Civil commitment of sex offenders pretends prisoners are patients

Twenty states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government have laws that authorize the civil commitment of sex offenders who would otherwise be released after serving their prison terms. The Supreme Court upheld the practice in 1997, saying it was appropriate for people who "suffer from a volitional impairment rendering them dangerous beyond their control." That logic is puzzling. The state punishes people who commit sex crimes based on the assumption that they could and should have controlled themselves. But when it is time for them to be released after completing the punishment prescribed by law, the state says that was not actually true; now they must be locked up precisely because they cannot control themselves. [...]

Back in 2015, when not a single "client" had been certified as fully cured [in Minnesota], U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank concluded that Minnesota's "treatment" was a sham designed to conceal "a punitive system that segregates and indefinitely detains a class of potentially dangerous individuals without the safeguards of the criminal justice system." In the United States, he said, "we do not imprison citizens because we fear that they might commit a crime in the future." Yet, that is manifestly what laws like Minnesota's do, confining some 5,000 people not for what they did but for what they might do.

source: Article 'Civil Commitment of Sex Offenders Pretends Prisoners Are Patients' by Jacob Sullum; townhall.com/columnists/jacobsullum/2021/02/10/civil-commitment-of-sex-offenders-pretends-prisoners-are-patients-the-practice-evades-constitutional-constraints-by-casting-punishment-and-preventive-detention-as-treatment-n2584499; Townhall; 10 February 2021