When People with Intellectual Disabilities Are Punished, Parents Pay the Price
A sex offense conviction can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Who pays when the offender has an intellectual disability?
Carol Nesteikis, 66, has never committed a crime.
But for two years, from six in the evening to six in the morning the next day, she lived under de facto house arrest with her 33-year-old son, Adam. It wasn’t because she wanted to. The home itself was a kind of punishment, she says.
Adam was sentenced to 10 years of probation in Illinois for exposing himself to a neighbor, something Nesteikis says he was coerced to do by an older man who was also abusing Adam. Since the victim of Adam’s offense lived next door, he was required to move out of his family’s house the same day that he pleaded
