Dyess Not Getting Abuse Victims' Therapy

Below is a story from the August 4th Register on the lack of victim's counseling Tracey gets. As one of the "clergy" mentioned, the only thing I'd change is the headline. To capture the concerns, I'd make it something like "Clergy: Dyess Not Getting Abuse Victims' Therapy."

Clergy: Dyess lacks mental therapy
State prison owes sex abuse victim serious counseling, they say

By JENNIFER JACOBS
REGISTER STAFF WRITER

State prison officials have provided no significant mental health therapy to convicted arsonist Tracey Dyess, and have forbidden her from discussing her history of molestation with visitors, according to two clergy members who have become her most staunch advocates.

"I have no sense that there's serious therapy going on in the area in which Tracey especially needs it: as a victim of childhood sexual abuse," the Rev. John Zimmerman wrote in a letter to Iowa Gov. Chet Culver. "To me, this is an outrage."

Zimmerman said his impression is that prison officials prefer docile inmates, so they don't want Dyess to work on issues that could be upsetting.

The spokesman for the Iowa Department of Corrections, Fred Scaletta, said: "All I can tell you is we are addressing her needs. All of them."

Scaletta said he couldn't elaborate except to say Dyess has access to all the prison resources. "Things are not going to happen overnight with the trauma she's been through," he said.

Dyess, 20, seems to be deteriorating, said the Rev. Val Peter, former director of Girls and Boys Town of Nebraska, who specializes in working with abused teenagers.

"When you look at her - I've been at this business of taking care of children for a long time - her face, you can see it's changing. There's a kind of a sadness," said Peter, who has visited Dyess since she was first jailed in spring 2005 for setting a fire that killed two of her siblings.

"I'm no psychiatrist, but it's a low-grade depression, a kind of a lessening of hope. Less energy," Peter said. "And that's taking its toll."

When Dyess wrote her victim's impact statement before her stepfather's sentencing in May for sexual exploitation, one of the questions on the worksheet was whether she had received counseling as a result of his abuse.

Dyess answered "no," the statement shows.

That's still the case, said Zimmerman, the pastor of Pleasant View Mennonite Church in Mount Pleasant, who visits Dyess regularly.

Scaletta denied a request from The Des Moines Register for an interview with Dyess, saying he didn't want her to say anything that could jeopardize the application for clemency she submitted last fall.

It was Scaletta and the warden of the Mount Pleasant Correctional Facility who restricted Dyess from discussing her abuse with visitors and spelled out certain conditions in a letter and phone conversations with Peter and Zimmerman, they said.

"The official reason," Zimmerman wrote Culver in a letter dated May 25, "is so that correctional system counselors can do the counseling, but that counseling has yet to begin and I'm convinced it is unlikely to."

Their focus seems to be on keeping Dyess "calm and manageable," Zimmerman said.

For two weeks last winter, Peter and Zimmerman were banned from meeting with Dyess at all.

And two agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which helped investigate Dyess' stepfather, Brian Street, for taking sexually explicit photos of her as a teen, warned Peter "to stop trying to help her," the priest said.

Zimmerman said that in his experience with abuse victims, giving them opportunities to talk with compassionate people about their past is essential to healing.

Peter wrote Scaletta a letter dated July 16 asking for "good therapy" for Dyess.

"This is my first request so there is no good reason to let the people of Iowa know this has not been Iowa's finest hour," he wrote.

Dyess may talk with visitors only in the presence of a prison guard, Zimmerman said. This restriction was kept in place after she was transferred in January to the Mitchellville Correctional Institute for Women, he said.

After the transfer, Dyess separately told both her mother and Peter by telephone that a number of women at Mitchellville were harassing her.

"I said, 'Is that sexual harassment?' " Peter said. "She said, 'I don't want to talk about it.' "

Dyess later said she reported the women, but then was a target for retaliation.

Zimmerman and Peter are hopeful Culver will grant Dyess clemency. Zimmerman told the governor that it was "a grave disservice" for Dyess' lawyer not to push for her case to be postponed until after her stepfather's trial.

Now that Street's abuse has been proven in court, the pastor wrote, a jury in Dyess' case would likely have found that the fire was an act rooted in self-defense.

Peter is asking corrections officials to drop the visitation restrictions on Dyess, arguing that they are not imposed on other inmates during pastoral visits.