ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, February 8, 1996 TAG: 9602080037
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAN VERTEFEUILLE STAFF WRITER
Sex offenders in a prison rehabilitation program will not get to finish their treatment, after a federal judge's ruling this week that they have no constitutional right to the therapy.
U.S. District Judge James Turk sided with the state of Virginia, ruling that the Constitution does not require the government to provide prisoners "the rehabilitation programs of their choice."
Twenty-six of the 48 participants in a therapeutic treatment program at Bland Correctional Center sued the state in federal court last year, asking that their program be resumed.
The first-of-its-kind program had been in place a little more than a year when the Allen administration cut its $220,000 annual funding. The program was shut down last June.
The state maintained that treatment for sex offenders has a low success rate and that the money would be better spent elsewhere.
The program's participants had been housed together in double-wide trailers away from the other prisoners. The program required them to take part in intense daily therapy and educational programs.
The inmates - rapists, child molesters and similar criminals - sued to keep the program going so they could complete their treatment. They said the program caused them additional psychological damage because it was abruptly ended.
John Fishwick Jr., a Roanoke lawyer who represents the inmates, said he plans to talk to his clients today to see if they want to proceed. Inmates still have the option of filing a state lawsuit.
But the longer the inmates go without the treatment, the less pertinent the suit becomes. Of the approximately 40 inmates who originally were part of the suit, 26 are left. A few dropped out as parties in the case, and others were paroled, Fishwick said.
The more time elapses, "the less relevance it has for them," he said. "The whole point of the case was just to keep the program going, ... not for money."
The inmates did not seek monetary damages.
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 spend two to three years in the program before being released.
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 Meek - who still works for the corrections department - is unqualified to diagnose sex criminals.
Last summer, Turk asked U.S. Magistrate Cynthia Kinser to make a report on the case. He adopted her findings in his ruling. She found that though the government has an obligation to provide medical care to inmates, the inmates failed to show the necessary "deliberate indifference" by the state to their medical needs.
General counseling is available to inmates at Bland, which satisfies the government's responsibility to provide basic mental health care, Kinser found. She also noted that experts nationally are divided over the effectiveness of treatment programs for sex offenders, making it harder for the inmates to prove that the state was aware that ending the program would cause harm.
LENGTH: Medium: 64 linesby CNB