As I wrote in the article immediately above, sexual perverts issues are less psychological than spiritual. Yes, there is an element of power involved in rape, but when it comes to prepubescent children, there is a larger element of spitting in the face of God by destroying innocence and violating the sacred!
WA confined hundreds for sexual violence.
Then it quietly began releasing them.
UNCOMMITTED | First in an occasional series
Editor’s note: This story contains descriptions of sexual violence.
Just before midnight, Paul Harell drove to a stranger’s home near a riverside town in Maryland. He found the basement door unlocked and, taking a paring knife from the kitchen, entered the bedroom. A 74-year-old woman awoke with Harell’s hands constricting her throat and the weight of his body on top of her.
It was a crime that echoed how Harell had raped women and girls decades earlier on Washington’s Whidbey Island. And one that Washington spent years, and millions of dollars, to prevent.
It was not an anomaly.
One in 4 people the state has committed and released from the nation’s first program to rehabilitate so-called “sexually violent predators” have been arrested for new crimes, a Seattle Times investigation found. One in 7 — like Harell — reoffended in a serious manner; half involved sexual violence.
Washington justifies detaining and treating people at the Special Commitment Center as necessary for the “preservation of the public peace, health, or safety.”
The Department of Social and Health Services, which runs the center on McNeil Island, 3 miles into Puget Sound, does not track the people it releases nor whether they commit new crimes. The agency does not track whether its legally mandated treatment program improves public safety. It is not required to.
Unlike other behavioral health treatment programs run by the state, the Special Commitment Center has no regular independent audits or enforceable state or federal standards for the quality or efficacy of its care.
DSHS’ per-person cost for the program currently averages $440,000, making it one of the state’s most expensive forms of institutionalization. But the agency has not examined whether its 34-year experiment in civil commitment is helping the people in its custody — or the public.
This lack of scrutiny by DSHS and lawmakers has allowed the state the convenience of saying the money and time it spends treating residents works, without the responsibility of looking at what happens off the island.
Yet Washington continues to send a small number of people to McNeil Island each year while rapidly releasing many more, according to a Seattle Times data analysis. Today, more people the state once labeled sexually violent predators live off the island than remain on it.
DSHS and the Attorney General’s Office stated in 2019 that Harell had been successfully treated for his history of sexual violence and agreed to his release despite concerns by a corrections officer that his compliance with supervision “appeared to be deteriorating” in the months prior, including lying to his therapist, records obtained from the Department of Corrections and Island County Superior Court show.
Please continue reading the article at the following link:
But when Harell moved back to Maryland...
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