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: The programs have given rise to new and bigger treatment centers: California opened a 1,500-bed facility for sexual predators in 2005. Minnesota opened a 400-bed building last year and plans another expansion at Moose Lake, 110 miles north of the Twin Cities. The Moose Lake complex, located just off the highway leading to this woodsy Minnesota town, looks like a medium-security prison, with layers of secure doors and guards monitoring cell blocks of patients. More than 400 men live there behind tall fences topped with razor wire. 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.