Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, July 26, 1995 TAG: 9507260066
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAN VERTEFEUILLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LYNCHBURG LENGTH: Medium
While U.S. District Judge James Turk refused Tuesday to take immediate action to save a prison program for sex offenders, he did allow the prisoners' case against the state to continue on to a federal hearing.
The Allen administration cut funding for the first-of-its-kind state program last month, arguing that treatment for sex offenders has a low success rate and that the money would be better spent elsewhere.
Twenty-six prisoners of the 48 participants in the therapeutic treatment program at Bland Correctional Center have sued the state in federal court, asking that the program be resumed.
The judge declined to order any action by the prison before a hearing is held.
The 48 men in the program had been housed together, living in double-wide trailers away from the other prisoners. They were part of the state's first therapeutic program that would try to control their deviant behavior, requiring intense, daily therapy and educational programs.
The program had been working with inmates a little more than a year when the Allen administration cut the program's roughly $220,000 annual funding.
The program ended June 30, the end of the fiscal year. It was begun in 1993 as the result of a General Assembly study that the state lacked such programs, before Allen took office.
The state, as the defendant in the case, found itself in the position of arguing in court that its own program was ineffective and that its program director - who still works for the corrections department - is unqualified to diagnose sex criminals.
Tuesday's hearing in U.S. District Court in Lynchburg centered on whether sex offenders have a mental illness or simply a behavioral problem.
John Fishwick Jr., the attorney for the prisoners, tried to convince U.S. District Judge James Turk that ending the program would deny the inmates medical care and thus cause them irreparable harm.
Fishwick was appointed to represent the inmates after their first appeal to Turk, in which they represented themselves, failed.
Assistant Attorney General Pamela Sargent, representing the state and the department of corrections, maintained that pedophilia, exhibitionism and other sexual deviancies are behavioral problems, not mental conditions requiring treatment. She also argued that prisoners have no constitutional right to be rehabilitated.
Shawn Meek, a therapist who headed the program, described it as an "extremely intensive process" that was open only to inmates within a few years of being paroled. Prisoners were to have spent two to three years in the program before being released.
In the program, when a sex offender reaches depression, it's a good sign, she said, because it means he's begun to realize what he's done to his victims.
"We had brought several people to that point when we shut down," Meek said, and some are now talking about suicide.
Dr. Conrad Daum, a Salem psychiatrist brought in as an expert witness by the inmates, testified that sex offenders are considered to be mentally ill.
The National Institute of Corrections estimates recidivism rates for untreated sex offenders to be 60 to 70 percent. Daum testified that only 20 percent of those who get treatment "reoffend" after release.
"I think it's sad," Daum said of the program's shut-down. "We'll never know if these folks will respond or not."
Even the state's expert witness, Dr. Dennis Ray Carpenter, agreed that "it would be unethical to drop someone out of intensive treatment to nothing." But he said there are general counseling services available to the men now as members of the general prison population, a claim one inmate disputed in an affidavit.
"If this treatment program has prevented even one man from committing another sex crime, have you not provided a terrific service to the citizens of our state?'' the inmates wrote in an appeal to Gov. Allen last month.
Judge Turk ordered the state to file its answer to the inmates' complaint in court and refered the case to a federal magistrate for a hearing on the evidence. The magistrate will then make a report to Turk with recommendations in the case.
by CNB