| As the end of his prison sentence approached, Donald Chapman and his therapist agreed that he needed more treatment. A dozen years earlier, in the summer of 1980, Chapman had committed a chilling crime, kidnapping and raping a woman before turning himself in to police. For most of the period since his confession, Chapman had been living at the Adult Diagnostic and Treatment Center in Avenel, New Jersey, a state facility where sex offenders received therapy from specialists. The center represented “a new way of thinking,” The New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright later observed: rather than viewing residents as unchangeable monsters, it operated on the belief that dangerous behaviors could be modified. But with Chapman’s release on the horizon, his therapist, Kay Jackson, grew increasingly concerned. Jackson, who had earned a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia, didn’t scare easily. In her first month at Avenel, she had talked down a prisoner as he held her hostage for hours; pregnant at the time, she had returned to work the next day. Chapman also preferred that he remain at Avenel after completing his sentence—but, when it became clear that he couldn’t, he decided he was ready to live on the outside. Jackson disagreed and considered taking action, a position that raised questions about patient-doctor confidentiality, risks to the wider community, and the limits of the law. “It’s really easy to be a psychologist working with victims,” she told Wright. “Everybody pats you on the back. It’s different when you work with offenders. . . . If you don’t take your mission for public safety very seriously, I do not think that you can have the stomach to do this job.” | 
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