July 2002 - Protect Children From Predators By Enacting Civil Committment For Sexual Predator Laws

The mere mention of commitment conjures up 1972 images of Geraldo Rivera sneaking his camera into Willowbrook, the state institution for the retarded in Staten Island where he filmed wards crowded with disabled children, their feces smeared all over the walls. After
exposing this abuse and neglect, public outrage and subsequent judicial backing helped to begin the process of deinstitutionalization in the United States.

Deinstitutionalization in the United States led to a flood of reforms nationwide concerning the housing and care of the mentally retarded and developmentally disabled. Today, most developmentally disabled Americans live not in institutions but under supervision in small groups in regular neighborhoods and in community-based residences where their individual rights, respect and dignity can be cultivated and maintained.

However, the lessons learned from Willowbrook and the progress made in deinstitutionalization and community-based treatment must not cloud our consideration of a special kind of commitment: civil commitment for a specific group of the highest risk sexual predators who freely roam our streets, unwilling or unable to obtain proper treatment. This kind of predator commitment follows a criminal sentence and generally targets repeat sex offenders who then remain in a sexual predator treatment facility until it is safe to release them to a less restrictive environment or into the community.

Why is such commitment necessary?

On July 1, 1993, 19-year-old Kansas college student Stephanie Schmidt was working at a family restaurant in a college town but was not aware that her co-worker had recently received an early release from prison after serving 10 years of a 20 year sentence for raping a
20-year-old coed in 1983. At work, Stephanie complained of a sore throat and he offered to drive her home.

Twenty-seven days later the sexual predator confessed to brutally raping, sodomizing and murdering Stephanie. Her parents, Gene and Peggy Schmidt, and Stephanie's sister Jennifer successfully lobbied and established a sexual predator law in Kansas. Although Washington State was the first to enact a comprehensive sex offender management law which included civil commitment, the Kansas civil commitment law was the first to withstand constitutional muster and was upheld by the US Supreme Court in 1997.

Megan's Law provides us with one prevention tool - the right to be made aware of the presence of dangerous known offenders in our community - but civil commitment could make sure that the most dangerous of these will be confined and treated until they are determined not to be dangerous.

It's like a disturbing experiment being conducted on our society: sadistic sexual predators are released and if lucky enough a community will be made aware of their presence through Megan's Law but why release the most predatory in the first place?

The enactment of civil committment laws in all of our states in the nation will probably require the construction of special facilities to house and treat these dangerous sexual predators. This population must not be housed with the mentally ill in existing facilities.

These special facilities can provide the vital information and potential innovations we need to more broadly and more successfully treat sexual predators and sex offenders. Sex offender treatment research is in its infancy and experts can only say that treatment reduces the number of sex crimes but it is not known if the reduction is a function of the treatment program or of the increased supervision.

Civil commitment should be a legislative priority for all of our lawmakers. What can stop sexual predators from further offenses is sound civil commitment laws where predators will be committed to special treatment facilities until it is determined through proceedings that they no longer pose a risk to public safety, which in some cases may be never.

The following states have Civil Commitment laws in place:
Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, North Dakota, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.

For more information call the Parents For Megan's Law hotline at (631) 689-2672.
Laura Ahearn, C.S.W. is the
Executive Director

If Your State Does Not Have A Civil Commitment Law in place then contact your state lawmaker and ask WHY?

Make your communities aware of options that other states have used to manage their most predatory sexual offenders.