The New York Times reported last weekon a growing problem in the US: States are struggling with what to do with sex offenders once they are released from prison. Minnesota has been detaining its sex offenders in a treatment facility after releasing them from prison, but a federal judge recently found the practice unconstitutional. Another federal judge recently struck down a similar process in Missouri, saying the state had imposed “lifetime detention on individuals who have completed their prison sentences and who no longer pose a danger to the public, no matter how heinous their past conduct.”
The program in Texas was one of the worst in the country, and was recently revamped by the Republican legislature after a Houston Chronicle investigation discovered that Texas’s outpatient program never actually graduated and released any of its hundreds of offenders after their prison sentence—and many were sent back to prison for breaking the program’s rules. Texas Senator John Whitmire, a Democrat who helped push through the state’s sex-offender program overhaul, explained: “The way it was, it just looked like incarceration with double jeopardy.” He said the new program, which included opening a former prison in remote Littlefield to house offenders who have been released from prison, “at least holds out a pathway to graduate.”