Civil Committment

The New York Times investigates treatment centers where sex offenders who have served their prison sentences are civilly committed to involuntary treatment because they are deemed to pose a risk to society. While it certainly concerns me on civil liberties grounds, I do think we have to remove dangerous people from normal society. But why not just do this through longer sentences, life sentences if need be?

The bigger problem seems to be that the wrong people are committed. Many violent rapists are being let out while people who expose themselves to children are locked up for life. The article give examples of patients over 70 (and one who is 102) being held in these treatment facilities at the cost of over $100,000 a year.

I think we need to have many more distinctions when it comes to sexual crimes. Someone who exposes them self to a child is entirely different than someone who rapes a child, who is completely different from someone who has sex with a 16 year old. These are different sorts of crimes (and in the case of statutory rape, it seems questionable to me that it's even a crime), and deserve different approaches in terms of prevention and treatment.

We also might consider placing such people in separate facilities from the get-go, since they are often the victims of sexual predations in prison. Of course, society doesn't seem to care that much about what happens to criminals, much like they don't care about what happens to middle easterners who may or may not be terrorists.