Felons Are Victims, Too, She Discovers |TODAY|

Submitted by dan. on 2007-06-29 23:51.
Offender Support | Victim Support

The person chosen to administer a new Jacksonville Sheriff's Office program aimed at integrating released felons back into the community has every reason to despise violent criminals. As she grew up in a small Ohio town, Cathy Chadeayne-Goldman was, against statistical odds, a three-time crime victim.

Such experiences gave Chadeayne-Goldman a passion for victim's rights.

She joined her first victim's rights organization in 1975, when she was 19.

Later, after she moved to Jacksonville - her husband at the time was in the Navy - she went to work for the State Attorney's Office and, subsequently, became its first victim's rights advocate.

So when State Attorney Harry Shorstein asked her to help administer programs he was developing to rehabilitate violent juvenile offenders whose crimes were so serious they had been certified as adults, she initially was reluctant, she said.

When she began to learn their stories and discovered that most of them, before they became offenders, had themselves been victims, her attitude changed.

"If you don't treat victims ... there is a price to pay," she said.

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