Inviting a Quagmire

If Gov. Jim Douglas needs another reason to abandon his misguided campaign for "civil commitment" for sex offenders, he need look no farther than Sunday's New York Times.

Actually, Douglas shouldn't need to look that far. On the face of it, civil commitment—by which certain offenders are kept locked up even after serving their sentence—is an obvious abuse of civil liberties; it was approved by the Bush Supreme Court only by a 5-4 decision in 1997. The majority opinion was written by Justice Clarence Thomas, no friend of civil liberties.

But that paper-thin decision has resulted in a spreading of the civil confinement idea to 19 states where 2700 sexual offenders are being held indefinitely. The laws, the Times states, multiply because they are popular with politicians—the word here carrying all its worst connotations.

It turns out, however, that the Supreme Court decided that civil commitment is permissible only because it is not the same thing as prison time. The extra confinement must be part of a therapeutic program for the prisoners. That requirement has resulted in untold millions of dollars spent on civilly-confined prisoners—about $100,000 per year each. California has just built a $388 million prison complete with therapeutic facilities. Ironically, a large percentage of the prisoners refuse to take part in the therapy.

Meanwhile, states are faced with conflicting criteria about how to choose who will be committed. Even more difficult is figuring out when, if ever, to release these men (hardly any women). As a result, dozens of elderly prisoners languish in prison in these states, some of them in wheelchairs, well past the age in which they are considered a sexual threat.

In short, civil confinement has become a "quagmire"—an enormously expensive sinkhole for the states that have tried it. The Vermont legislature should continue its stout opposition to such a wrongheaded notion, and hope that Gov. Douglas comes to his senses and spares Vermont an unjust law that could bust the corrections budget.