Keeping prisoners past their terms because of

[astro]

While I can understand the concerns about whether a person is rehabilitated or not, it seems that if a person has done their time as determined by their sentence, that keeping someone imprisoned for years beyond this date, based on somewhat questionable guesses by psychiatrists about their “state of mind”, seems ethically wrong somehow, even if they are criminals. In essence a person’s sentence means nothing, if the state feels you are not sufficiently rehabilitated.

It’s vaguely like a Soviet gulag where you can be imprisoned indefinitely based on an administrative or psychiatric opinion about your state of mind. Is this the way punishment should work?

From the New York Times

Questions Rise Over Imprisoning Sex Offenders Past Their Terms

EARNY, N.J. — Robert Deavers, guilty of two rapes, has done his 20 years in prison. He still has not been freed. Instead, for five years, he has been locked up by state officials who are worried about what he might do.

Mr. Deavers took another try at gaining his release in the fall of 2002 at a hearing, his third. The subject was his state of mind, and he quickly lost hope.

A state psychiatrist who had interviewed him briefly told the closed, nearly empty courtroom that Mr. Deavers tended to self-righteousness and had been taken to task in group therapy for being overconfident.

A psychologist who had never met him but had reviewed his records said he was egocentric. There was much testimony about an incident in which he had bumped into a female guard.

By noon Mr. Deavers knew what would happen a month later: the judge would rule that he was too dangerous to be released.

Back in his room, Mr. Deavers resumed his role in a fiercely debated but politically popular system of preventive detention used by New Jersey and 15 other states. In hearings here at the Northern Regional Unit at Kearny, a Department of Corrections center, men who have finished their prison terms are involuntarily committed as psychiatric patients and, with a handful of exceptions, are recommitted each year.

[astro]

Dear mods- There is apparently another thread addressing this same topic that I did not notice. Please close this one.