According to his attorney, twenty-seven-year-old Dustin Beach is a reformed man. Since his arrest in July 2019, he has reconnected with his faith. He has earned some kind of religious certification. On April 4th, 2021, he was even baptized.
He is sober. He has been attending substance abuse treatment for a longstanding addiction to methamphetamines and crack cocaine. His substance use(alcohol) reportedly began at age ten. A year later, he was smoking pot every day.
This is good news, indeed, not only for Beach himself but also for us law-abiding folks. Beach has made several statements blaming his violence on his drug addiction. For instance, here’s what he told a probation officer in 2020:
I wish it didn’t happen this way, but I’m thankful for my sobriety. It has changed me for the better. I will sacrifice this time to get better and be a better person. I’m OK with that. I was so far gone in my drug addiction I wasn’t really a person anyway.
Beach says he is sorry for what he did. He says he is no longer the person he was when he first entered jail. And to that, I say “Hallelujah.”
And thank God he’s not getting out of prison any time soon.
This is No Ordinary Offender
Look. I’m all for one’s spiritual journey. Redemption. Live and let live. Second chances. I’m for all that.
But you need to understand why I am not jumping up and down now that Dustin says he has seen the light. You need to know where he’s been. He has been in the black of night.
He kidnapped a woman in South Carolina after offering a woman a ride in his pickup truck to a local Walmart. He smashed her phone. He threatened to kill her kids. He hit her with a hammer, a cane, and his fists. He held her head under water until she passed out. He cut her by dragging a pin up and down her legs. He sexually assaulted her.
Somehow, in Lewiston, Maine, she managed to escape. She called local police from a motel, begging them to rescue her before Beach came back. They found her sitting in the lobby wearing dark glasses and covered head-to-toe with bruises.
Beach’s version of what happened? He offered her a free ride to Maine, and she accepted. Everything that happened afterward was consensual.
This Was Not His First Kidnapping
If you think this saga can’t get any worse, you’re wrong. At his July 2019 arrest, Beach was already facing felony charges for a similar offense. This time the victim was his ex-girlfriend.
Over two days, he allegedly kept her captive. He took away her cell phone so she couldn’t call for help. He assaulted her with a bullwhip, a stick, a shotgun, and a pistol. Sound familiar?
God knows why they released him on bail, but they did, with the stipulation that he wear a GPS monitor around his ankle. Which he promptly sawed off. We can only hope he has yet to face charges for these offenses.
The Drugs Made Me Do It
Now, I have no doubt that meth and crack cocaine can contribute to violence, not only in terms of the lying, stealing and cheating that often goes with getting money to buy drugs, but the direct influence this nasty duo can have on a person’s psyche.
It causes paranoia. It causes agitation and irritability. In high enough doses or with prolonged use, it can cause psychosis. All of these can lead to an increase in violence. But not the kind of violence Beach committed. Not premeditated violence lasting for days and targeting a specific person.
It’s also a matter of the chicken and the egg; which came first? The violence or the drugs? It’s hard to tell.
In one study that evaluated 350 meth users in treatment for addiction, fifty-six percent said that they had been violent during their drug use. Fifty-nine percent reported a history of violent criminal behavior. But more than half of the violent offenders were violent before they began using meth. Meth seemed directly related to violence in only the most severe users, who reported significant drug-induced psychiatric symptoms like paranoia.
Indeed, taking drugs out of the mix would have a calming effect on Mr. Beach. According to the prosecution, Mr. Beach has a longstanding habit of not playing well with others, including hitting, beating, and torturing them. Simply taking drugs out of the equation would be like putting out a four-alarm fire with a garden hose.
Jailhouse Jesus
People do turn their lives around.Some of the most amazing people in the world are prison chaplains, who are willing to provide love, acceptance, and forgiveness to people who’ve often never experienced any of these. I saw plenty of people genuinely find or reconnect with their spirituality once they were behind bars. I have a distant relative convicted of murder as a teen, spent seven years behind bars, and became a minister after his release. As far as I know, lived a law-abiding life ever after.
But I also know that there are many reasons why an inmate might pretend to turn over a new leaf. When you are going to trial or up for parole, it is in your best interest to show remorse, to program, to say and do all the right things. So, while some inmates do their time as quickly and as honestly as possible inside a difficult and dangerous environment, others learn how to work the system to their advantage.
When I worked on the crisis unit in a maximum-security prison, I learned pretty quickly that a “suicidal” inmate mean anything from a potentially lethal depression over a wife leaving or mom dying, to a desperate inmate’s attempt to get off the yard before his drug debt that was about to come due. I’ve seen plenty of inmates whose mental health treatment didn’t seem to do anything other than help become a smoother manipulator and liar.
So forgive me if I am skeptical of Mr. Beach’s sudden personal transformation. Kudos to him it it’s genuine. I hope it serves him well in prison.
The Bottom Line
In January 2022, Beach received ten years in prison for interstate stalking. This is a federal charge which involves transporting someone across state lines “with the intent to injure, harass and intimidate” and placing the victim in “reasonable fear of serious bodily injury and caused (her) substantial emotional distress.” He also received three years of supervised release, which will hopefully give us a chance to see just how much his personal transformation holds up in the real world.
I belief that your skepticism is warranted and is a handy tool to have to analyze the facts. It would be interesting to know his adolescent abnormal sexual deviance and how the drug use was used as a coping mechanism. If his finding of Jesus in prison has enlightened him so be it...He's out of society now and not able to quench his abnormal behavior.