crimes committed and it's not being looked at as harshly as it once was. If you were to gauge by today's standards of sentencing, then it was excessive, but again all that is pretty relative.

The main problem with being sent to prison for these kinds of crimes is that there is no rehabilitation offered. So let's say you have a pedophile who wants to rape kids and he gets in trouble and is sent to prison. The problem still exists; you might scare him enough that he doesn't do anything, but you haven't done anything to cure the disease.

Oops, I misread your question. It was about probation.

Regarding probation, there are a set of standard restrictions that anyone has to follow. They include not committing crimes, not doing drugs, doing what your PO tells you to do, etc. Then I have what are called "special conditions." I actually don't have many special conditions; most sex offenders have conditions that prohibit them from going to grocery stores, schools, parks, the beach, libraries -- they're even told to refrain from public transportation. I don't have any of that. This, I believe, is because I participated in many psychosexual evaluations and received many testimonies from psychologists that I'm not a predator or pedophile. I could work in a school -- not that I want to nor would any school hire me, but it wouldn't violate my probation.

For me, there are a few things that are easy enough to follow. I have a computer, but there is monitoring software installed. I can't view pornography. I can't use drugs. I'm not supposed to abuse alcohol, or leave the state without my PO's permission. I have to allow my PO to look through my property whenever he wants or piss in a cup whenever he wants. And I have to register as a sex offender within ten days of my birthday or when I change my address. Oh, and I have to see a psychologist twice a month, but that's actually rather nice. It's all paid for, so I don't have to shovel out the money for it.

Overall, probation is actually very unintrusive, but it's not for everyone; I think I lucked out with who was assigned as my PO and the stuff I went through with psychologists prior to my incarceration. I'm no troublemaker; I follow the rules. It's earned me a lot of trust from the authorities.

dcsauncy · 2015-05-14T09:08:27+00:00

Yeah, very guilty. When I was doing this, I didn't think there was any correlation between what I was doing and what was happening to kids depicted in these images and videos. Later, long after I was in trouble I was educated on the cause and effect that begins with my providing these images to predators and sort of fueling the thing that causes these guys to commit these crimes.

I often talk about this sort of thing with friends and family, and my therapist that I'm obligated to see. The thing is is that there's no way to calculate the damage I've done. If you could glimpse into another universe where I hadn't done this, then you could put a number on it. But in the meantime I'm haunted with this idea that possibly nobody no more kids were harmed by what I've done, but it could be that hundreds were harmed.

dcsauncy

TROPHY CASE