FL- Florida's Prison for Predators

12-30-2008 Florida:

Florida's Civil Commitment Center, a facility that holds prisoners convicted of sex offenses after they have served their time is entering its fifth year. But there is no evidence that it serves its intended purpose--curing the pedophile or sex offender who has already served his time.

Those who agree to treatment -- and many don't -- take lie-detector tests to squelch their biggest obstacle, denial. They smell noxious fumes, hoping to reprogram their criminal urges with mental tricks. One therapy involves fitting their genitals with a plethysmograph -- a device that monitors desire by measuring blood flow.

While such centers are growing as part of a national trend, many say they are nothing more than high priced prisons. Consider these statistics from the Florida facility:

Only 143 of the 408 residents have consented to be treated for sexual disorders. Most residents refuse treatment on the advice of lawyers because accepting it requires that they admit they're predators, an admission that can be used against them in court in the future.

• Sexual predators who agree to be treated enter a four-step program, but the fourth step, which prepares them for release into the community, does not exist because the Florida Legislature has neither provided the money nor shown the will to create outpatient treatment.

• Staff turnover and lack of state funding keeps even longtime, eager-to-be-treated residents from progressing. Actual sex-offender treatment lasts no more than 12 to 13 hours a week. Many residents receive no more than six hours a week.

....''It's, in effect, the Legislature practicing medicine or practicing psychology without a license,'' says Dr. Fred Berlin, a psychologist and psychiatrist who founded the sexual disorders clinic at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Florida law allows for the continued incarceration of sex offenders after they have finished serving their criminal sentences,

...if it is deemed likely they would commit the same crime again. It is a controversial concept: confining people not for what they did, but for what they might do in the future. Thirteen states have similar laws.

Many of these inmates are denied basic rights.

In a written opinion last year, Senior Circuit Judge Vincent Hall of DeSoto County said the center was denying a resident his constitutional rights when officials locked him in the equivalent of solitary confinement without his personal belongings and denied him the right to contact his attorney. The resident was being punished for protesting a broken air conditioner in the middle of summer heat.

How effective is the program?

Residents say some idle time here is filled having sex, especially among detainees who have not entered treatment. That's officially forbidden. A full-time staff of guards is supposed to prevent it. But administrators concede it happens, especially among residents who reject treatment.

Only eight people have been released from the center in five years, and those were released due to plea bargains in which prosecutors agreed to their release.

Critics say judges tend to want to keep people locked up forever rather than risk the public backlash that would result should a freed detainee re-offend.

Each "resident" costs the state $50,000 a year--more than twice what the state pays to house a prisoner.

''If people are just too dangerous to be out there, we ought to say that's what we think and not pretend it's treatment,'' Berlin says. ``If you're going through the motions and one percent are ever going to get out, it might not be worth it.''

Not suprisingly, we dont' like these centers. While appellate courts disagree with us, we think they are an unconstitutional infringement on due process rights. The maxim has been, "you do the crime, you do the time" These prisoners did the crime and the time and should be going home. If they reoffend, lock them up again. But what authority gives the government the right to lock people up after they have served their time simply becuase the bureaucrats believe they might reoffend? We say, let them out. If they reoffend, the state can file new charges, try them , and if convicted, give them a long sentence. But to make them do these sex classes (which our clients tell us are pretty worthless), repetitively take polygraphs about other prior conduct and their state of arousal, and make them hook their penises up to a plethysmograph to see if they get aroused when watching pictures of young girls, seems to us to be unseemly and ouija board justice. ..News Source.. by Jeralyn, FCCC