Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Sex Offenders After Prison: Lifetime GPS Monitoring? - Legislation & Policymaking - FindLaw Blotter


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Treatment for a sexual predator costs a whopping $175,000 per person per year in New York: study

BY Rosemary Black
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Monday, June 21st 2010, 4:38 PM

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The average annual cost of treating a locked-up sex offender is $96,000 (in New York State that number jumps to $175,000) – about twice what it would cost to put him through an Ivy League university, according to a nationwide Associated Press analysis. All told, the 20 states with “civil commitment” laws aimed at keeping sex offenders behind bars will spend close to $500 million this year on housing and treatment for more than 5,000 inmates.

The programs, formed back when states were more flush with cash than they are in the current recession, were meant to keep dangerous sex offenders considered capable of striking again locked up once they’d served their time. But the civil commitment programs are setting the states back by hundreds of millions of dollars annually and creating a problem for legislators. They must trim budgets but don’t want to be perceived by their constituents as soft on child molesters and other sex predators, reports the AP.

“I’ve heard people in a lot of the states quietly say, ‘Oh, my God, I wish we’d never gotten this law,” University of Maryland School of Law Prof. Lawrence Fitch told the AP. “No one would ever dare offer repeal because it’s just untenable.”

At a Moose Lake, Minn., facility, 400 sex offenders divide their time between group-therapy sessions and activities like painting state-park signs. Minnesota plans an expansion at Moose Lake, which resembles a medium-security prison.

What makes facilities like this one so expensive is the cost of all the treatment staff – behavioral therapists, social workers, psychiatrists and psychologists. For example, there is a treatment team consisting of five or six people for every 25 to 50 offenders at the Moose Lake facility.

Overall, the cost of keeping sex offenders in treatment costs more than five times what it does to keep offenders incarcerated, reports the AP, and this doesn’t include all the legal expenses incurred when committing someone.

Some wonder if the programs are even effective. Research shows treatment can only lower a sexual predator’s chances of committing another sex crime slightly – by a little less than 20%, Fitch told the AP.

As lawmakers with less money in hand continue to make cuts to education and health care, some wonder how viable the civil commitment programs are.

“It’s easy to say, ‘Lock everybody up and throw away the key,’ ” state Rep. Michael Paymar (D-St. Paul) told the AP. But, added Paymar, who heads a public-safety budget panel, “It’s just not practical.”
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"When an American says that he loves his country, he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, the wide and rising plains, the great mountains, and the sea. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect."
~Adlia Stevenson U.S. Vice President (1893–1897) and Congressman (1879–1881)

On a Personal Note

Thanks for the opportunity to express my thoughts regarding the issue of citizens’ rights, particularly addressing certain sex offenders’ crimes that do not fit the devastating, inequitable and endless punishment given.


As you know, many young men and women lives across the nation are being destroyed by incarceration, life-time registry and restrictive laws that do more harm than good. For those individuals, there is no second chance.

Below is a personal letter to President Obama:
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“Dear President Obama,

I truly agree with your sentiments that individuals, such as ex-felons, should be able to receive a second chance at life. Since we all know that one can veer off that path of life and travel along rough, rocky terrain, sometimes running off and ending up in some ditch. We all have made our fill of mistakes and sometimes those held a costly consequence that changed life forever. So we lived through it, trying harder to make things right with family, friends and those around us, but what about those who aren’t able to make things right even if they tried…because they’re labeled as too dirty, a leper, a person who is rejected from society and home.

But what if they’re a seventeen year old and had sex with a fifteen year old, consensual at that? Or they’re a teen that had gotten so enraged after a breakup that he sent out naked pictures of his girlfriend on his cell phone or email? Or an individual urinates where someone just happens to see them?

All are wrong and a travesty but do they deserve the life of no second chance with a registry that ends all. They are labeled, no jobs, no where to live…they have been deemed a menace to society, a plague. These certain circumstances, and many other situations similar to these, I believe still deserve a second change.

Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

After my son’s early release and two years of prison, I thought I had handled that fact graciously knowing after serving his time he would be able to get that fresh start, that second chance. He was an exemplary inmate, GED, college courses and vocational classes. Little did I know that a second chance on the outside was the farthest from the truth? He now struggles and lives in a trailer park sharing a trailer with another and surrounded by others in the same rocking boat, one to float endlessly in shark infested waters. I see him little because of probation requirements (he couldn’t live with us because we were 800 feet near a school). My family is afraid of what would happen to them if he lived with them…vigilantism. My son has no other place to stay since others condemn him of his crime that is screamed from the highest rooftop. Sex offender, sex offender!

Not all sex offenders are pedophiles or predators but some are simply young kids that make one stupid and rash decision that eventually changes everything, and they have no idea what they’ve done until their life is never their own. Exactly, where is that second chance for those sex-offenders who are lumped together with pedophiles and predators? Now, it makes me sick to think of my son’s future and many like him that are on the registry and many with no second chance…ever. I am asking you as a mother and as another concerned citizen of the United States that these laws are looked at again and taken into serious consideration in what they are doing to the Constitution of the United States, not for sex offenders in general but the future rights of every citizen, before anymore are put into effect. They unjustly strip an offender of their rights and place them in a guillotine that can be easily set off by anyone and at anytime. Where is the second chance for ex-sex offenders in the present, pending and future laws?”
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What truly saddens me is the weakness and deterioration of what the sex offense issue is doing to our once, great nation. Across Europe, others are seeing the injustice and disregard of rights, but we ignore this problem and it makes me wonder where humanity is heading….

We have become a hysterical society in which our latest witch-hunt is a sex offender--no matter his/her crime.

Below is a email sent from a foreign advocate to a father of a sex offender:
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“The tragic story of your son's death is just so sad that it's difficult to explain how. It was very hard to read your letters. It seems almost unbelievable that this can take place in a democracy! From our point of view, there is no justice in this. Not in any way: not for you, your son, the former girl friend – or even the state.

It is an abusive legal system. It seems barbaric. And we are so very sorry that this takes place. That's why it's so important for us to try to neutralize the debate with this…, hopefully making some changes. ….. to show the every day life of the sex offenders, trying to show how they keep on being punished, even after served prison time…..But we will for sure tell the story of the injustice that your son has been exposed to.”
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I appreciate everyone's commitment and backing to protect everyone's civil rights, plainly as noted in the Constitution of the United States and is presupposed, giving ALL men are “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.”