12-10-2009 Minnesota:
The saga of the big-screen TVs that were removed from the Minnesota sex offender program by Gov. Tim Pawlenty is not over.
More than a month after Pawlenty announced that some of the 50-inch, flat-screen TVs would be given to veterans homes across the state, the Minnesota Department of Veterans Affairs reports that eight of the 14 TVs it received were damaged when they arrived. Of the remaining six TVs, four have been installed in veterans homes in Minneapolis and Fergus Falls.
"We are disappointed that the TVs were damaged in the transfer and we are hoping FedEx is able to resolve this matter as quickly as possible," said department spokeswoman Sarah Graves.
TVs INSURED: Graves said that the TVs were delivered in mid-November and that the state had insured the shipments. "The department has filed the necessary paperwork with FedEx," she added.
The governor ordered the TVs removed from the state's sex offender program in Moose Lake after the Star Tribune reported that the program had bought two dozen large-screen TVs, even though 90 percent of the program's patients had TVs in their rooms. According to state records, the TVs cost $1,576 each and state officials used brackets that cost another $706 apiece to mount the TVs in common areas at a new $45 million treatment facility that opened in July. ..Source..
December 10, 2009
Big-screen TVs damaged in transfer to vets homes
October 23, 2009
MN- Minn. Vets Get TVs From Sex Offenders
Further proof that, the state has no real interest in treating sex offender even in civil commitment (see highlights), or the professional suggestions of treatment professionals.
10-23-2009 Minnesota:
Veterans homes get TVs from Moose Lake facility
ST. PAUL, Minn. - 13 flat-screen TVs Gov. Tim Pawlenty ordered removed from the Minnesota sex offender treatment facility in Moose Lake are headed for veterans homes.
On his radio show Friday, Pawlenty said the 50-inch TVs are bound for veterans homes in Minneapolis, Fergus Falls, Hastings and Silver Bay. Pawlenty said discipline is still being discussed for employees involved in the purchase.
"Every once in a while someone makes a mistake in judgment," Pawlenty said. "This was clearly a bonehead decision."
The Department of Human Services said 90 percent of patients already have TVs in their rooms, but the facility installed two dozen 50-inch plasma TVs in common areas at a cost of more than $2,200 each.
The executive director of the sex offender treatment program, Dennis Benson, defended the TVs. Benson told the Star Tribune that the TVs have clinical value because patients can be watched to see how they respond to what's on TV. Program officials said the TVs also concentrate patients in one spot, making them easier to monitor at a time when staffing has been reduced.
Pawlenty says the sex offenders can make do with smaller TVs.
The remaining TVs are likely to be sold.
Sold? They are now used TVs so they will be sold at a loss, and I wonder who will be buying them? Could it be state employees?..Source.. by FOX9.com
October 20, 2009
MN- Pawlenty Orders Removal Of Sex Offenders' Luxe TVs
10-20-2009 Minnesota:
Gov. Tim Pawlenty called the purchase of big flat-screen TVs for a Minnesota sex offender treatment facility "boneheaded" and said Tuesday he wants them removed, sold and replaced with smaller sets.
"They don't need 50-inch, flat-screen plasma televisions for sex offenders," the Republican governor said outside his official residence after an unrelated meeting with lawmakers.
He added: "Clearly, somebody just made a bonehead decision, and I'm going to reverse it."
A spokeswoman for the state Department of Human Services said the 25 televisions will be removed immediately. The agency administers the Minnesota Sex Offender Program, which confines offenders the courts have deemed dangerous and likely to commit new sex crimes. Nine of 10 offenders in the program have their own televisions in their rooms.
The Star Tribune first reported on the large TVs, saying each one cost $1,576, plus a $706 mounting bracket. Human Services Department spokeswoman Terry Gunderson confirmed the prices and said agency officials will work with the Department of Administration to sell the TVs.
Officials are looking into who authorized the purchase and whether disciplinary action should be taken, Gunderson said.
Dennis Benson, executive director of the sex offender treatment program, told the Star Tribune the TVs have clinical value because patients can be watched to see how they respond to what's on TV. The TVs also draw patients to common areas in the 400-bed facility, making them easier to monitor with fewer employees, program officials said.
State Rep. Michael Paymar, DFL-St. Paul, said the luxurious TVs are "an embarrassment." Lawmakers approved emergency funding for the Sex Offender Program early this year without being told about the televisions, he said.
"At a time when schools are being starved and poor people are getting kicked off their medical assistance plans and hospitals are struggling and nursing homes are struggling, how do you justify 50-inch, plasma-style televisions in a facility for sex offenders?" he said.
Still, Paymar and state Rep. Alice Hausman, who heads a House panel that picks state-financed construction projects, said the issue probably won't derail the Department of Human Services' request for $96 million to expand the Moose Lake facility. The project is competing with others for inclusion in a 2010 public works bill.
Hausman, a St. Paul Democrat who toured the facility recently, said the TVs are a distraction.
"This is really a time to say, 'What is the program? Why did we move in this direction, and what are the future needs?"' she said.
Enrollment in the sex offender program is projected to double from about 500 to 1,000 in coming years, she said.
No one has ever been released from the sex offender treatment program, which costs $328 a day per patient. Enrollment has shot up since 2003, when the kidnapping and murder of college student Dru Sjodin by convicted rapist Alfonso Rodriguez Jr. led state corrections officials to refer all high-risk sex offenders to prosecutors for possible civil commitment. ..Source.. by WCCO.com
MN- Do pricey TVs treat sex offenders?
This article is valuable beyond the issue of "Pricey TVs," note the statistics and the fact that, not one single person has ever met the criteria for release. The standard for release is set -by the state- so high that, not even a person who has never committed a sex offense could ever meet it. i.e., proof that civil commitment is no more than further punishment and treatment is but a pretext to keep former offenders beyond their prison sentences.
10-20-2009 Minnesota:
Moose Lake sex offender program officials say the new plasma-screen TVs have some clinical benefit. Some offenders say they waste a lot of tax money.
MOOSE LAKE, MINN. - Sex offenders at Minnesota's newest treatment facility at Moose Lake can watch television on one of two dozen new, 50-inch flat-screen TVs, and more may be on the way.
The cost of the sports bar-type, plasma TVs -- $1,576 apiece, plus a $706 mounting bracket -- is a relatively small part of the state's multimillion-dollar effort to house and treat sex offenders.
But a debate has ensued over whether the TVs help make the offenders easier to manage and have a clinical benefit, or are a needless luxury for a controversial program that faces a skyrocketing budget and patient population.
Surprisingly, the loudest critics of the TVs may be the sex offenders. Two of them have complained to state legislators that the TVs mounted in common areas of the new 400-bed facility are a waste of money because most patients have small televisions in their rooms.
"I am appalled by the fact that there are children in school now that probably don't have schoolbooks, and that bridges are falling down, and old people are going without medicine, and we're sitting here in this 'white horse' bolting these huge sports bar televisions onto the walls," said Rodger Robb II, a sex offender living in the new $45 million complex that opened in July.
Robb maintains that the new TVs are watched mostly by security guards. "I just don't get it," he said.
Program officials bristle at suggestions that the TVs are a waste of taxpayer money, and say focusing on their cost ignores the complex treatment plans devised for a population for which there are no quick cures.
Since Minnesota decided to commit sex offenders to civil treatment programs after they had served their criminal sentences, .the number of sex offenders has risen to 566 patients and is expected to nearly double in seven years. .So far, no patient has been successfully treated and released by the courts.
Two weeks ago, state legislators toured the Moose Lake facility and heard program officials urge .that money be appropriated to build another new wing at a projected cost of $96 million. Officials said it may include more big-screen TVs.
One legislator on the tour, Rep. Alice Hausman, DFL-St. Paul, is a key player in whether the new building will get funded. She said she found the explanation of why the TVs were necessary to be "fascinating."
TV benefits unproven
Program officials see two minor, but important, benefits to the TVs. First, they said that after reducing staffing by nearly 200 even as the patient population increases, .the TVs draw groups of patients to one spot and make them easier to keep an eye on.
The state is forever justifying everything under the sun on, keeping an eye on sex offenders. i.e., TRACKING.
Secondly, while .officials acknowledged that 90 percent of the patients had TVs in their rooms, they said making television available in a group setting can have clinical benefits for a population with severe socialization problems. At the same time, the program's top officials acknowledge there is little research showing a conclusive clinical benefit.
Michael Thompson, president of the Minnesota chapter of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, said he wasn't aware of any research on using TV as a socialization tool for sex offenders. "I perused approximately 180 research abstracts to see if this issue has ever been studied. I could find nothing," he said.
The case for the TVs
But Dennis Benson, the program's executive director, argues that the TVs have value.
"We aren't going to hide anything from anybody -- including how many TV sets," he said. "You really want to see how they're going to interact with four other people watching the [Minnesota] Vikings play the [Green Bay] Packers."
Besides, he added, the TVs are located in common areas that are roughly 200 feet long, and are spaced at least 50 feet apart. Linked to a cable system, they give the sex offenders access to 62 networks such as the Disney Channel, ESPN, SPIKE TV, ABC Family and VH1.
"Could we have put up a 42-inch TV? I don't know," said Benson, who noted that the patients had access to TVs in their previous building. "Sex offenders are easy to hate ... I know what the public will say." Benson said there were "very clear clinical reasons" for purchasing the TVs and said observing a convicted sex offender reacting "to the stimuli of a 5-year-old on a television set" had potentially important clinical benefits.
Patients are watched by staff members to see how they respond to what is on TV -- a task made easier if TVs are located in an open area, said Janine Hebert, the program's clinical director. "TV is used as perhaps a social stimulus," said Hebert, who said a patient's treatment plan could be adjusted depending on how they reacted to an image on TV. Most patients have "a social interaction deficit at the simplest form," she said. "I'd rather have guys mingling, watching TV."
Plugging the budget shortfall
In March, the state sex offender program came before legislators with an urgent request to cover a $16 million shortfall, which the Legislature filled.
Much of the shortfall, program officials said, came because of construction delays at the new Moose Lake facility, which forced the program to temporarily rent beds elsewhere.
"We might find ourselves trying to figure out how we pay staff after April 1," Cal Ludeman, the state human services commissioner, told legislators last spring, in asking for the additional money. "We might have to delay payments to food service vendors, contractors." The sex offender program is part of the Department of Human Services.
Rep. Thomas Huntley, DFL-Duluth, who chairs the House Health Care and Human Services Finance Division Committee, said he was unaware of the TV purchase. "They certainly have a right to watch TV," he said. "I don't know if they need a big, flat screen. .It has to be treated like a hospital -- it is not a prison."
But Rep. Michael Paymar, DFL-St. Paul, who chairs the House Public Safety Finance Division Committee, said legislators are likely to have questioned the expense, had they known. "If it came up, I think there would be probably some concerns about it," he said.
Larry Schultz, another sex offender who complained to legislators that the TVs were unnecessary, .said he doubted that television provided any clinical benefit. "I don't know what dream world [Benson] lives in," Schultz said. "Right now, one TV is on. Nobody even watches the [others]. It's just a waste of money." ..Source.. by MIKE KASZUBA, Star Tribune
