Because we classify their particular type as mentally ill. We assume that violent criminals generally are violent with some purpose in mind: even if they enjoy the violence while robbing you, for example, their ultimate goal is something other than violence.
Sexually dangerous, mentally ill predators are those people that have been found, by psychiatric examination, to be an on-going danger to themselves or to others. Our goal in confining them is not punitive, but intended to protect society and the person in question. Ordinary violent criminals are locked up to punish them for their crimes.
It’s a perfectly reasonable distinction to make. Unfortunately, it’s one that Congress shouldn’t have the power to make, because Congress should have only limited, enumerated powers.
That’s ONE reason. Another is, yes, to protect society from people with a demonstrated propensity toward performing the acts which got them incarcerated. IOW the same damn thing.
And then there’s penitence and the opportunity for rehabilitation as reasons for incarceration, too.
The funny thing is, not a single post in the thread (until yours) was concerned about it being Congress who enacted the law, but the fact that the law allowed involuntary commitment. But I realize you have your axe to grind (and grind, and grind, and grind), so knock yourself out.
For those who expressed concern about it being a violation of an individuals rights (which would be everyone 'cept Bricker), the Supreme Court has been handling these kinds of questions for over 30 years now, not just sexual offenders, but the involuntary commitment of mentally ill people who are a danger to themselves or others. In the 90’s States started to use these involuntary commitments to detain sexual offenders who were found to be mentally ill with an impairment that effects their actions, and who are a danger to reoffend. The Supreme Court has upheld these kinds of commitments many a time in the past (Kansas v. Hendricks for example).
This most recent case, as Bricker so kindly pointed out, was, for the most part, about whether Congress can make a law for involuntary commitment, not whether the law itself would violate the Constitution.
According to the DOJ, sex offenders have lower recidivism than other categories of offenders. Sex offender - Wikipedia
What we classify as mental illness is arbitrary. We could just as easily classify violent tendencies as mental illness and indefinitely imprison violent criminals.
Whether a criminal “enjoys” crime seems irrelevant to me. Plenty of criminals enjoy violence and other crime. And sex offenses have a goal, sexual gratification. I don’t think most sex offenders get off on traumatizing victims, they just don’t care or they think they aren’t.
C.S. Lewis had this to say back in the 1940s, and I think it’s surprisingly prescient. I will quote just this one part of it:
“The immediate starting point of this article was a letter I read in one of our Leftist weeklies. The author was pleading that a certain sin, now treated by our laws as a crime, should henceforward be treated as a disease. And he complained that under the present system the offender, after a term in gaol, was simply let out to return to his original environment where he would probably relapse. What he complained of was not the shutting up but the letting out.”
For the record, this is not a new concept. Today’s decision only concerned the federal government’s power to civilly commit sexually violent predators, and whether the federal government can justify doing so under an enumerated power. The states conduct many more sexually violent predator commitments than the federal government does, and have been doing so for quite some time. State sexually viollent predator commitments were declared constitutional thirteen years ago, in Kansas v. Hendricks, 521 U.S. 346 (1997).
Sex offenders as a whole have a low rate of recidivism, but “sex offenders” is a very, very broad category. Statisically, certain subcategories of especially dangerous sex offenders have much higher recidivism rates than the garden variety, same as how a 19 year old male has a higher statistical chance of wrecking his car than a 50 year old female A 35 year old married offender who raped his 3 year old kid’s 25 year old female babysitter and has no other convictions of any kind has a 10 year recidivism rate of less than 10 percent. A 25 year old offender who molested 6 or more stranger male children of varying ages and has prior convictions for nonsexual assault and non-contact sex offenses (voyuerism, masturbating in public, etc) has a 10 year recidivism rate of roughly 60 percent. Far more sex offenders fit the less dangerous profile of the first offender, but the extremely small number of offenders like the second pose a very real risk. Those are purely statistical observations - individual offenders may show other risk factors, like psychopathy, sexual sadism, refusal to participate in any sort of sex offender treatment, sexual misconduct in prison, etc.
I can think of a couple of reasons. The children wouldn’t have to be intimidated by walking past his house every day and he wouldn’t be presented with constant temptation.
I don’t know about child molesters, but with adults who rape other adults, it is not a matter of sexual gratification. Rape is an act of violence and brutality. It is about control.
I don’t understand your shift from talking about “people” and “they” to speaking in the second person “you” which is a little more personal.
Did “we” really hand this power to the courts? I know I didn’t personally. Several people were nominated by Presidents that I didn’t support. And I can indeed complain anyway when SCOTUS makes a decision I don’t cotton to. (There is a simple-minded idea in the First Amendment that says that I can. We can. Are you suggesting that we shouldn’t complain about decisions we don’t like?
I know from personal experience that someone can be involuntarily committed without ever seeing a judge or talking with a psychiatrist for three days. That was 44 years ago. Maybe things like that don’t happen anymore. It was absolute hell.
Scalia and Thomas dissented because they did not agree that the federal act was within the federal governments enumerated power, not because they believe the civil commitment of sexually violent predators is unconstitutional in and of itself. As an exercise of state power they are both perfectly fine with it, so much that Thomas actually wrote the majority opinion that approved it in Hendricks, which Scalia joined with. Breyer dissented in Hendricks because of specific concerns about the Kansas statute, not because he disagreed with the constitutionality of state civil commitment in general. Breyer further wrote the majority opinion in today’s Comstock opinion, meaning that the current count of justices that believe civil commitment of sexually violent predators is appropriate and constitutional in certain applications, particularly state courts, is 9-0. That’s all of them, unanimous from the most liberal to the most conserative.
Civil commitments are judicial proceedings, typically with a judge, jury, medical testimony, and in many jurisdictions a “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard, same as in a criminal proceeding. Out of the thousands of sex offenders released from the criminal justice system every year, only a handful are referred for civil commitment. They are not your average drunken date rapists; they are typically serial rapists and serial child molesters, and occassionally budding serial killers. Sometimes they have firmly entrenched and untreated paraphilic or pedophilic disorders, sometimes they are are psychopathic, sometimes they are dangerously psychotic and delusional. They pose a threat far beyond that of the typical sex offender.
Exactly. There are still quite a few sexually dangerous and very mentally screwed up predators who need to be locked up, and who cannot be rehabbed. They can’t function in society. They should be in mental insistutions in a special locked ward. (a la Hannibal Lector)
This appears to be the same brand of power as would allow the government to decide, for example, that a homeless person with schizophrenia should be committed to a mental care facility indefinitely. If you agree that this would/should be a government power, then I can understand the position of the court.
This isn’t an issue of criminal guilt nor punishment but of recognizing a person with a mental illness and getting them to where they aren’t damaging themselves or society.
It is a fairly common government power throughout the world and I’m sure the US has had it at varying levels in the past.
Why would anyone agree? If the person doesn’t want to be treated, why should they be forced? If they aren’t harming anyone else, what right do you have to do anything? Heck, why do you want to, other than “This person is mentally different from me. Therefore I can deny him his right to life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness.”
The same shit used against minorities and gay people. It’s bigotry, pure and simple.
And as revealed by a moderator on this very board, it’s okay to be bigotted against bigots. And I am.
Like the bigotry where the government tells children they have to go to school? Or the bigotry of telling blind people they can’t drive? There are plenty of things where the government steps in and deprives people of rights where there’s adequate reason to think that it’s to the greater welfare of the people.
A schizophrenic who doesn’t cause problems might not be justifiably committed, but one whose been proven to cause problems of such an extent that he’s been imprisoned can be. It’s not like there isn’t zero burden of proof at work here. The government isn’t arbitrarily picking people off the street and committing them. It’s requiring that they have been diagnosed by an impartial expert and that the person have been shown to be incapable of self-restraint due to his illness. That’s not a standard that really runs into slippery slope territory.
This ruling applies to the feds. States have always been able to do this. In fact they used to do it often in the past. Sexual preditors fall under the heading of “mentally ill” people. You can lock up the mentally ill without their consent.
Moreover the government has to follow a strict set of guidelines to get them locked up and keep them locked up.
Keeping sexual preditors at bay doesn’t work overall, but it does work to keep them out of certain areas. Of course it just pushes them into other areas where they can ply their trade.
But that is common. In Chicago, we go through cycles of cleaning up neighborhoods. The neighborhood gets good, the poor people leave and where they settle rapidly goes downhill. Then the poor get kicked out again and return to another neighborhood and it goes back downhill.
On this issue I can state that it can be exactly the same as prison. I worked at a prison where we kept civil commitments. They lived among and were treated the same as the prisoners under regular sentences.