Therefore, I just don’t pay it. By law it can’t be enforced. I have not been accosted by any law enforcement for failure to pay.

Dear M.

What is that address at the VA you mentioned in your reply to Capt.Munsey?

Good for you! You didn’t feel your SO treatment provider was extorting that 25 bucks a week? I tried the route you describe and found it to be total nonsense. The people I had were not even Phds in their field and treated all of us like sub-human lepers and pieces of fecal matter. I had to drive 70 miles a week and pay 30 bucks for an hour and a half of that? My offense was non-contact/non-violent and I felt my “crime” to be simply journalistic curiosity, which it WAS. The Army turned me into a reporter and it”s information school was like a four year journalism degree in eight weeks. I wrote for the Stars and Stripes and the camp newspaper, and papers back home as an “information specialist”. Later on, those skills helped me with four published novels, two produced plays, and a host of television scripts-all out of New York City in last century’s 70s, 80s, and 90’s. The real money as far as television went, was in OWNING what you wrote.Most of the time I was just a “hired gun” with a good salary, and longed to actually own a project I had labored on. My “crime” involved no “prurience” in and of itself. I simply was seeking more information and understanding about a subject I knew nothing about. I was for many years an actor, writer, producer and I worked with some of the biggest stars in the industry. It is a hallmark of those whose lives are spent in pursuit of the arts to have an inordinate interest in all aspects of the human condition. And some of us will on occasion cross the line. I was nabbed my first time out through what amounted to an illegal and outrageous sting. As so many of those of us on the registry are. Because I relied on the SCOTUS decision “Curzon vs the Director of the Missouri dept of Health” in which the right to refuse medical treatment was upheld for any competent adult, I was recently denied for early release from criminal supervised release and thus am still a government slave. Consider… most sentences for ANY sex offense in Florida and many other states are for LIFETIME Supervision and Registration, regardless of the length of any prison sentence. We are not talking PAROLE here as my sentence was completed.
Current sex offender laws are simply a resurgence of the slave codes of the antebellum south. I was released in December of 2014 after seven years of an eight year sentence. My “masters” there told me I had three days to report to my new masters in Central Illinois. All I got back from my former life was the right to vote in elections. I was forced into unnecessary ‘treatment’ against my will, not allowed to attend the church I grew up in because it held Sunday School classes for little kids while the Adult services went on in the downstairs auditorium. I can’t participate in any family celebration where anyone under 18 attends also. I have no access to social media, can only own ONE internet device (my computer) which is constantly monitored at a personal cost to me of 42 bucks a month. This monitoring software slows my state of the art computer down to an early model of the breed. It takes forever to do anything on it. All the conditions and restrictions covering me, just at the state level, runs to a large half inch thick sheaf of double-sided print-outs.
I have a lot in common with that poor devil Dred Scott who was told back in 1857 the SCOTUS chief Justice that he had no rights anyone was bound to respect.

I completed my ‘counselling’ in 2009. The counselor was a ‘good guy’ and caused me no problems. I paid $25 a week for five years. I treated it mostly as ‘entertainment’. I sat and listened to the ‘stories’ and threw in my ‘two-cents worth’ every now and then. I knew what I had done was wrong and I really didn’t need some one to tell me what I already knew. I was over it before I even started. I have since been released from probation…eleven years early… and am back to pretty much living a normal life. I look forward to each day.

Capt Munsey-
Were you a twenty or thirty year man? If so, you qualify of course for the whole panoply of line-ups at the VA. It covers all the US military services. My particular pension is meant to supplement my paltrey Social Security payments. (under a thousand a month. The VA will supplement that to bring my income up to 12,900 a year. They will also pay for any treatment for outside medical I might receive. I did get a little windfall when I got back all that I had paid those crooks running the cottage industry in Illinois of Sex Offender “treatment”. The captive clientele must pay CASH for all of it in Illinois. Including all polygraph testing, which goes on ad infinitum. The treatment providers do not even have P.h.d.s in their field and are supervised by no one in the “field”. The classes run night and day and I have always wondered where all that cash is winding up-probably a good portion of it in the hands of compliant supervisors who force their charges into these groups on pain of violation of supervised release.
Florida’s and Illinois’ both have “offense” based treatment regimens, whereas the standard now is the 99CR risk-based assessment programs. According to those an old man like me with Low-T and no priors is a Tier one and needing no treatment and little or no supervision. I’m an author whose work was originally published back in 1970-80 by brick and mortar houses in New York City. When I was released, the self publishing phenomenon was on, and so now I’m on Amazon with Ebooks/audiobooks and all that. BUT…I am just four novels out of 40 million, so it’s a little hard to get noticed. My original offense didn’t even involve prurience, but journalistic curiosity for a book on the whole CP phenomenon. I’d never seen any CP, but responded to a mail offer and was nailed on it the first time out. My entire life has been in pursuit of the arts, first as an actor working with some pretty big stars of the era (Deborah Kerr, Jose Ferrer, Maureen O’Sulivan, etc) and a hallmark of that is the inordinate need to understand all aspects of the human condition, including on occasion its bizarre extremes. I just never imagined the government would throw one in jail for that.

Fortunately I survived my 29 years of military service with only minor injuries and have, since retiring, been seen by the medical facilities at Patrick AFB. I have not had to avail myself of the VA although I do have friends who do and that think well of the treatment they receive. I paid $360 a month for monitoring since April 2009. At the encouragement of my lawyer I inquired about the amount I was paying and with much reluctance probation checked for me and sure enough I had been over paying to the tune that I had over $5,200 in an account set up for me by DoC…that represented the amount I had been over paying and no one at DoC bothered to let me know I was paying too much. I wonder who was collecting the interest on that money? I was released from probation eleven years early and have since…with much “teeth pulling”…received a refund. I was always honest in my dealings with DoC and I expected them to be so with me…not! I am now living a relatively normal life with my grown children and their families close by. My paperwork to have my voting rights restored has been submitted and received by Tallahassee. Once that is done I will go to work getting my name removed from the registry. During my service in DC I enjoyed pointing out the bureaucracy to the ‘inbreds’, so doing so with Florida will be an enjoyable challenge. This lifetime effort by politicians to destroy certain lives has got to come to an end. I am not easily offended but when I am put in the same category as a murderer I am offended…the other offensive thing in my life is being called ‘politically correct’. All have a fine Navy day!

Dear M.
Does that VA policy apply also to veterans on an old age pension?

Tell them to go pound sand. Look up Bearden vs Georgia.
You can not be arrested for being unable to pay fines and fees provided you make a good faith effort.
Rent, utilities and groceries are necessities. Sex offender registry fees are luxuries. If it is that important for you to register, the state needs to pass the cost on to the tax payer or have Ron Book pay for the registry since his dumb @$$ lobbied for the registry.