MN- A vote against paying wages to sex offenders

10-26-2009 Minnesota:

Long before the news broke that sex offenders in a Moose Lake treatment facility had been given 50-inch, plasma TVs, Rep. Matt Dean had other concerns about the program.

Dean, a Republican legislator from Dellwood, said he did not think it was a good idea for a state-run treatment facility to pay the patients for any work they performed -- especially when the program’s costs were spiraling upward and no patient had been successfully treated and released from the program by the courts. So Dean authored legislation earlier this year that would make it mandatory that 50 percent of their wages go to help pay for the program’s costs and that the other 50 percent not encumbered by a court order go to the crime victims reparations board.

A spokesperson for the state sex offender program said patients are paid $7.25 an hour when they participate in vocational programming, can work up to 30 hours a week and that up to 50 percent of their earnings go to paying for the program’s costs.

Though Dean’s proposal received a legislative hearing last spring, it eventually died. Dean, the lead Republican on the House Human Services Finance committee, said he later offered a watered down version on the House floor, asking that it be mandatory that 50 percent of the wages paid to sex offenders go to help pay the program’s rising costs. That proposal, he said, failed too.

"The purpose of that was to try to get [more] of the funds back," Dean said in an interview after the Star Tribune wrote last week that the program spent nearly $60,000 to buy two dozen large-screen TVs for the patients. "A lot of people are very surprised that they actually do collect a wage.

"It’s a very odd population, and it’s also one that infuriates people," he added.

The decision to buy and install the TVs in Moose Lake was described as "boneheaded" by Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who ordered the TVs removed last week. Pawlenty said Friday that roughly half the TVs would go to some of the state’s veterans homes. Though the governor’s office vowed to find and reprimand whoever made the decision to buy the TVs, DFLers said the disclosure reflected a continuing lack of oversight by the Republican governor’s administration.

Dean said he had been bothered by the price of the new Moose Lake facility, which cost $45 million and opened in July. "I have been critical of [the new facility] -- just the cost of construction, particularly," he said. ..Source.. by Mike Kaszuba