The U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division is examining New York’s controversial system of civil confinement for sex offenders.
The probe was revealed when an attorney with the Justice Department’s special litigation office recently interviewed a sex offender confined at the Central New York Psychiatric Center in Oneida County.
Under New York’s decade-old Sex Offender Management and Treatment Act, convicted sex offenders can be kept in secure psychiatric hospitals indefinitely after their prison terms expire. If an offender is found to have a mental abnormality that makes the person likely to commit another sex crime, the state can — after a court hearing — order the offender committed as a patient in a secure psychiatric hospital. (There are currently no women in civil confinement.) Full Article
I already applaud the author of this article for specifically stating that no woman is confined to civil commitment, a fact that conveniently gets omitted when other articles about this unconstitutional practice is published.
A quote from the article…”It’s just a front to house people.” THAT is the real reason why there are so many people in prison and civil confinement. I say, give them an effective treatment and be done with it. But as long as people make money from housing offenders for long terms or making money from almost never ending “community supervision”, no justice is being done. U.S. prison population has exploded exponentially since the 1980’s, not because more people are committing crimes, but because there’s money in it.
I say if the States insist on calling these places hospitals instead of Prisons but these people are in regular prisons anyway then why don’t we flip this s*** around and send people directly to these hospitals which are prisons anyway and get the prison out of the way in the beginning. Then based on their success rate of treatment reduce their prison sentence later if they ever manage to get out anyway.