While the purpose of civil commitment is -treatment- notice the absence of any cost figures related to treatment! Why isn't the focus on the TREATMENT program? One other thing missing is, even though these folks are in a civil commitment center, have ALL OF THEM completed their prison sentences?2-21-2010 Minnesota:
Civil commitment program grows in cost, controversy
In 1956, when he was 15, Dennis Linehan molested a 4-year-old girl and was sent to reform school. What happened over the next several decades sent Minnesota down a path that state lawmakers are still grappling with.
At 19, Linehan had sex with a 13-year-old girl. Three years later, he and a friend beat and repeatedly raped a woman. Two years after that, he spotted 14-year-old baby sitter Barbara Iversen through a window, lured her outside and choked her to death while trying to rape her. Before he was caught a few weeks later, he raped a 22-year-old woman and molested two sisters, ages 11 and 12.
Linehan was sentenced to 40 years in a Stillwater prison, but escaped in 1975, swam across the river to Wisconsin and headed east. Eleven days after his escape, he hid in a Michigan woods and assaulted a 12-year-old girl. After a Michigan jury read their guilty verdict, he told the girl he was going to kill her.
Linehan served his Michigan sentence and was returned to Stillwater. With his release set for 1992, the state committed him under the Psychopathic Personality Commitment Act, but the Minnesota Supreme Court overturned that decision in 1994.
Panicked that an obviously dangerous offender was about to be released, Gov. Arne Carlson called a special session of the Legislature, which quickly passed just the second sex offender civil commitment law in the country. Two days later, the Ramsey County attorney hauled Linehan before a judge.
Minnesota's sex offender civil commitment program was under way. But it has grown in expense and controversy since then, especially as none of its now more than 550 patients has ever been successfully treated and released.
And now, state officials are grappling with another pricey expansion — $89 million sought by Gov. Tim Pawlenty to add 400 beds to the program. It was the governor's largest state construction request this year.
But some lawmakers have urged everyone to take a deep breath and look at the program before expanding it. The Senate didn't include the project in its proposal, but at the last minute the House did, and lawmakers still haven't determined whether to fund it.
Pawlenty has harshly criticized the DFL-controlled Legislature, saying lawmakers' priorities are out of whack.
"That facility is needed, while at the same time, they have things in their bills to fund things like recreation centers, arts facilities," Pawlenty said.
GOAL IS TO CURE THEM
Up in sleepy Moose Lake, 500 of Minnesota's most frightening offenders live behind 12-foot fences protected with razor wire. On average, each offender has victimized 16 people, mostly children. Of those victims, about 60 percent were younger than 13, and 85 percent were younger than 18.
In one 98-bed wing, patients, as they are known, mingle by the door as lunch draws near. There are two guards behind a semicircular desk with several monitors, overlooking two interior floors of 160-square-foot, double-occupancy rooms set off to either side.
Down the middle of the open area are steel tables, and about halfway down are private shower stalls with three-quarter doors. The sex offender unit does not have communal showers.
The patients are allowed to mingle freely or play games. On this day, one man leans over a steel table that has a partially completed jigsaw puzzle. The border is done, but he stares into the empty middle, blocking out what's going on around him.
And because the program's goals are treatment, the patients are allowed more creature comforts in their rooms — TV monitors, headphones, books, even plants.
In fact, the program isn't even run by the state Department of Corrections — the Department of Human Services runs it. That distinction helps keep the civil commitment programs legal — courts approve them if the goal is to "cure" sex offenders, a notion some question — but it also explains some of the confusion and criticism of them.
While prison inmates cost taxpayers $63 a day, sex offenders in civil commitment cost $328 a day.
That means treating each of the approximately 550 patients costs taxpayers $119,720 a year — roughly equal to Pawlenty's annual salary.
I wondewr how much of the $119,720 actually is TREATMENT? The way they figure it, it includes housing, security and whatever medical there might be.
As the program grew over the years, its operating budget peaked at $75 million in 2008. To save money, the program has shed more than 200 positions and its annual budget is down to $65 million, which approximates the 2009 payroll of the Minnesota Twins.
Dennis Benson, who runs the Minnesota Sex Offender Program, has heard the criticism. He projects that with an expansion, efficiencies of scale will bring the cost of treating each offender down to about $250 a day.
But that's still expensive — much more than housing prisoners. Benson's answer is that they aren't prisoners.
"They have rights and entitlements that people in corrections don't have," Benson said, adding that in order to meet constitutional requirements, the program must provide treatment that is research- and evidence-based.
State Sen. Linda Berglin, DFL-Minneapolis, said she is concerned about the cost of the program and opposes adding all 400 beds.
"As long as we have beds to fill, the inclination will be not to do the hard work of figuring out other appropriate alternatives besides those beds," Berglin said.
Berglin suggested a new option, something between releasing an offender into society and sending him into the costly sex offender program.
"I think the problem is we don't have alternatives," Berglin said. "So somebody gets presented to a judge, and the judge is given two alternatives: send them home or send them to this program."
Pawlenty recently proposed doubling the sentences for first-degree sex offenders, suggesting the program might cut the cost of housing patients in the commitment program simply by keeping them in prison longer.
SJODIN CASE TRIGGERED CHANGES
It wasn't always this way. But this generation's Dennis Linehan changed that.
On the evening of Nov. 22, 2003, college student Dru Sjodin finished a shift at a mall in Grand Forks, N.D. She was speaking to her boyfriend on a cell phone as she walked to her car when the call abruptly ended.
Less than two weeks later, police arrested Alfonso Rodriguez Jr. in Sjodin's disappearance. A convicted rapist, Rodriguez was a Level 3 sex offender who, six months earlier, had completed a 23-year sentence for the stabbing and attempted kidnapping of a woman. When the snowmelt came in April 2004, Sjodin's body was found near Crookston.
From January to November 2003, the state Department of Corrections, which refers inmates whose sentences are about to expire for civil commitment, asked judges to commit a total of 14 inmates.
That December, 235 offenders were sent before judges. Following Rodriguez's arrest, Minnesota Corrections Commissioner Joan Fabian decided that all Level 3 sex offenders would be recommended for commitment.
The sex offender program was on a growth curve. In 2006, the Legislature approved a 400-bed expansion at Moose Lake, a former 100-bed facility that opened shortly after the Legislature approved the civil commitment law.
But the Legislature did not approve all the money requested by the Department of Human Services. Instead, it agreed to pay for the beds but nothing else — not new group therapy rooms, not a new kitchen to feed everyone, not other infrastructure.
The new unit opened six months ago and eventually will quintuple the original population without adding the means to service the patients.
To augment the original restaurant-sized kitchen, Human Services has added a trailer fitted with several ovens. Inmates eat in three shifts on tables set up in a gymnasium, so only half of it is usable for pick-up games of basketball.
And there is only one room in the entire 400-bed unit made for group therapy sessions, where more than a dozen chairs are placed in a circle, with a white board and tissues nearby. To manage, the department has converted recreation rooms and clinical offices in each of the five wings to be used for daily therapy sessions.
There is a question of whether the patchwork conditions blur the line between a therapeutic or punitive program, threatening to jeopardize the entire civil commitment program.
"Our job is to provide meaningful treatment, and that's also in keeping with the law," Benson said. "To do that, you've got to have adequate space, adequate beds and adequate infrastructure, or there could be constitutional challenges to the programs."
The new proposal would add a 400-bed unit at Moose Lake, as well as the infrastructure the Legislature failed to include in 2006.
PREVENTION VS. TREATMENT
Civil liberties advocates have long raised concerns that civil commitment is merely an indefinite extension of an offender's prison sentence. Those concerns are emphasized in Minnesota, which has released only one person, and even then only temporarily.
When Eric Janus looks at the cost of the Minnesota Sex Offender Program, he sees a waste. The cost of treating offenders there and expanding the program could be better spent on prevention, he said, including changing societal attitudes about sexual violence.
"If you put the same amount of money you're spending at Moose Lake and put it into prevention, you'd do a whole lot better at preventing crimes than you're doing right now," Janus said.
Janus, the dean of William Mitchell College of the Law and who once represented Linehan, released a book last year critical of civil commitment programs.
"They're pretty clearly designed to prolong the incarceration of sex offenders whose criminal sentences have expired or are about to expire," Janus said.
One widespread problem with the programs has to do with the nature of treatment and recovery — to get better, offenders often need to acknowledge what they've done, and that includes confessing to previously unknown crimes. In fact, the state uses polygraph tests on offenders to make sure they've come clean.
Such disclosures have therapeutic value, Janus said, "but when the disclosures result in further incarcerations, that really discourages further participation."
Of the 550 or so offenders in the program, 98 are currently refusing treatment, though Benson pointed out the figure used to hover around half the population.
"There are people that are motivated to change," Benson said. "The choices are: You can sit around and watch TV all day or you can seek treatment."
One case against the Minnesota Sex Offender Program is being closely watched.
While construction of the new Moose Lake facility was under way, the state housed overflow prisoners at an annex of an adjacent medium-security prison run by the Department of Corrections.
Inmate Wallace Beaulieu alleged in a federal lawsuit that the program began to feel more like prison, with strip searches and restraints.
While Beaulieu first pursued the case without a lawyer, a federal judge soon took a look at it and appointed him counsel — a local law firm and the American Civil Liberties Union. ACLU lawyer Theresa Nelson said the case goes to a key point — whether the line between a therapeutic and a punitive program has been blurred.
"In the hospital setting, it's got to be reasonably related to the treatment," Nelson said. "All of these policies, all of these rules, don't do that. They don't even look at whether a lot of these policies are countertherapeutic."
PUBLIC SAFETY AT ISSUE
What will happen when Minnesota finally releases a sex offender? The outcry over sex offenders, combined with laws restricting where they live, has roiled other states.
In Georgia, one sex offender was forced to live in the woods behind an office park. In Florida, parole officers routinely recommend that sex offenders live under a Miami causeway, and dozens now live in the colony. In California, sex offenders sometimes are forced to live in trailers on prison grounds, ostensibly free but literally steps from where they served out their sentences.
A substantial number of Minnesota's civilly committed sex offenders who are in the later stages of treatment have been sent to the state hospital in St. Peter. And four of those live in a state-constructed home within the grounds of the St. Peter hospital.
They are learning how to live in society again: shoveling snow, washing dishes, even taking supervised trips to the bank. All four refused requests for interviews.
While there is no timeline for their release, the four patients are the closest to being released into society. What happens when they are finally released could very well have implications for the future of the program.
"We do everything we can to ensure public safety to the extent that we can," Benson said. "If and when that day comes, we'll do everything we can." ..Source.. Jason Hoppin
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