States Struggle With What to Do With Sex Offenders After Prison
Behind razor wire and locked metal doors, hundreds of men waited on a recent morning to be counted, part of the daily routine inside a remote facility here that was built based on a design for a prison.
But this is not a prison, and most of these men — rapists, pedophiles and other sex offenders — have already completed their sentences. They are being held here indefinitely under a policy known as civil commitment, having been deemed “sexually dangerous” or “sexual psychopathic personalities” by courts. The intent, the authorities say, is to provide treatment to the most dangerous sex offenders until it is safe for the public for them to go home.
Yet not one of the more than 700 sex offenders who have been civilly committed in Minnesota over the past two decades has actually gone home. And only a few men have been provisionally discharged to live outside of state facilities under strict supervision. “You knew you were going to die here,” said Craig Bolte, a sex offender who has been held here nine years and who says he would rather be sent to prison, where “there is still hope.”
But now Minnesota’s civil commitment program — which detains more people per capita than any other state — is facing an overhaul. Earlier this year, a federal judge found it unconstitutional, calling it “a punitive system that segregates and indefinitely detains a class of potentially dangerous individuals without the safeguards of the criminal justice system.” The judge, Donovan W. Frank, of Federal District Court in St. Paul, is expected to order changes to the program as soon as this week.
Minnesota is not alone in revisiting its policies. In Missouri, a federal judge last month found that state’s program violated people’s right to due process, potentially imposing “lifetime detention on individuals who have completed their prison sentences and who no longer pose a danger to the public, no matter how heinous their past conduct.” Of about 250 people held since Missouri began committing people in 1999, state officials say seven have been granted what the state considers release with court-ordered restrictions, though some of those men remain in a group-home-like setting behind razor wire at a state facility. (Read more from “States Struggle With What to Do With Sex Offenders After Prison” HERE)
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