By Ignazio Messina
Dayton Daily News
LUCAS COUNTY, Ohio — The Lucas County juvenile system doesn’t want anything more to do with Tyler Kimble.
The 17-year-old - who is accused of raping a 9-yearold girl after already having been convicted in 2006 of sexual contact with a 5-year-old boy - is just one of two juveniles certified as adults in Lucas County for sex crimes during at least the last six years.
Authorities dedicated to rehabilitating juvenile sex offenders in Lucas County stress that an exhaustive attempt was made with Kimble and that he is the exception, not the norm.
Lori Olander, an assistant county prosecutor, said crimes involving juvenile sex offenders are not common and usually don’t rise to the level of the Kimble case. But at the same time, they can be difficult to prosecute for a variety of reasons.
“It is not his first sexual offense, which is one of the main reasons we are looking to certify this young man,” Olander said. “He has already completed our sex offender treatment program, and we have a very comprehensive sex offender treatment program that can be all the way up through 24 months
This is one we are worried the juvenile system cannot take care of and he needs to be taken out of society.”
Other youths who successfully complete the county’s program can be reintegrated into schools, and parents of their classmates cannot be told by the school system about the sexual crimes.
Last year, 47 juvenile offender sex crimes were filed, of which 22 were rape. In 2010, there were 61 charges, of which there were 18 rape and 15 were gross sexual imposition offenses.
The numbers represent offenses alleged, not the number of youths charged; a single juvenile may face multiple charges.
In the past five years in Lucas County, the highest number of juvenile sex charges filed was in 2007, with 89, including 42 rape charges.
Kimble was arraigned June 19 in Lucas County Common Pleas Court, where he pleaded not guilty, and is being held on a $75,000 bond. He went through the county’s youth sex offender treatment program and was reintegrated into school, but authorities acknowledged it didn’t work for him. He attended Garfield and Navarre elementary schools before going in 2008 to the district’s Mayfair School at the former West-field Elementary building.
That was two years after his first conviction. May-fair is a alternative program for troubled students. The district would not confirm the dates he attended each school.
His mother, Mary Abrell, declined to comment.
No notification
Nancy Brenton, director of human resources for Washington Local, cited the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act as the reason parents couldn’t be told about a child’s sexual crimes.
“I would think that sex-offender information is not something that a school district determines but that the courts and police determine if it would be released,” Brenton said.
“What we used to do is some kind of a service and they would provide reports back to the district on any juvenile offender we had and what happened,” she said. “That service was part of a budget cut a few years ago and we haven’t gotten that for a number of years.”
Bill Weis, long-term director of probation for the Lucas County juvenile sex offender treatment program, said youths who go through the program have extremely low recidivism rates- unlike adult sexual predators.
Between 4 and 6 percent will reoffend, which is below the national average, he said. About 20 percent will commit other nonviolent criminal acts after the treatment.
“Adult sex offending and juvenile sex offending are two different things,” Weis said. “These juveniles don’t grow up to be adult sex offenders.”
Phil Rich, author of Understanding, Assessing and Rehabilitating Juvenile Sexual Offenders, said his research and work with juvenile sex offenders backs up statistics that show a much lower recidivism rate for youths than for adults. But he said it appears to be higher than the average in Lucas County.
“Somewhere between 10 and 5 percent juvenile sex offenders after treatment reoffend,” Rich said. “Many studies come up with lower numbers, but that means something like 80 to 90 percent do not reoffend. Many more continue to get in other forms of trouble, nonsexually.”
Therapy programs
Ken Miller, clinical director at Harbor Youth & Family Services, which operates the Lucas County treatment program, said sex-offender therapy for juveniles was a new field in the 1980s. Now, parents are a crucial part of the process that favors rehabilitation instead of incarceration.
“A lot of them suffer from an impulsive disorder. Their cognitive functioning hasn’t matured and they act impulsively upon their urges on what is a seemingly unimportant decision and they kind of go down a subtle pathway telling themselves, ‘That little girl won’t mind if I touch here,’ and they have all these thinking errors,” Miller said.
In 2007, Juvenile Court entered into a partnership with Harbor, a community-based mental health organization, to provide the outpatient treatment to juvenile sexual offenders and their families.
Since then, 161 youths have gone through the program.
“This is such hard work,” Miller said. “We really put our heart and soul into this.”
Copyright 2012 Dayton Newspapers, Inc.