By Dave Maley

Psychologist Kay Jackson '78 is at ground zero in the debate over criminals' rights versus community concerns.

ou’ve probably heard the tragic story of Megan Kanka, the seven-year-old New Jersey girl who was kidnapped, raped, and murdered, allegedly by a neighbor already twice convicted of sex offenses.

Her 1994 death -- and similar accounts of child molesters set free only to hurt again -- helped spawn Megan’s Law, designed to protect people from released high-risk sex offenders by making public their whereabouts.

A speedy reaction to an outrageous act. Who could object to such a response?

Well, Kay Jackson for one. Once an aspiring pianist at Ithaca College, Jackson now spends her days surrounded by exhibitionists, rapists, pedophiles, even murderers: the very sorts of people Megan’s Law and its progeny are intended to protect us from. And she does it willingly, as a therapist for sex offenders.

"If you tell people you work with perpetrators and still identify yourself as a feminist, a lot of them think that is traitorous, or at least misguided," she says. "But most of the people who work with victims understand the continuum very well. I work with perpetrators, but I really work for victims -- both their past victims and their future ones."

Jackson’s opposition to Megan’s Law is ironic in light of her own experience with public notification, as chronicled in a September 1995 New Yorker. The article focused on a case in which Jackson told local authorities that a man she had counseled who was about to be released from prison had not been cured of his impulses and that he was likely to continue committing sex crimes. The police kept a quiet, though close, eye on him until it was leaked to the press that the man was not only a convicted child molester but that his own therapist had deemed him still a threat.

There ensued a firestorm of controversy as authorities tried to find a reason to lock the man back up. Jackson was criticized by some therapists for committing what they believed was a breach of ethics in revealing confidential patient information. At the same time she was praised by people who felt she had done a public service.

Jackson cannot discuss the case in detail since she is now facing a multimillion dollar lawsuit filed by her former patient, but she believes she is neither villain nor hero. "I got letters of support from total strangers saying I was brave for doing what I had done. I wasn’t trying to be brave; I was just trying to do what I felt was required and appropriate under the circumstances. These are the ethical dilemmas we deal with every day."

Jackson faced dilemmas of a different kind when she entered Ithaca College as a music major. Discouraged to see "how much more talented, focused, and committed the other music students were," she left school, only to return to study psychology. Protesting that she doesn’t want to sound like a "shill" for Ithaca, Jackson is nonetheless unstinting in praising the education she received.

"I went to college wanting to get exactly what I ended up with, which was a solid liberal arts education. I’ve said it to the New Yorker and in many other places, so I might as well say it to my own alumni magazine. I received a very solid grounding in terms of my intellectual interests. Graduate school is useful for training you in a particular field; Ithaca taught me to think."

In particular, Jackson points to the psychology program’s approach of ensuring that students become solid researchers as well as practitioners. She recalls fondly her work with faculty member Linda McBride that led to a presentation at the Eastern Colleges Science Conference, as well as an advanced-level independent study course with psychology professor Martin Rand. "I partici-pated in everything I could think of doing in the psychology program," she says, "and there was nothing I was not allowed to do. I won’t tell you that everything that happened to me [at Ithaca] was marvelous, but it was a great experience for me."

In the waiting room of her office is a pile of buttons bearing slogans promoting civil rights, unions, and other causes. She laughs when asked about the one that says "I am a shameless agitator" and again speaks of her college days.

"My political activism has always been fairly present. I would still call myself a socialist- feminist, and the work I do is strongly informed by the classes I took with [professor of politics] Zillah Eisenstein. Almost everyone else in those classes was a politics major and when I look back on it I was absolutely in over my head, but it was still a phenomenal experience. At the risk of making NYU and Columbia mad at me, I was stunned to get into grad school and find people actually expecting to do less work than I had done as an undergrad."

Jackson first put her counseling skills to the test while still an undergraduate, working in what was then called the Ithaca College Crisis and Counseling Center. After graduation she helped run the psychology department’s perception laboratory for a year and was a counselor with the Ithaca Task Force for Battered Women. She went on to earn her master’s in counseling and guidance from New York University and a Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Columbia University, all the while working for a variety of agencies doing individual and group counseling. In 1985, when she was casting about for a population on which to do her dissertation research, she was recommended for a job in a prison treating sex offenders.

That turned into a 10-year stint with the New Jersey Department of Corrections at its Adult Diagnostic and Treatment Center in Avenel. As a staff psychologist and director of research she was able to combine both of her interests, treating incarcerated sex offenders in psychotherapy while conducting research with a "captive" population. It was an Avenel inmate whose release caused such an uproar and the subsequent New Yorker story.

Jackson believes there is a fundamental difference between making local authorities aware of the presence of a sex offender and the premise of Megan’s Law, which requires public identification. Noting that such laws are well intentioned, she says that they can have unforeseen consequences, such as in the case of a former client who had his name, face, and address plastered around town along with the fact that he had been imprisoned for incest.

"The effect of that was to ‘out’ the victim, the man’s daughter," she points out. "She was already having enough difficulty, but this just added to her humiliation and shame and she had to change schools again. That kind of absolutely uninten-tional impact on victims is a cruel result of public notification."

Last July Jackson’s name again surfaced in the media, in a Sunday New York Times Magazine cover story on another former patient from Avenel. In his case, Jackson believes his compulsions are under control and he should be left alone. That attitude doesn’t sit well with many of the man’s neighbors, since his crimes include the 1969 rape and murder of two teenage boys.

"Knowing that a sex offender lives down the street can give people a false sense of security, because they don’t think about the one who might live next door who just hasn’t been caught yet," Jackson counters. "It seems to me that even though prison is designed to be punitive, we still have a belief that some degree of rehabilitation is possible, that they can in fact change their lives and shouldn’t be haunted by their history to the extent that they experience ongoing prejudice and lose their right to privacy."

Jackson left Avenel a little over a year ago and now operates the Metropolitan Center, an admittedly ambitious name for the private practice she and her partner run from a nondescript office in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. In the midst of buildings housing pricey art and antique galleries, Jackson was treating men who had committed the most heinous of crimes. Controversy recently caught up with her again, however, when neighbors discovered the nature of her clientele.

"They successfully pressured the New York State Division of Parole to force us to move our treatment program," says a clearly exasperated Jackson. "We’re temporarily in the division offices on 40th Street, but as private practitioners we can’t continue to operate in a state building. Everything is in disarray as we try to find a suitable permanent location."

Despite the disruption, some 220 sex offenders are seen each week, usually in groups of 10 or so for an hour at a time. They range in age from 17 to 75, with their victims representing an even wider age range. The people she treats are mostly, as they say in the business, "negatively predicted for success."

"We don’t get the easy ones," says Jackson. "Most of them are drug users, they don’t have a stable employment history, and they lack education or financial resources. All those things predict trouble, and those are the clients we have."

Asked what exactly drives these men -- and they are, overwhelmingly, men -- to commit sex crimes in the first place, Jackson offers up the Reader’s Digest version of an answer: "We know that early experiences with trauma can lead people to display a variety of maladaptive behaviors. So experiences with childhood physical or sexual trauma can sometimes lead victims to repeat the very behavior that was perpetrated on them, in an effort to try to resolve something that is ultimately overwhelming. Not everybody, obviously, who is abused goes on to become an abuser, but 70 to 90 percent of offenders fit this pattern.

"Victims who do not become abusive themselves," she continues, "tend to be those who have some of the resources lacking for perpetrators, like a family that helps them get treatment. Their efforts to resolve what happened to them are given support and understanding rather than ridicule and dismissal."

As difficult as it may be, Jackson offers just that kind of support to her patients. She claims a low recidivism rate, with very few overt failures. "We have a large number of clients who do in fact get better and that’s rewarding -- to realize that you are effective in reducing violence and working in the favor of public safety."

Given the fact that most people incarcerated for sex crimes finish their sentences and are let out of prison, one would think that treatment leading to rehabilitation is a high priority in the criminal justice system. One would be wrong.

"It’s an unfortunate state of affairs for people who need services," says Jackson. "For those who are required to be treated as a condition of parole or probation, they have to attend a program and are charged a fee -- I start at 5 dollars a session and after a month it goes up to 10 dollars -- but the government covers none of the costs. To someone struggling with very little support elsewhere in their lives, that amount can be astronomical."

Jackson still finds a way to look on the bright side. She’s been talking with the New York State Department of Corrections and hopes to land a contract to provide treatment services. She’s also excited by the prospects of continuing her research interests, supervising graduate students doing evaluations of patients who have completed treatment.

So while the constitutionality of Megan’s Law is debated in the courts and politicians vie to be the toughest on crime and criminals, Jackson continues to do what she thinks works: to be a "shameless agitator" for perpetrators and victims alike.