The Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP) is currently the hot topic in Minnesota legal news. The case of Karsjens v. Jesson (No. 11-3659, 2014 WL 667971) was recently brought in the U.S. District Court by fourteen plaintiffs currently held in the program. MSOP participants (or detainees?) are convicted sex offenders who have completed their sentences, but have been civilly committed into the program. A core tenant of the program is the “treatment” component, which is purportedly the key to restoring the participants’ freedom and reintegrating them back into society. The Karsjens plaintiffs claim that the treatment and the program itself are simply a cover for a “throw away the key” policy aimed at sex offenders. And since the program started in 1993, only one out of nearly 700 sex offenders has been discharged. Their lawsuit alleges that being civilly committed to the treatment program is equivalent to a lifetime of prison-esque incarceration.
The legitimate desire to protect the public by confining convicted sex offenders is completely understandable, but also raises fair constitutional questions about the legitimacy of confining individuals when they are no longer under the jurisdiction of the penal system. This constitutional conundrum is aptly explained in this Star Tribune editorial. And obviously, reforming a program to allow for at least the potential release of convicted sex offenders bears an unmistakable political toxicity that makes legislators loath to touch it. Nonetheless, in his Order declining to dismiss the case, Judge Donovan Frank has cued the Minnesota Legislature to not only touch but to repair this clearly broken system, lest the Court be forced to intervene. (2014 WL 667971 at 19)
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An interesting book that looks at the policy issue of treating/containing sex offenders is Failure to Protect: America’s Sexual Predator Laws and the Rise of the Preventive State (Cornell University Press) by Eric S. Janus. The author, currently the Dean of William Mitchell College of Law, makes several assertions, including that we spend much money for the punitive containment of sex offenders in reaction to horrific headliner incidents and tend to ignore workable (and less expensive) treatment options for more mundane sex offenders.
