Barbara Schwartz wears big glasses and uses a trained dog named Thomas to help her get around. She is small, funny, sarcastic, and sometimes dismissive of those she deems unworthy. But Schwartz is a pit bull, and if you care about protecting the public against sexual predators, she should be your hero.
Schwartz came to Massachusetts from the state of Washington 10 years ago to run the sex-offender treatment program at the Massachusetts Treatment Center (“for the Sexually Dangerous,” it used to be called) in Bridgewater. She transformed an embarrassment into a national model, recognized by the US Department of Justice’s Center for Sex Offender Management and by the nonprofit Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers. Schwartz is an internationally known expert in the field; her books are standards. She has, by her own estimate, sat face-to-face with more than 10,000 sex offenders, including some of the worst that humanity has to offer. And to the best of anyone’s knowledge, only one sex offender who passed through the Bridgewater program when it was run by Schwartz has gone on to commit another sex crime.
You can find Schwartz these days in one of the offices in Arlington and Bridgewater where she sees patients. But she’s no longer part of the state’s strategy against sex offenders. The Department of Correction (DOC) got rid of Schwartz, along with many of the clinicians she worked with, last year.
In this, there’s nothing new. For 50 years, Massachusetts, like many other states, has changed and changed again the way it manages those who commit sex crimes. As it has whipsawed between seeing offenders as evil (and deserving punishment) and regarding them as sick (and needing care), the state has indulged in a hodgepodge of laws, policies, and practices that cancel each other out. Long mandatory prison terms keep offenders off the streets but also keep them from getting the treatment that would make them less of a danger when they get out. Civil commitment can keep offenders locked up indefinitely even after they serve their prison sentences, but with this threat hanging over their heads, many of those serving time for sex crimes won’t open up in therapy for fear that what they say will be used to lock them up for life.
If there is one thread that’s been consistent in state policy, it is fatalism: the view that sex offenders are lifelong dangers, never to be trusted in society, no matter what you do with them. But it turns out that some people, like Schwartz, really do know what to do with them. Instead of letting her and her colleagues do so, however, the state releases hundreds of sex offenders from prisons every year–unsupervised, having received little or no treatment, and likely to strike again.
“The most despised people on earth”
It was more than 30 years ago that Schwartz, 58, chanced into her obscure therapeutic niche. As a mental health clinician in Albuquerque, NM, she was asked to compile a study of how other states treated sex offenders. She laughs when recalling her resulting 1972 report, The Rehabilitation of Sex Offenders: A Review of the Literature. “The literature was one half page,” she says. She could find only one program in the country even touching on the subject.
The field was begging to be explored, and Schwartz quickly got hooked on it. Raised Presbyterian, Catholic for many years, and now a Quaker, she cites the biblical admonition to “help the least of your brothers” as inspiration.
“I wanted to treat the most despised people on earth,” she says. She started treating sex offenders, and by 1980 she was hired full-time by the New Mexico Department of Correction to initiate a program. In 1984 she became a consultant to the National Institute of Corrections, helping to start sex offender treatment programs across the country. In 1988 she moved to Washington state to get its program up and running, and she came to Massachusetts in 1992.
Schwartz enjoys working with sex offenders, she says, because most of them are essentially functional–that is, they can participate in almost any kind of treatment. And Schwartz throws everything she can at them. Schwartz expects a lot from her patients, but no more than she expects of herself. After surviving polio at the age of two, Schwartz pushed herself relentlessly until by the age of 12 she could walk unassisted. “Polio victims have a similar personality,” she says. “No pain, no gain.”
Like others who treat them regularly, Schwartz compares sex offenders to alcoholics. Recovery from the inclination toward sexual assault is not so much a matter of healing deep-seated psychological wounds as it is learning how to keep from doing it again. It’s relapse prevention, just like Alcoholics Anonymous. Even Weight Watchers uses similar techniques, she says.
Very few sex offenders don’t understand that what they did was wrong, and even fewer know but don’t care, Schwartz says. Most find ways to ignore the consequences of their actions, or they feel powerless to control their own impulses. Schwartz puts the offenders through classes, films, and role-playing to get them to confront the victim’s perspective. In group therapy, they discuss their crimes, impulses, and fantasies–and how to control them. Behavioral treatment comes into play as well. The offender may learn aversion techniques, the way a smoker is sometimes taught to picture a diseased lung at the thought of a cigarette. Some of Schwartz’s patients link thoughts of assault to images of what scares them most–drowning, snakes, or heights.
Schwartz’s treatment regimen also gives offenders coping skills, anything from anger management to maintaining basic personal relationships. Many sex offenders completely lack the social skills that allow them to make friends or succeed at work–leading to the rejection that starts their spiral toward offending.
certain offenders in civil commitment.
A final component–psychopharmacological drugs to dampen certain brain functions–is no longer used at the Massachusetts Treatment Center (MTC). The DOC banned it several years ago, over Schwartz’s objections.
These techniques are not unique to Schwartz. But at the MTC, as elsewhere, Schwartz put them together in an inpatient program that, based on its track record, seemed to succeed. “Her recidivism rate was [near] zero,” says Craig Latham, a Natick psychologist who served on a panel on sex offenders appointed by former governor Michael Dukakis in the late 1980s, of Schwartz’s 10 years at MTC. And sex offender therapy is not only great for patients; it’s even better for potential victims. In Schwartz’s Bridgewater office, stickers tout slogans such as NEVER ANOTHER BATTERED WOMAN. It may be the offender she’s working with, but it’s the victim she’s working for.
Disincentives for therapy
One victim Schwartz never got to work for is Alexandra Zapp. That’s because Paul Leahy is one of the many offenders Schwartz never got a chance to work with.
Leahy had been in and out of prison; he did 13 years at one stretch for aggravated rape, wrapping up his sentence in 1998. Most recently he served a brief prison sentence for “enticing” a minor; having served his full term, he was ineligible for the state’s Intensive Parole for Sex Offenders program, but he was placed on probation when he left prison. Then he struck again, just a few miles away from the MTC. Last July, Leahy allegedly attacked and killed the 30-year-old Zapp at a rest stop in Bridgewater. Like most sex offenders, Leahy had spent his years of incarceration without undergoing treatment and then walked out to rejoin society with minimal supervision.
“A guy goes from having to ask whether he can pee to having total control over his environment,” says Latham. “That’s the last thing we want to do, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”
Indeed, we do it almost every day. When a sex offender is caught and sentenced, typically to a seven-to-10-year term in state prison, DOC officials will encourage him to volunteer for treatment. But his attorney will advise against it. This is because, in order to enter sex offender treatment, an inmate must waive all rights to patient confidentiality. Everything he tells his therapist can be used against him later, if the state tries to commit him to the MTC.
When his first seven years are up, the inmate might seek parole, which would release him from prison under supervision, but he’s unlikely to get it, despite the state’s new Intensive Parole for Sex Offenders program, which has been piloted in Framingham and is now expanding into other parts of the state. Sex offenders are generally considered high risk, and if one has refused treatment that’s a further strike against him. He will also not have had other chances to prepare and prove himself ready for a return to society. A 1999 law precludes sex offenders from participating in transitional pre-release programs, such as work release or electronic monitoring.
As the incarcerated offender nears the end of his term, he might write to the several dozen halfway houses in the state that give temporary housing and support to ex-cons. He will be denied by all of them; none takes in sex offenders.
Finally, the district attorney will choose whether to petition for civil commitment as a “sexually dangerous person” following the inmate’s release. The odds are slim–less than 2 percent–that the inmate will be committed to the MTC.
Then, on the 10th anniversary of his incarceration, the Commonwealth will open the doors and the sex offender will walk out a free man, without any support or oversight, and without any understanding of his problem or how to curb his impulses.
Roughly 50 sex offenders are released exactly this way from Massachusetts prisons every month.
Legal contortions
How things got this way is a twisted tale of parallel stories. That’s because the clash of cross purposes in the control and management of sex offenders involves the legal process of civil commitment, on the one hand, and the institutional mission of the Massachusetts Treatment Center, a facility that houses both sex offenders serving criminal sentences and those who are not–or no longer–doing time.
The Commonwealth’s contortions with the civil commitment aspect of sex-offender policy date back more than a half-century, to 1947. That’s when Massachusetts passed, in response to a blue-ribbon panel’s report, a law that allows persons found “sexually dangerous” by a court to be involuntarily committed to custody in a state institution for a period of “one day to life”–that is, as long as they are still considered a danger. Under that law, sex offenders could be declared sexually dangerous at the time of sentencing and might then go straight into commitment, with prison time awaiting them if and when they were deemed safe enough to leave treatment.
But the law was not implemented for 10 years, until an ex-con murdered two young brothers in Brockton 49 days after his release in 1957. Before the year was out, the state began committing sex offenders under this civil law to an antiquated prison building at MCI-Concord. A 1972 court decree forced the state to build the new MTC, which is part of the massive Bridgewater Correctional Complex along with Bridgewater State Hospital, Old Colony Correctional Center, and the Massachusetts Alcohol and Substance Abuse Center.
called the “Department of Punishment.”
Many other states had similar laws in the 1950s and ’60s, but by the 1970s states began shedding these laws in light of the clinical realization that “sexual dangerousness” is not a mental disorder. By 1990, Massachusetts was the last state with such a law on the books. The year before, a panel appointed by then-Gov. Dukakis concluded that the commitment law “has failed to meet either public safety concerns or the treatment needs of those committed.” The Legislature abolished the old civil commitment law a year later–but left the 274 offenders already locked up at MTC to continue their treatment. The incoming Weld administration, caught in a budget crisis, slashed funding for the MTC, and the state began releasing some of the committed patients.
The result was disaster. In 1991, Michael Kelley, a twice-convicted rapist committed to MTC in 1979, gained his release; less than a year later, he killed two women in Plymouth. This was the first of a string of crimes linked to men released from the treatment center–a string that is not yet over. In 2000, Nathaniel Bar-Jonah (formerly David Paul Brown), also released from MTC in 1991, was arrested in Montana for allegedly abducting and killing several boys–and for practicing cannibalism.
Pilloried in the press and closely watched by the courts, the Department of Mental Health, which was running the treatment program, wanted out. The department privatized the treatment program, awarding the contract to a local nonprofit agency, Justice Resource Institute, in July 1992. After a stormy relationship with DOC, which provided security for the treatment center, DMH handed off JRI’s contract to the correction department three years later, washing its hands of sex offenders completely.
Just when Massachusetts finally caught up with the trend of eliminating civil commitment in 1991, a new movement began in the opposite direction. The first state to put the practice back on the books was Schwartz’s home state of Washington; it was her distaste for the move that sent her looking for a change. JRI’s Robert Prentky, one of the top researchers in the field, promptly hired Schwartz to be his new clinical director at MTC. She threw out the old Freudian approach that had been used at MTC and implemented her aggressive behavioral program. In 1995, the program expanded to include the treatment of inmate offenders as well as civilly committed patients, in hopes of making them safe prior to their release from prison.
Then more news hit the papers. In 1997, the body of 10-year-old Jeffrey Curley was found in a barrel in a New Hampshire stream. He had been abducted, raped, and murdered by Charles Jaynes, a member of the North American Man Boy Love Association. Then, in 1998, James Lee Pells got out of MTC. A mentally retarded man charged twice in the 1970s for intent to commit rape, Pells had spent 20 years at MTC when the courts granted him release under the law, declaring him no longer sexually dangerous. Although Pells did not commit any new offense, Barnstable residents reacted with outrage at the news that he was moving back home. Pells’s release, coupled with the Curley case, prompted the Legislature to re-institute civil commitment for sexual dangerousness in 1999–despite an array of experts who trudged to Beacon Hill to testify against the idea. (The American Psychological Association calls civil commitment in these cases “an abuse of psychiatry.”)
Not long after the new commitment law took effect, DOC showed signs of wanting to use information obtained in therapy to help prosecutors extend inmates’ stay by having them civilly committed after their prison sentences. After a contentious showdown between Schwartz and correction officials–in which Schwartz locked a patient’s file in her desk to prevent a district attorney from getting it–DOC rewrote the confidentiality waiver required of all inmates entering the program. It now specifies that all records, including the notes taken by their therapists, can be given to prosecutors to use against the offender in a commitment petition.
Robert Murphy, superintendent of the MTC, says the change merely clarified the waiver. But the old waiver, contained in a copy of DOC’s sex offender management policy dating from 1999, authorized release of information only to DOC, probation, and the Parole Board, and specified what those agencies may use the files for. Evaluation for civil commitment is not on the list.
“The policy of the treatment center for the Department of Corrections is not to release people,” says Elliot Levine, an attorney who frequently defends sex offenders. “And that is at loggerheads with [the policy of] treating people so they could be released safely to the community.”
Now lawyers like Levine routinely advise their clients to refuse treatment, rather than risk post-sentence commitment. And even those inmates who do enter treatment in prison have learned to watch what they say.
“It certainly makes treatment difficult,” says David Cuppenheimer, director of the sex offender treatment program at MCI-Norfolk, which prepares inmates for intensive treatment at MTC. “We’ve always encouraged these guys in treatment to ‘fess up to all of the incidents of abuse–including all of the times you didn’t get caught. These days not too many will tell you anything. It certainly inhibits them.”
sex offenders would try to escape.
For good reason. Of the roughly 1,500 offenders committed nationally since 1990 in the 16 states with civil commitment laws, all but 86 of them were still locked up as of this summer, according to a study conducted by the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors. And probably less than half of the 86 have actually gained release by the state declaring them no longer dangerous, says Larry Fitch, the report’s co-author; most have been transferred to prison, are in transitional programs, or are under court-ordered release for other reasons. “States are full of people coming in, and not many going out,” Fitch says.
Certainly at MTC, once someone is in, it’s not easy to get out–as evidenced by more than 200 still there from the pre-1990 commitment law. And the district attorneys work hard at getting more in. “We take this very seriously,” says Amanda Lovell, a Suffolk County assistant district attorney assigned to file and prosecute commitment petitions. “I think the public is certainly safer for a few individuals who we have gotten committed.” She considers a number of factors when deciding to petition: the number and seriousness of the offenses, prison behavior reports, and treatment history among them. And, of course, notes from treatment sessions. “It is information that is made available to us,” says Lovell. “I can’t not look at it.”
The Suffolk County DA’s office is not one of the more aggressive on civil commitment. But Plymouth County, by all accounts, petitions on almost every offender who could be eligible under the law. It petitioned against Steve (not his real name), a thin, quiet, unassuming man who described his journey through the system over coffee, with his father sitting alongside him. Steve committed a rape in 1983–“a purely opportunistic offense,” he calls it–and served 15 years beginning in 1984. He participated sporadically in prison-based mental health treatment. In the mid-’90s, when the DOC began treating inmates at MTC, they asked Steve to sign up, but would not say whether he would have access to a job, school programs, and “good time” credits– all of which he had in prison.
So Steve finished out his prison sentence in 1999 and, plans all in place, discovered one week before his release date that Plymouth County had filed a “sexually dangerous person” petition on him. After three years of temporary detainment at MTC, Steve was declared not sexually dangerous by the courts last October. Now living with his family and trying to restart his life, he is frankly unsure why prosecutors think his one crime, committed so long ago, makes him so dangerous–though he understands why some residents of the treatment center are. “There are some people [in MTC] who should never get out,” he says.
Steve may have gotten out just in time. In their campaign literature, Gov. Mitt Romney and Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey proposed “locking [sex offenders] up for life” by “expediting the civil commitment procedure that allows courts to hold criminals past their sentences if they are still deemed to be sexually dangerous.” In addition, friends of Alexandra Zapp are pushing legislation that would expand the list of offenses that can trigger civil commitment. And last December, the state Supreme Judicial Court made it easier for DAs to win commitment trials, by ruling that they must prove only that the offender poses a reasonable danger to commit another sexual crime, not that the offender is more likely than not to reoffend.
All this begins to make MTC look less like a treatment facility than a detention center. Indeed, that makes sense if you view sex offenders as a special breed of creature, inherently dangerous, deviant, and incurable, as many law-enforcement officials do. Commitment seems like a good way to keep such people off the streets.
The trouble is, the courts have ruled that civil commitment cannot be used as a means of locking someone up for life. The state may only use civil commitment as a temporary means to force a person into treatment–as a hospital patient, not as a prisoner. Without the presumption that sexually dangerous persons can be treated, cured, and released, civil commitment would be unconstitutional.
Suspecting that it already is, some judges have become increasingly reluctant to approve commitment petitions. “I think a lot of my fellow Superior Court judges are concerned about the application of these laws,” says former judge Vieri Volterra, who retired from the bench last year.
Secondary treatment
This would not be the first time the state’s treatment of sex offenders has run afoul of the courts. In the early 1970s, civil suits brought by civilly committed patients led to a pair of consent decrees, in which Judge David Mazzone laid out precisely how committed patients must be handled: in the least restrictive way possible, and always as DMH patients, as they were at that time, not DOC inmates. In 1992, prompted by complaints–including MTC psychologist Paula Erickson’s affidavit stating that “the men at the Center are held in utterly immoral, punitive, and inhumane conditions”–Mazzone appointed a special master, Herbert Gleason, to keep an eye on the facility.
When the state transferred control from DMH to DOC in 1995, attorneys for the plaintiffs cried foul, and Mazzone was ready to strike the move. “How do I know that [DOC] control would not result in…simply punishment?” the judge wrote. DOC pledged to satisfy the conditions of his decrees, but for the next four years, Gleason filed repeated critical reports to the judge, citing everything from excessive discipline to commingling of sentenced inmates with the civilly committed population.
“The culture of the DOC wasn’t compatible with day-to-life commitment,” Gleason says now. Once DMH left, he says, “The screws began to tighten.”
Schwartz’s clinicians saw the change right away. “It’s a difference between night and day,” says Greg Canfield, who was JRI’s program director for the sex offender treatment program. “The daily schedule under DMH was centered around the treatment. Under DOC, the daily schedule is centered around [head] counts and accountability and security, and fitting treatment in became secondary.”
Roger Smith, who retired this year as director of forensic mental health for the Michigan Department of Mental Health, was one of several independent experts Mazzone brought in to review the treatment facility. “Some of the things that were going on were scandalous,” he recalls now, and this is a tough guy to shock: He was Charles Manson’s parole officer. Disciplinary measures included long periods of solitary confinement. Patients were not allowed to put up even crepe-paper decorations for Christmas. The 21 classes available to patients dropped to four. In 1997 new, restrictive policies concerning mail, clothing, property, telephones, and visitors were announced. A former MTC clinician tells of a patient who wouldn’t come out of his room; she wanted to talk him out but DOC security instead sent a team of correctional officers charging through the door. Guards listened in on treatment sessions, says Gleason, and picked on the patients afterward. Correctional officers were “treating these people like dogs,” says attorney Bruce Carroll.
“It’s not suitable to call it the Department of Correction anymore,” Gleason says. “It’s the Department of Punishment.”
But for all of Gleason’s damning reports, Mazzone gave in and struck the decree in 1999, just before the new commitment law came to pass. Although noting that “It is not all clear sailing, to say the least,” and writing several pages of concerns, Mazzone concluded that the state was in fact providing effective treatment in constitutional conditions at MTC. “It was just judicial exhaustion after a while, even though there was no compliance,” says Jeffrey Follett, a partner at Foley, Hoag who represented patients in the MTC case.
The legal challenges have not ended, however. Civilly committed patients continue to claim that they are unconstitutionally treated as prisoners, when they should have the rights of an ordinary hospital patient. Complaints in suits brought by Mitchell King, Ronald DeWolfe, Jeff Healey, and other civil commits include unfair restriction of access to the gym, yard, library, treatment rooms, and other facilities; imposition of prison policies; visiting room restrictions; institutional correctional movement control; and pay reduction for work details in retaliation for filing lawsuits. Former inmate Steve says that MTC is “exactly the same as a prison” with its disciplinary system, on-the-hour movements, stand-up counts, and pat-downs.
Now that Gleason is no longer watching, Schwartz believes that conditions will worsen until the patients bring a case so powerful that the courts grant a writ of habeas corpus, ruling they’ve been wrongly imprisoned. That would set all these certifiably sexually dangerous persons free, regardless of the risk to the public. Gleason fears she could be right.
Switching contracts
Now Schwartz, like Gleason, can only watch from the sidelines. Although DOC had an option of three years of renewal on its agreement with JRI, the department decided to re-bid the treatment contract, awarding it this July to Forensic Health Services (FHS) of Allston. That decision has left outside observers scratching their heads. “I’m shocked to hear that they’ve been replaced,” says Smith, the Michigan forensic mental health expert.
Nobody has anything but praise for JRI’s program, and the worst anyone says of Schwartz is that she can be an abrasive figure. Even Gleason, who excoriated the MTC in his reports, is careful to point out that JRI’s program, and Schwartz in particular, are above reproach. And the DOC acknowledges–indeed, often touts–the program’s national reputation as one of the best of its kind.
MTC Superintendent Murphy could not point to any problems with JRI’s program, and he says there were no problems with the relationship between DOC and JRI. Performance audits had not brought up any significant issues, he says. Asked why the contract was re-bid, Murphy says that the department “decided to change some of the ways we organize sex offender management at the treatment center.” Specifically, he explains, they decided to change the four-phase plan for inmates entering sex offender treatment into a two-phase plan. DOC Commissioner Michael T. Maloney, through a spokesperson, also cited the change to a two-component system as the major impetus for re-bidding the contract.
Why such a change would require selection of a new vendor is unclear. In fact, DOC changed the program from six phases to four in 2000 without disrupting the relationship with JRI. And according to David Cuppenheimer, who runs the early phases of treatment at Norfolk-MCI, the current shift is entirely semantic–the first three phases in preparation for transfer to MTC have just been re-labeled as early, mid, and advanced pre-treatment. “It’s really still four phases,” he says.
In any case, DOC’s own assessment of the competing bids–conducted by a seven-person team headed by Murphy –gave high marks to the JRI program design, which was based on past practice. According to the DOC bid evaluation, “JRI’s program had strength in their model with four levels and specified motivational phases and treatment.”
In contrast, DOC’s reviewers were unimpressed with the treatment plan proposed by Forensic Health Services. Some review comments: “FHS has an unclear schedule and a lack of details and specifics regarding the core treatment program”; “FHS was unclear on the needs of this [committed] population and did not present a clear model of services”; “The vocational program presented by FHS was weak.”
In all, the DOC review team awarded FHS 68 out of a possible 105 points in program design, giving JRI 79. JRI also outscored FHS in “demonstrated experience,” and money was not an issue–the difference between their bids was barely $50 out of more than $3 million.
Where the evaluation faulted JRI was in the staffing categories, including supervision, training, credentials, and licensing. In the bid scoring, FHS received 83 points of a possible 90, while JRI scored just 43, including a mere five of 20 for supervision, and three of 10 for training. Why, exactly, JRI received low scores in these areas is unclear. Several former staff members and outside observers praise those very aspects of JRI’s administration, and Murphy could provide no explanation. What is clear is that those categories were given new weight in the bid evaluation. In 1997, the last time JRI had to bid for the treatment contract, staffing counted for 15 percent of the total scores; in 2002, it counted for 29 percent.
What FHS did have going for it, at least in part, were personal ties. Joel Haycock, president of FHS, used to work with Murphy at Bridgewater State Hospital, and since Murphy became superintendent of MTC, FHS has won all three DOC contracts related to sex offenders: providing “qualified examiners” to assess whether someone should be committed, performing treatment at MTC, and running the Community Access Board that determines whether a committed patient is ready for release.
Murphy denies that his acquaintance with Haycock has had anything to do with awarding department contracts to FHS. And some observers say a clash of philosophies could be the main cause of the contract switch. “The problem as I see it is that JRI was doing what it was supposed to do–treating these people with the hope of curing them,” says Stan Goldman, director of mental health litigation for the Massachusetts Committee for Public Counsel Services, which represents many MTC residents.
“There was some animosity about a program that was being effective and actually recommending that people might be able to leave,” says Carole Ball, a clinician who works with several sex offenders released from MTC.
In November, more than four months after FHS took over the treatment program, it was still understaffed, with four clinical positions unfilled. Many of the top JRI people were not offered positions; others refused to accept them. But the new clinical director, Nancy Connolly, defends herself and her staff’s readiness. “I would put the experience of my people next to anyone at JRI,” she says.
Debbie Baker, who started MTC’s intensive treatment program eight years ago and ran it until JRI’s last day, is pessimistic. FHS didn’t offer her a position; the new treatment contractors even declined her offer to spend a day showing them the program and reviewing patient histories, she says. “In nine months to a year you’ll be getting graduates from a watered-down program,” Baker warns.
Talking tough
Roughly 98 percent of convicted sex offenders will one day go free. Ideally, they would do so after receiving a full course of treatment in the prisons and in MTC, and then after going through a graduated process of community reintegration. But the move away from treatment and toward indefinite confinement is making that more difficult. In 1999, DOC suspended the community reintegration program it had in its minimum-security prisons, which was designed to help sex offenders make the transition from intensive treatment to release on parole. That, says Cuppenheimer, is because the department pulled all sex offenders back to medium-security facilities out of fear that they would try to escape to evade civil commitment.
“We never got to do any legitimate community access,” says Canfield, who says that it was part of the model outlined in JRI’s contract. “It seems strange to say, but we ran the program there for 10 years and nobody ever finished the program.” (DOC was also contractually obligated to conduct a recidivism study; seven years later, Murphy says he still intends to.)
Also, ideally, these inmates would be released under the Parole Board’s Intensive Parole for Sex Offenders (IPSO) unit, launched in 1996, which provides especially tight oversight. This specialized supervision includes two visits a week, curfews, electronic monitoring, a ban on driving at night and other travel restrictions, daily logs, drug testing, polygraph examinations, and treatment-participation requirements. (Had Paul Leahy been placed in the program, the curfew and ban on driving at night would have presumably prevented him from getting a late-shift job at the rest stop where he attacked Alexandra Zapp.) Of the 114 offenders supervised by IPSO as of last June, not one has yet been found to commit another sex offense.
“Parole is one of the greatest tools we’ve got,” says Latham, “because we can see when people start slipping, whether it’s drinking, losing a job, or something else.”
“We know that will lower recidivism,” says Canfield.
The specialty parole unit is similar to a Colorado parole team that adds creative twists like an electronic monitoring bracelet linked to a global positioning system, which alerts police when the parolee goes near a school or other off-limits area. But Colorado also modified its mandatory sentencing laws specifically to encourage lengthy parole for sex offenders.By contrast, Massachusetts rarely paroles those convicted of sex crimes. To date, fewer than 200 inmates have gone through the special intensive parole program. Meanwhile, the state prisons hold some 2,500 sex offenders.
The new program director at MTC, brought in by FHS, says she expects to place people at the community transition house on the Bridgewater campus, and then allow them to start supervised community access programs to shop, attend AA meetings, or take classes. “Our goal is to send people out into the community who are ready to go out into the community” says Connolly. Whether DOC will allow her to do so remains to be seen.
Commissioner Maloney does not sound eager. “The MTC transition program permits suitable inmates to participate in the community access program,” says Maloney, through a spokesperson. “But given the nature of the population, public safety concerns mandate review on a case-by-case basis.”
When Alexandra Zapp died, press reports pointed not to the fact that Leahy was free from parole constraints, nor that he received no treatment while behind bars, but that his name had not made it onto the state’s backlogged sex offender registry, which still had 17,000 names awaiting processing. Gov. Romney has pledged to be aggressive on this front, widely publicizing where sex offenders live. As a candidate, he also said he would try to remove privacy restrictions in the Criminal Offender Records Information (CORI) Act specifically for sex-related felonies.
But if anything, the Zapp case illustrates the limitations of the registry approach. What was it about Paul Leahy that posed the greater danger, that where he lived had not been publicized–or that he had emerged from prison untreated for his sex-crime tendencies and returned to society without the intensive supervision the Parole Board now provides for similar offenders?
In developing its stance on sex offenders, the new administration did not consult Schwartz–or Latham, or any of the state’s other experts. Nor, apparently, did the administration pay any attention to a recent task force on sex offenders appointed by then-acting Gov. Jane Swift, which emphasized treatment and parole oversight.
Schwartz and others warn that the current approach to controlling sex-offenders is creating a serious public safety issue. Like the rest of us, they can only watch and wait–and hope they are proved wrong.
David S. Bernstein is a freelance writer in Watertown.