Complex sex offender system isn't working, say lawmakers and lawyers

4-15-2013 Colorado:

When he was 22 years old in 2003, Eric Martinez met a girl online. She was two months away from her 15th birthday, and he knew it.

Both were living in Colorado Springs, and after two months of chatting online, they met and had sex. The girl told Martinez that she had been sexually involved with men his age before, so he thought it was no big deal, he said.

“I kind of got myself into feeling I was her friend,” Martinez said. “If I said no, she was going to take that wrong.”

During the next couple of months, they had sex three or four times, and in June 2004, Martinez was arrested for sex assault on a child, after the girl’s parents discovered their relationship, Martinez said.

The arrest marked the beginning of a long, winding trip for Martinez through the correctional system, a trip determined by Colorado’s Lifetime Supervision Act of 1998.

Concern for public safety was at the heart of the act’s creation; it was designed to keep people convicted of the worst types of sex offenses behind bars, possibly for life, while using therapy to treat others with lesser offenses, allowing them to transition back into society and live under strict parole requirements.

But the system isn’t working as lawmakers intended.

The system has become an expensive way to warehouse sex offenders of all types, state lawmakers and lawyers say. Thousands of offenders, including Martinez, are serving what are essentially life sentences in prison, where release on parole depends on the availability of money and treatment spots. Of the nearly 2,000 Colorado sex offenders sent to prison under the Lifetime Supervision Act, 168 have been released.

Costs for the treatment program are rising yearly, as more offenders require treatment and others are on a years-long waitlist, with a disproportionate amount of money supporting a relatively small prison population. A state-ordered study of the offender treatment program found that it is poorly funded and is staffed by therapists whose training is out of date and who use antiquated treatment techniques.

Without more money, Department of Corrections officials have said, the system bears little resemblance to the one lawmakers envisioned and is further threatened by the costs of lawsuits by prisoners desperate to get into the treatment program that is the key to their release. ...continued... by RYAN MAYE HANDY