MOOSE LAKE, Minn. — Behind razor wire and locked metal doors, hundreds of men waited on a recent morning to be counted, part of the daily routine inside a remote facility here that was built based on a design for a prison.
But this is not a prison, and most of these men — rapists, pedophiles and other sex offenders — have already completed their sentences. They are being held here indefinitely under a policy known as civil commitment, having been deemed "sexually dangerous" or "sexual psychopathic personalities" by courts. The intent, the authorities say, is to provide treatment to the most dangerous sex offenders until it is safe for the public for them to go home.
Yet not one of the more than 700 sex offenders who have been civilly committed in Minnesota over the past two decades has actually gone home. And only a few men have been provisionally discharged to live outside of state facilities under strict supervision. "You knew you were going to die here," said Craig Bolte, a sex offender who has been held here nine years and who says he would rather be sent to prison, where "there is still hope."
But now Minnesota's civil commitment program — which detains more people per capita than any other state — is facing an overhaul. Earlier this year, a federal judge found it unconstitutional, calling it "a punitive system that segregates and indefinitely detains a class of potentially dangerous individuals without the safeguards of the criminal justice system."
The judge, Donovan W. Frank, of U.S. Court in St. Paul, on Thursday ordered the state to promptly conduct independent risk and treatment assessments on everyone being detained, to seek releases or ease restrictions in appropriate cases, and to begin conducting annual assessments to determine whether everyone here still meets the legal requirements for civil commitment.
Minnesota is not alone in revisiting its policies. In Missouri, a federal judge last month found that state's program violated people's right to due process, potentially imposing "lifetime detention on individuals who have completed their prison sentences and who no longer pose a danger to the public, no matter how heinous their past conduct." Of about 250 people held since Missouri began committing people in 1999, state officials say seven have been granted what the state considers release with court-ordered restrictions, although some of those men remain in a group-home-like setting behind razor wire at a state facility.
In Texas, which previously had a unique outpatient method for treating sex offenders civilly committed after their prison sentences, the Republican-dominated state Legislature this year revamped the program after a Houston Chronicle investigation found that none of the hundreds committed to the program had ever graduated from it. The investigation also found that nearly half of the men detained for treatment while living in halfway houses and other facilities were actually sent back to prison for breaking the program's rules.
"My sense was that we had to make changes or a federal court is going to strike down the whole program, and we need this program — some of these people would scare the hell out of you," said state Sen. John Whitmire, a Democrat who helped push through the overhaul, which included opening a former prison in remote Littlefield to house the detainees. "The way it was, it just looked like incarceration with double jeopardy," Whitmire said. "This at least holds out a pathway to graduate."
Civil commitment gained support in the 1990s amid reports of heinous sex crimes by repeat offenders. Today, 20 states, along with the federal government, detain some sex criminals for treatment beyond their prison time. But not all have been as sharply criticized as Minnesota's program. In Wisconsin, 118 offenders have been fully discharged from commitment since 1994, and about 135 people have been given supervised release, according to Frank. New York had sent home 30 people and moved 64 people out of secure facilities for the civilly committed and into strict supervision and treatment, Frank wrote.
But the picture in Minnesota looks far different. Since the current program was created in the mid-1990s, civil commitments have soared. The abduction, rape and murder in 2003 of Dru Sjodin, a North Dakota college student, by a sex offender who had been released six months earlier enraged residents and set off a wave of efforts by county attorneys to call on judges to hold such offenders after their prison terms.
Minnesota now has the highest population of civilly committed offenders per capita — nearly all men — in the nation, Frank found, and the lowest rate of release. And costs have soared — to about $125,000 per resident per year, at least three times the cost of an ordinary prison inmate in Minnesota, the judge said.
Yet even in a state that is often seen as liberal-leaning, changing the policy is politically fraught. Gov. Mark Dayton, a Democrat, faced intense criticism before his last election over a plan, later dropped, to release from commitment — with strict conditions — a serial rapist who had admitted attacking at least 60 women. And proposals aimed at paying for regular risk evaluations for committed people, as well as other changes, have stalled in the state Legislature.
"It's really a stalemate now because the House Republicans have made it clear that anybody who supports any kind of step forward is going to be castigated in the 2016 elections," Dayton said.
In his order Thursday, Frank said that "political sensitivities" had repeatedly hampered efforts to revamp the policy, and that state officials should urge the Legislature to provide money to make the changes he was requiring, including regular evaluations. The judge added that he was likely to require even more changes later.
In an interview last week, Dayton said the state's program met constitutional requirements, and he noted that more people than ever were permitted to leave the facilities under strict supervision. Six people have been granted provisional discharges by the courts, officials said. Three of them are living outside the facilities with close supervision. And although no one has ever been entirely released from the commitment system, Lucinda Jesson, the commissioner of the State Human Services Department, said more people than ever are in a final phase of treatment, a fact she described as promising.
"I consider myself certainly as committed to improving our social service efforts on behalf of people who need help in our society," Dayton said. "But there's a line you need to draw for public safety — and these people, if you look at some of their case files, it's repeated, horrific crimes that put them in this situation."
"Minnesota's a compassionate state," he continued, "but there's a line you've got to draw. No one wants to take a risk with somebody who would rape or murder somebody's spouse or child, and look them in the eye and say, 'We put your family at risk in any way.'"
But critics of the program say it is focused more on warehousing and punishing people than on treating them. They say that offenders receive no regular risk assessments to see whether they require more treatment or supervision, and that the treatment program itself has been revised and reinvented repeatedly over the years as new Human Services employees have come and gone, especially in Moose Lake, a small town where state officials acknowledge hiring is difficult.
Dan Gustafson, a lawyer for the plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit, said the state's reports of more detainees making progress in the program arrived only recently and appeared to be largely in response to the criticism by the court and other officials. At least 43 men have died while committed.
"There is a pervasive sense of hopelessness among everybody, knowing that there is no out date and knowing that there is no way to complete anything," said Bolte, who was sent here nine years ago, at age 19, after being convicted as a juvenile of sexually assaulting a family member and later acknowledging sexual contact with other minors during a deeply troubled childhood.
Critics also complain that the program treats people like Bolte, whose crimes occurred when they were juveniles, largely the same as it treats adult sex offenders. Other offenders here are much older — one man is 93 — and, some suggest, unlikely or even incapable of committing new offenses. More than 30 of the men are over 70.
Dennis Steiner, a balding man who was civilly committed more than two decades ago in lieu of a prison sentence for molesting boys between ages 8 and 17, said he has done various versions of the state treatment program "about seven times." He lives in a second state complex in St. Peter, southwest of the Twin Cities, where offenders in the later phases of treatment are housed and allowed increased privileges in a dormlike setting.
Steiner, who is 66 and wore a suit on a recent morning, clutched a thick binder with scores of documents from treatment over the years, including one that listed plans if he ever emerges from the program: "attend support groups," "follow rules of electronic monitoring," "go to outpatient treatment." Steiner, who wants to move in with his mother, 87, said he would never harm anyone else.
"When do you stop proving that to people?" he said. "If I can't get out on the street and prove it to people, I can't keep proving it to people in here over and over."