I’ve written before about the difficulties of reconciling anti-sexual violence work with concerns over the civil and human rights of sex offenders, and I haven’t had any illuminating epiphanies since then. Recently I came across a story that made matters even more complicated for me—a man convicted of raping a Minnesota college student, and then attempting to rape her again weeks later, has completed his prison sentence, and has been committed by a judge to the state’s sex offender facility. My interest was piqued by the newspaper’s decision to go with a quote from the offender’s lawyer in the headline, which refers to the state’s facility as a “gulag.”

So I’ve spent the last 40 minutes or so (transparency: not enough time to fully grasp the issue!) looking into the Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP) out of my own curiosity. The basics go something like this: the program currently indefinitely holds over 500 previously-incarcerated sex offenders who have been committed to MSOP facilities for treatment after being found “sexually dangerous” under Minnesota statute. [Relevant Minnesota law and legal definitions can be found here.] According to Minnesota’s Civil Commitment Training and Resource Center, the MSOP:

…Operates secure treatment facilities at Moose Lake and St. Peter. The program’s main philosophy is based on cognitive-behavioral techniques, with strategies to assist a sex offender to reduce the chance of relapsing. Individuals who successfully complete the program may receive a recommendation from MSOP for release to a less restrictive setting.

The goal of the MSOP is to help a person safely return to society. Group therapy is the main form of treatment. The program consists of three stages: The Evaluation Stage, the Inpatient Treatment Stage and the Transition Stage.

However, the MSOP began in 1994 and no one has ever been released. Being placed in the MSOP pretty much guarantees a lifetime sentence in one of the state’s “secure treatment facilities.”

Prior to 2003, an average of 15 offenders per year were entered into the MSOP. In 2003, a released rapist murdered a college student, and the number of civil commitments for sex offenders who completed their sentences skyrocketed; since 2003 the average number of yearly commitments is 50, with 170 commitments in 2008. Also in 2003, Governor Tim Pawlenty “prohibited releases [from the MSOP] not required by law or court order.” It costs the state of Minnesota $328 per day to house a single patient (the committed offenders are called patients, since they are supposed to be receiving treatment), totaling $119,720 per patient, per year.

The question is, how are these “treatment” centers (and not just prisons) if no one is being effectively treated and released? Then there are these figures:

Both prison-based treatment and the MSOP provide group therapy, classes and other meetings. But the MSOP provides less treatment at a higher cost. According to prison officials, it costs about $100 a day to treat and house a sex offender in prison…

While the state says MSOP residents get five to 18 hours of treatment weekly, treatment records released by patients show that many got only five to six hours. Margretta Dwyer, former director of a sex offender outpatient program at the University of Minnesota and a volunteer adviser to MSOP residents, surveyed patients and came to the same conclusion.

“It averaged out around 5 1/2 hours per week, which makes it more like outpatient treatment,” said Dwyer, a critic of the program. In contrast, Lino Lakes prison offers a minimum of 12 treatment hours weekly, according to the Corrections Department and former inmates.

The disparity widens when breaks are factored in. The MSOP has month-long breaks between “trimesters,” each of which contains its own weeklong break. That adds up to almost four months a year without treatment — a deficiency cited by the Department of Human Services’ own Licensing Division.

In contrast, Lino Lakes prison has four weeks of breaks a year.

But those facts are largely focused on economics and not rights. This summer the ACLU took on the case of a group of MSOP patients who are challenging the constitutionality of the conditions of their commitment. beyond the apparently unsanitary conditions a number of these patients are living in, there is the simple question of the ethics and legality of effectively re-incarcerating people who have finished their prison sentences and not been charged with another crime. To put it one way:

“We as a society will be locking people up for years, based not on a crime that they committed … but because they pose a risk, and we think they might [someday] commit some undefined, unspecified crime,” said Janus, author of “Failure to Protect — America’s Sexual Predator Laws and the Rise of the Preventive State.”

I don’t have any answers here as to how we should handle the population of sex offenders who are statistically most likely to reoffend. But the situation in Minnesota sticks out to me as an ethics and economic quagmire of crazy proportions. As I continue to suss out my feelings on the issue of  “proper” punitive actions for sex offenders, it surely will be an example I remember…

[If you're interested, definitely check out this in-depth article from the Minneapolis Star Tribune on the MSOP, it's patients, and similar programs]