Title: $175,000 per offender? Get-tough sex predator 'treatment' busts state budgets - cleveland.com
Headings: $175,000 per offender? Get-tough sex predator 'treatment' busts state budgets
$175,000 per offender? Get-tough sex predator 'treatment' busts state budgets
'Lock everybody up'
No idea of the costs
Treatment only slightly lowers risk
Recommitting Dennis Linehan
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Content: They spend their days shuffling between meals, group therapy sessions and activities such as painting state park signs. The confinement is costly mainly because of the need to hire behavioral therapists, social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists. For every 25 to 50 offenders, there is a five- to six-member treatment team. Parts of the facility resemble a community college campus, with chairs arranged around the edges of rooms for group therapy sessions. There is a separate unit for about 8 percent of the sex offenders who refuse to participate in treatment, and another one for aging clients, some of whom use wheelchairs and walkers. No idea of the costs
"They had no idea 10 years ago, seven years ago, what this program was going to cost," said Dennis Benson, a former prison warden who now oversees Minnesota's civilly committed sex offenders. Minnesota already spends $65 million a year to house and treat sex offenders. State lawmakers usually don't complain about the costs, but they balked when Gov. Tim Pawlenty asked to borrow $90 million to complete the expansion of the Moose Lake facility. They eventually gave him slightly more than half that amount, despite a growing deficit of $1 billion. "We have to cut something else to pay for it," said Sen. Linda Berglin, a Minneapolis Democrat who supervises the budget for civil-commitment cases as head of a health and welfare spending panel.