The Virginian-Pilot
©
RICHMOND
The number of Virginia criminals labeled "sexually violent predators" is growing at such a rate that it's straining both the budget for treating them and the capacity of a two-year-old facility built to hold them after they finish serving their sentences.
Built to hold 300 people, the Virginia Center for Behavioral Rehabilitation in Nottoway County currently holds 214. By mid-2012, its population is expected to hit 356 and, five years after that, to 738, members of the House of Delegates Appropriation Committee were told Monday.
Offenders are sent to the $62 million rehabilitation center through a process known as civil commitment, which allows the state to confine certain criminals even after they've served their time. Before the center opened in 2008, some resided in a 48-bed treatment facility in Petersburg.
Now that the center is reaching its occupancy limits, there is talk of reopening that unit or another state building, possibly an old correctional unit, for more space.
Officials project that escalating costs will leave the facility with a roughly $25 million budget shortfall over the next two years. The current annual budget is nearly $16 million, up from less than $3 million in 2004.
Growth in the program appears to be linked to a 2006 law change. That year, the list of crimes that qualified someone as sexually violent was expanded from four - rape, forcible sodomy, object sexual penetration and aggravated sexual battery - to 28.
That increased by 350 percent the number of people eligible for civil commitment, explained James W. Stewart III, commissioner of the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services. The number of people referred to the center jumped from about one a month to five or six times that.
Once there, residents remain at the facility until a finding is reached that they no longer pose a public threat, Stewart explained. Patients are assessed once in each of their first five years at the rehabilitation center and every other year thereafter. So far, seven have been released.
That indefinite term of confinement gives state Del. Rosalyn Dance the impression Virginia effectively has "set up another penal system."
"If we're going to give them life, let's call it life," said the Petersburg Democrat, who wondered if the state is "throwing these people into a dark hole" and then sinking money into it.
Mary Devoy, an advocate for modifying some of Virginia's sex crime laws, believes some statutes designed to punish offenders go too far. She argued that in their zeal to target pedophiles and rapists - "the true threats to society" - lawmakers have enacted rules which can leave a lifetime stigma on teens convicted of underage consensual sex, for example.
House Majority Leader H. Morgan Griffith defended Virginia's laws - including the 2006 expansion and the 1999 civil commitment statute he successfully carried - as tools designed to punish and reform repeat offenders with a pattern of aberrant behavior.
The commitment process has been an effective vehicle to determine which offenders have a high likelihood of committing new crimes, said Griffith, a Salem Republican and advocate for curbing sex crimes against children. "Releasing them out on the street is not an option for me."
Julian Walker, (804) 697-1564, julian.walker@pilotonline.com
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Who Are The Real Criminals?
Okay, here we sit with a fact of sick-minded individuals who desperately need help. Now the the question is "is it the offenders or those who want to commit criminal acts to the offenders that needs the help?" If we are so discussed with what these offenders have done to harm others, and harming others is wrong? how do you all justify committing a criminal act against a criminal ("kill them", "give them the chair", "give them life", etc.)? The true problem is in our government, who uses these and other offenses as money-making smoke screens to do what they do best-LIE! Yes, absolutely, our chilkdren are the top priority and that should never be compromised, but most of these offenders were once children who 98% were compromised by society and they grew up to become offenders. So while we are looking for the offenders trying to protect against them, we may be breeding them within our own homes with TV, Video games, Movies, and even our very own sicknesses. Lets be honest, If we want to protect our children, GET INTO THEIR LIVES! Then you can blame no one but yourselves for the outcome. The Watchman.
sex offender status,(violent
I have never in my life heard such ignorance when someones comments on a violent sex offender. I lived in Hampton for years. A woman or man can be inside their home and if they are seen by an adult not a child. But if there is a baby up to 13 yrs old 1 inch- 500 ft. or more or less around , all the adult has to do is claim intentional indecent exposure. All it takes is a baby in a crib half a mile from the home or more! , if they can look through binoculars and see you , the adult, you are classified as a violent sex offender the rest of your life you register and on the internet. A child does not even have to be pointed in your direction! This is va. law. So you can have a man looking at a half naked woman in the wrong way and if her baby is somewhere , maybe inside? She could help ruin his or her life.People get all the facts of being classified as violent now before you call all registered offenders as predators>
VA facility for sex predators to exceed limit in 2012
What was left out of the article was the expanded criteria for defining a sexual predator now includes non-sexual crimes. What does this have to do with being a sexual predator? The sex offender hysteria that has been going on in this country has increasingly cast a wider net in a witch-hunt for "sex offenders." The result has been many low risk or no-risk offenders have been caught up and re-classified as violent or dangerous. I know of one young man who was considered for civil commitment when his "sex crime" was sleeping with his teenage girlfriend. Going by that criteria, it's no wonder we have an increasing number of so-called sex offenders. We need to get serious about going after the real predators and remove from the registry those distracting individuals who pose no risk to society. Georgia recently did an assessment of its registered sex offenders and found that less than 1 percent were true predators. Please lawmakers, media and the public, let's push for registry reform and not only save Virginia a lot of money but make our children safer by focusing on the truly dangerous child predators.
Please get the facts
I tried and tried to access something that would spell out what those 28 offenses are and, having no success, am resorting to this from the ECONOMIST; I feel sure that some are covered here. The ECONOMIST found, “At least five states require registration for people who visit prostitutes, 29 require it for consensual sex between young teenagers, and 32 require it for indecent exposure. Some prosecutors are prosecuting teenagers for the ‘distributing child pornography’ called ‘sexting’ via their cell phones." Indecent exposure in itself covers a multitude of what used to be misdemeanor offenses. The greatest crime of all, however, is selling the public registry and all of its claptrap to the public on the pretense of curbing sex crimes against children. Less than 1% of sex crime against children is committed by released, registered sex offenders. Between 90 and 95% is committed by family members and close friends. Given this, if you can show me how the registry can protect children, I will re-think my position.
agree to a point.
I agree to a point. After all, even those who do register as required after release often, if not always, repeat offend if they are violent in their hunting and committing of the crimes. And not every predator registers, banking on a clogged system not seeig it.
Registries only help in the sense that parents might be aware of what's in their nieghborhood, along the route to school ect. However...
If we euthanized them, it would a list of the dead and we wouldn't need to be having this pondering of the effectivness of registry. Along with the registry would disappear repeat offenses. Not to mention playgrounds and nieghborhoods being alot safer.
When I was growing up, the topic on house buying was "so, how are the schools around here?" Now, included is, "So, how many predators live within five miles of here....?" Sad, very sad.
You might be an offender if....
There is where most people are mistaken. ALL registered offenders are NOT predators. You really do need to do some research if it only includes looking up the definition of predator so that you know what it means. The clogged system you mention is because of all the non-violent offenders that shouldn't be on a list at all; there are children as young as 9 years old, teenagers in consensual relationships, and even MARRIED couples where the husband took his wife out for a romantic evening and they end up making out in the car parked in the dark and getting arrested for indecent exposure because some police officer shined his flashlight through the window. All that it takes for someone to be convicted of a sex offense is for someone to SAY it happened. The accused is the one who has to PROVE that nothing happened. ANYONE can end up on the list.
Please note: violent offenders are the ones I've specified.
I do realize that in our justice system, there is alot of unjustice. That includes people being on registries in the company of much more vile offenders. That's why, in all my posts involving euthanizing, that the sexual -predator- (not merely a one time whoops in a car or consentual tryst with a person 17 when they turn 20), has to be just that, as predator; someone who has stalked, planned, blueprinted a routine of a victim, vetted victims online over the years, for example, and then carried out a violent crime -- such as killing the molested child and tossing them in the garbage, or leaving a raped high schooler face down and dead in an orchard after strangling them with a shoelace. Those are the violent, sexual predators I am speaking of when I call for their euthanasia. It is those; who hunt, track, take trophies of victims, and leave a scarred family and horrified, fearful public in their wake, that I think it would be kinder on all involved to kill. After such crimes, their purpose in life becomes to hunt, again & again.
hmmm
Aparently, some of the prisons, even the ones in Chesapeake, are going to be recieving some of these inmates. The problem is, if the other inmates find out, the sexual offender is dead in a matter of days.
I see nothing wrong with that.
Jail
Move them back to the regular prison. Why should our tax dollars be used to keep them seperate from the rest of the scum. If they are there for life then why should they not spend the rest of their sorry life in a special prison.
C-mon, people. This is America not Saudi Arabia
We don't execute 16-year-old males for having consensual sex with a 15-year-old female (considered a sexual predator in Virginia). Who needs sharia law when we have attitudes like that in our society.