Fair enough. But if this person has a mental illness, then why were they criminally charged and put in prison in the first place? Why didn’t they go to the hospital from day one?
It seems like the government wants to call it both: It’s criminal so we’ll put you in jail. Wait, jail time is up? No, it’s mental, so we will lock you up.
This pretty well sums up my objection as well. When a person is convicted of a crime, they are given a sentence to serve. Once they have served there sentence (paid their ‘debt to society’) they should be free to resume their life in whatever capacity is available to them.
If the government is concerned that a person may be a continuing threat to society and wants the option to hold someone after their ‘punitive sentence’ has been served, then that should be spelled out at the time of sentencing, not once the person is eligible for release from prison.
Now, I have no idea if such an ‘open ended’ sentence is generally permissible by law at this time, but in my mind that is the correct solution to this problem. What has happened here seems to me (again, assuming I am understanding it correctly) to be decidedly ‘un-American’. I am disappointed.
Because a mental condition doesn’t necessarily equal legal insanity. You can’t molest children and claim that the fact that you meet the DSM IV criteria for pedophilia precludes you from criminal liability. Ted Bundy undeniably suffered from identifiable mental conditions, but none of them made what he did not a crime.
It’s important to note that this is not the rule, though, even in your own state. In New York civilly commited sex offenders are generally commited to a state psychiatric ward, or if they’ve progressed enough in sex offender treatment, in the community under the Strict and Intensive Supervision and Treatment program (SIST). If you still had civilly commited offenders in your prison, I suspect it was when New York’s civil commitment law was first passed and there were not yet separate facilities to house them (or they were the offenders that were so dangerous that no facility would take them, as if often the case with sexually motivated murderers.
Most states run some sort of separate inpatient commitment center that sex offenders are commited to, with some sort of outpatient program as well. One state offers uses only outpatient commitment - individuals live in halfway houses and their whereabouts are monitored with ankle bracelets, and there is no commitment center. Housing individuals in the same facilities as the currently incarcerated is rare.
What if, when asked their plans upon release, an inmate sex offender with multiple serious mental disorders tells an evaluating psychiatrist that that the first thing they intend to do is get drunk, drop some acid, and rape a woman?
The argument seems to be that you are either
a) found guilty, and sentenced to a set amount of time in prison, or
b) found not guilty by reason of mental defect, and sentenced to an indeterminate amount of time in some sort of institution
This ruling seems to be allowing for a), and then b)
Admittedly, my knowledge of ‘Law & Order’ law is sadly much greater than my knowledge of actual criminal sentencing procedures, but is this not the case?
No, afraid not. Being guilty of a crime and having a mental condition are not at all mutually exclusive. “Mental defects” don’t preclude criminal liability - insanity does. Insanity is a legal term, not a medical one, and the criteria for being adjudged legally insane are generally very high. If merely having some sort of mental defect excused criminal conduct, the prisons would arguably be nearly empty of sex offenders, especially the very worst ones - if there wasn’t something off about them in some way, they wouldn’t be serial sex offenders in the first place. A sexually sadistic serial rapist very definitely has something mentally wrong with him from our standpoint, but he knows and understands exactly what he’s doing and isn’t legally insane.
It’s also worth noting that the offender isn’t completely helpless in the equation; there are things that they can do for themselves while incarcerated to lessen their chance of recidivism and civil commitment, namely request and participate openly and honestly in sex offender treatment. Offenders who sucessfully complete sex offender treatment programs have lower rates of recidivism, and less chance of being singled out for civil commitment.
So what’s to stop this from turning into "We can’t convict you of drunken driving, but we do feel that you suffer from alcoholism and are a danger to yourself and others by driving on the highways while intoxicated. We sentence you, er, place you in hospital care for six months.?
This is a concept that some of our mental health staff couldn’t seem to grasp. A lot of them came in to the prison from a background in mental hospitals. And as such they have the ingrained viewpoint of thinking of their patients as generally average people who have a mental problem. You fix the mental problem and the patient is back to being an average person.
I was having a conversation one time with a doctor who was treating a prisoner for a degenerative brain disease. One of the symptoms of this disease was a loss of inhibitions which would make some patients threatening and violent. So the doctor had prescribed a drug that was supposed to temporarily arrest the degeneration and alleviate the symptoms. But he told us at an assessment meeting that the drug didn’t seem to be working - the patient was still threatening people and starting fights. I pointed out what I thought should be obvious - this patient was a convicted felon who was serving a life sentence for murder and assault and he had a criminal history that went back over thirty years. So the drug might be working just fine and this might be his real personality we were seeing.
Lots of factors. To begin with, the part about committing the individual but not being able to convict him criminally doesn’t generally happpen in sexually violent predator civil commitments - a prior violent sex offense conviction is needed, two in most jurisdictions. The federal law is unusual in that it doesn’t appear to have prior convictions as an absolute requirement, but that doesn’t mean that they’re commiting jaywalkers - the respondents were in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons for sex offenses and all had prior state and federal sex offense convictions, except for one who couldn’t stand trial in criminal court due to incompetency.
Another consdideration is that we don’t need civil commitment to force repeat drunk drivers to get treatment - we do that already. Courts frequently make treatment a condition for DWI probation, and if a repeat offender gets up to the felony level and still isn’t regulating his behavior the state can require further probation to be contingent on spending time in a lockdown drug and alcohol treatment facility run by the state prison system.
Another is the nature of the condition being treated. The sexually violent predators being civilly commited aren’t analogous to your average alcoholic who can get sober through mutual support in a 12 step program - they have serious personality disorders and/or mental illnesses that go to the core of who they are as a person and are not amenable to 12 step treatment. They need surveillance and a mental health professional, much more so than your average sex offender. Think of a bad sex offense, then think of a worse one, then think of one so cartoonishly worse than that you having trouble believing that it’s true and you’ll be close. Civil commitment offenders are the Itchy and Scratchy of sex offenses.
Another is cost. Civil commitment trials require medical testimony from mutliple experts who must be paid, court reporters, and many costs that aren’t associated with a criminal trial, not to mention the subsequent cost of detention. That’s one reason why civil commitments are reserved for the Worst of the Worst, a fraction of the sex offenders who are released. We couldn’t afford to do that to alchololics if we wanted to, and nobody wants to. The list goes on.
I know a guy with almost exactly the same problem - he’s delusional, but he was a pretty bad guy before he was delusional. Get rid of the delusions and we’ll probably see that same guy. Antisocial and mentally ill is a bad combo.
In my area there was a case where a person was forced to move from a residence that was across the river from a school because it was linearly too close. It didn’t make sense.
I worked at another prison which had a big substance abuse program. It was actually a good idea for those prisoners who were willing to commit to it. But the state overloaded it with prisoners who had no real interest in the program and, in some cases, were not in prison primarily for substance abuse problems.
One prisoner even told me straight out, “I’m here for assault - I beat a guy up with a baseball bat. They put me in this program because I was drunk when I did it so they say it was a drug-related crime. But I didn’t beat up because I was drunk. I beat him up because he owed me fifteen hundred dollars and didn’t pay me.”
Then they should go directly into treatment, or be involuntarily committed at the the they are originally sentenced.
I have no problem with indefinite detention of dangerous sex offenders per se. I have a very big problem with the concept that a convict can receive a finite custodial sentence and then have an indefinite one tacked on afterwards.
I disagree with it on plain common sense grounds. If they are an on-going danger to society, then put them to death. Don’t waste time and money putting them in a jail cell.
It costs more to execute prisoners than it does to incarcerate them. Everyone knows that.
What, child molesters can’t swim?
It costs more to both incarcerate them for decades and to deal with all the appeals they’re entitled to in the meanwhile, yes.
So why don’t convicted sex offenders just get taken out back of the courthouse and hanged? It would save all that bother. :rolleyes:
Okay, that’s a reasonable position to take. It does raise its own set of problems, though.
If you mean “going directly into treatment” to mean bypassing the criminal system altogether and going directly into commitment, that’s entirely possible with someone who meets the definition of legal insanity, but the guys we’re talking about aren’t legally insane. They’ve may have had mental conditions that are mitigating factors to consider in punishment, but ultimately they knew what they were doing, knew it was morally wrong by our standards, and made a conscious decision to do an abhorrent act anyway - they’re criminally culpable for the decisions they make, and it’s not inappropriate for their victims to expect that they receive some sort of punishment. God help the district attorney who tells the 12 parents of 6 molested kids that even though the molestor who violated their children is legally sane, he’s decided to have him committed instead of pursuing criminal charges precisely because he’s the worst sort of offender there is, and who has to answer their questions about when he will get out with “whenever a judge decides to let him.”
As far as commiting them at or near the same time as punishment, ironically neither law enforcement nor the sex offenders themselves would prefer that. Part of the reason the present system works the way it does is because the mental condition of the offender is being evaluated at the time of his release, not back at the time of his original trial. If the offender has had good institutional adjustment, participated and completed sex offender treatment, and otherwise has been a model prisoner, that speaks well of his mental condition at the time of release from his sentence. If you were in his position and were thinking straight about the matter, you probably would much prefer your commitment trial to be at the end of your sentence rather then at the beginning - you would have a couple of decades to show them what a good guy you are and how you’ve put your long-ago crimes behind you. Nine months after you offense isn’t a whole lot of time to claim “but I’ve changed since then!” Moreover, if commitments happened at the time of the original criminal trial, we couldn’t commit anybody right now who didn’t have one back then, regardless of his mental state. If you’ve got a mentally ill serial rapist telling a psychiatrist in apparent earnestness that they can’t wait to get out and go rape a woman, it’s an extremely grim to think “wow, wish we had civil commitments when he got caught - now we have no choice but to let him go rape a woman.”
Another factor is that in addition to the mental states of offenders improving, they can also deteriorate while incarcerated. Say you’ve got a career criminal type who’s committed a number of different crimes, some burglaries, some robberies, and some rapes. No mental illness, just mean as hell. While he’s in prison, he ends up in segregation (solitary) for violent activity, like assaults, a couple of stabbings, and raping another inmate. While in solitary his mental condition starts to deteriorate - seeing ghosts, talking to dead people, and stuff even spookier than that. Doctors aren’t sure why; it could be early onset dementia, it could be schizophrenia, it could be neurosyphillis contracted from the inmate that he raped. One thing is for sure - he’s even more dangerous now, because he’s delusional and has no impulse control.
Take another hypo: you’ve got a guy who’s nearing the end of a somewhat lenghty prison sentence in your state, for attempted kidnapping with intent to commit rape and aggravated kidnapping with intent to commit rape. He is also suspected in the disappearance of another girl. Four different mental status evaluators, psychologists and psychiatrists, have evaluated him and determined that he is the worst sort of offender: he’s a full blown, remorseless, prototypical psychopath and narcissist, and a sexual sadist who takes delight in the pain, suffering, and torture of others. What’s more, you are contacted by the state police of Colorado and Washington who tell you the girls he assaulted in your state are probably lucky to be alive; your guy is the number one suspect in a series of rapes and murders in their states. He was in the right place at the right time in each state at the times of the murders, matches vehicle and physical descriptions, but they don’t want to file official charges without more physical evidence than they have right now. Even putting that aside, you have enough evidence from the mental health evaluations and from the crimes he is known to have committed in your own state to refer him for civil commitment as a sexually violent predator. You are convinced that if you don’t, the only thing that will prevent him from committing more rapes and possibly murders is getting hit by lightning as he walks out of prison. What would you do?
Fair points. I suppose this wouldn’t bother me that much if it was clear that these laws do no effectively result in de facto indefinite custodial sentences - ie., rather than simply being sent back into the prison population, they are sent to actual treatment centers - psychiatric wards, or whatever.
However, based on Little Nemo’s post, that does not appear to be the case.