Surrounded by the cold, hard waters of the Puget Sound, the SCC shares a small plot of land with the medium-security McNeil Island Correction Center. Both facilities comprise a series of squat gray buildings with tiny windows and red trim. Both are set in the middle of a thick grove of hardwood trees. Both are encircled by high fencing and razor wire.
Perhaps more to the point, the SCC has been criticized, cited, sued, and threatened for its lack of treatment programming. Critics say the facility is just a pretext--a prison-like place to stash sex offenders indefinitely, against their constitutional rights. Only two men have ever been recommended for release from the 10-year-old SCC. A few others have gotten out, but only after winning court orders from judges.
Inside the SCC, officials are anxious to show that they're doing a good job, that conditions have improved of late. Center executive assistant Allen Ziegler is careful to refer to inmates as "residents"; he calls sentences "civil commitments." Ziegler, a career bureaucrat who comes across as a professor in his red sweater and thin bifocals, claims the SCC is a relaxed, therapeutic community. "It's nice to be able to offer a lot of services to our residents," he says, gesturing toward a Native American sweat lodge. Ziegler leads the way into the center's main building, through a corridor, and up a stairwell. At the top of the stairs, we are greeted by Recreation Specialist Kelly Cunningham, a stocky, amiable guy who resembles a high school football coach.
Cunningham starts pointing. To the left is a full-sized basketball court. Straight ahead and to the right is the music room, where SCC residents can lay down their own tracks with their own instruments. Further ahead and to the left is the hobby room, where residents do woodworking, pottery, and model building. Tucked away in the corner is a weight room that was abandoned until the SCC recently refurbished it. "We even have a few horticulturists," Cunningham boasts. "Some of the woodworking guys make their own planters."
The tour leaves Cunningham's domain and heads to Unit A, a two-story, four-tiered building where the men being held at the SCC live. Outside the building's entrance, Ziegler talks openly about the residents before he is interrupted by one of them. "Our residents?" the man says derisively, before correcting Ziegler: "Our inmates." Once inside the unit's day room, the men instinctively sense that a reporter is among them. "If you want to get the real story of what this place is really like," asserts a large man with a scraggly beard, "I'm sitting over there." Expressionless, Ziegler ignores the comment and starts talking about the quality of the SCC's furniture: dormitory-style upholstery, he points out, not the welded-down chairs and tables you'd find in a prison. Then he ushers me out of Unit A.
Whether the SCC functions as a prison or a hospital is at the center of an ongoing controversy that has left the facility fighting for its very life. This fall, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the case of Andre Brigham Young, an SCC resident who claims that his constitutional rights were violated when he was committed there. If other Supreme Court rulings are any indication, the decision could go Young's way; the court has been willing to uphold the legality of post-prison incarceration only if inmates (or residents) are receiving meaningful treatment and have the chance to be "cured" and released. If the court finds that the SCC resembles a prison, the facility could be forced to close.
Young's attorneys have lots of fodder for their case. Most of the damning evidence against the center is already on the record, having been part of a different lawsuit in a lower federal court here in Seattle. That case was originally filed by SCC resident Richard Turay, but now includes more than a dozen residents. The judge who heard the case, William Dwyer, ruled last November that the SCC was in contempt of court for failing to provide "constitutionally adequate" mental-health care or establishing any sort of plan for releasing residents back into the public. If the center doesn't make sufficient progress in its treatment standards by this coming November, Dwyer will fine the center thousands of dollars per day in taxpayer money.
Washington's practice of incarcerating sex offenders after they've completed their sentences raises all kinds of questions. SCC residents and civil libertarians say that the state's civil commitment laws are unconstitutional. Fiscal conservatives fret about the SCC's enormous budget (a good portion of which goes to defend lawsuits filed by residents). The American Psychiatric Association argues that it's unethical to "treat" people when they haven't been diagnosed with any illness, and that a lack of treatment for people who have been diagnosed could be dangerous to the public should they ever be released.
"What underlies [Washington state's] lock-them-up-and-throw-away-the-key mentality is a fundamental belief that people won't change," says Robert Edmund Smith, the SCC's former clinical director, who testified in Dwyer's courtroom. "If the Special Commitment Center is supposed to be a long-term prison system, then let's just do it. Let's call it that and forget about this pretext."
ANATOMY OF A BAD LAW
The SCC was created in 1989, after Earl Shriner anally and orally raped a seven-year-old boy in Tacoma. Shriner proceeded to stab the youth in the back and cut off his penis, leaving him caked in dirt and blood in a wooded park on the city's south side.
The crime created a groundswell of public fear and outrage. The mentally ill Shriner, who was 39 years old at the time, had been released from prison (where he served a lengthy sentence for murdering a young girl) two years earlier. "This case makes clear that a class of criminal exists that is beyond reach of rehabilitation because of mental deficiencies," the Seattle Post-Intelligencer editorialized. "Such people cannot be put to death by a just society. But justice also demands that society be protected from such people." A new phrase found popularity among appalled pundits and community leaders: "sexual predator." It wasn't long before the mass of angry sentiment resulted in a new crime bill in Olympia--the 1990 Community Protection Act. The new law had many parts, but its most significant feature was a revision in the way the state would deal with its most dangerous sex offenders. They would be civilly committed at the SCC.
The people spoke and the state listened: a simple lesson in eighth-grade civics, right? Wrong. The state would soon learn that outbursts of public frustration do not necessarily inspire great lawmaking. Not too long after the new sex-offender laws were implemented (the first in the country that committed offenders who had already served their sentences), problems materialized, lawsuits were filed, and new controversies emerged.
The treatment of sex offenders isn't easy. The psychological issues are complex, and the recidivism rates are high--more than 50 percent in some categories. But therapy does work. The American Psychiatric Association recently found that, although results vary depending on the type of sex offense a person has committed, those who receive counseling are up to 44 percent less likely to commit new sex crimes.
Sex-offender therapists say individualized treatment is the linchpin to recovery. That treatment usually involves multi-phase counseling that resembles a 12-step program: The sex offender must admit he has a problem, come to terms with that problem, and learn to manage his sexual desires so he no longer acts on them. Some psychiatrists favor supplementing therapy with medications that lower sex drive. In prison and in civil-commitment settings, sex offenders are often required to undergo tests to determine whether they get erections when faced with abnormal sexual stimuli, like the sounds or sights of children playing in a park.
Yet inmates have been arguing for years that they haven't been receiving the kind of attention necessary to call the SCC a hospital and keep it on the right side of constitutional law (most residents at the SCC are involved in suits against the facility--the most recent, filed last year, includes 60 men). And Judge Dwyer has sided with them, ruling last November that the center was in contempt of court. The SCC was rife with problems at the time. It offered shoddy programming, had a hard time hanging on to staff, wasn't actively encouraging family members to participate in treatment plans, and had no halfway house where residents could go after gaining their freedom. "The [center's] shortcomings do not reflect any judgment of any qualified professional," Dwyer wrote. "They exist, and have existed, despite uncontradicted professional opinion to the contrary." The SCC's "foot-dragging has continued for an unconscionable time." The judge threatened to fine the SCC $50 a day per resident if the center did not make significant progress within five months.
Before his ruling, Dwyer had heard from a number of credible sources. A major piece of evidence came from Dr. Janice Marques, a psychologist from California. At Dwyer's request, Marques had been observing the center's efforts to provide long-term mental health care since September of 1994. By last November, Marques had written 16 different progress reports, pointing out problems with everything from staffing to treatment. By her 16th report, it was obvious that the center still had a long way to go before it could offer adequate care.
Dwyer also received a report from an Inspection of Care (IOC) committee, a group run by the Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) that routinely inspects mental-health facilities. The committee's report, released last October, was a scathing indictment of the SCC: "The site at present definitely operates more like a correctional facility than a treatment center or program," it said. Most alarming to the IOC were the horrendously inconsistent treatment plans for SCC residents. Some residents had outdated plans; some had none at all. "Almost universally, the residents we spoke to were vague about what their treatment goals were, or what they actually needed to do to complete their program," the report said. "One resident, active in treatment, said they 'keep changing things.' He said he had a program overview, but that wasn't always what was required and it wasn't up to date."
Also adding to the mountain of testimony against the SCC was Robert Smith, the center's former clinical director. Smith, who quit the SCC late last year and now heads a voluntary sex-offender treatment center in Alberta, Canada, wouldn't tell The Stranger exactly why he left the center. He said only that he had political problems with the SCC's director, Mark Seling. Smith's court testimony is a little more specific: He said that when he asked for money for more comprehensive treatment programming, he was turned down by Seling. "[He]'s busy spending resources on [the] long-term development of an institution that would be comfortable for people who don't want to go anywhere," Smith said. Seling's only response was that he's invested in programs related to job training.
According to Smith, the deficiencies at the SCC were exacerbated two years ago, when the DSHS, which runs the SCC, moved the center from Monroe to an unused building next to the McNeil Island prison. He says that few staffers wanted to travel the extra distance to the ferry or take the 45-minute boat ride to and from the SCC. "We essentially lost 90 percent of our trained core staff that had been with the program a number of years," Smith testified. "SCC residents also were feeling frustrated and feeling bounced around [by the move], which also impacted our ability to provide good treatment."
SCC resident David Nelson is a prime example of where the SCC falls down. A small guy with thinning hair who talks very fast, Nelson was convicted of three sex-related charges involving children in Kansas and Washington. Early this year, after finishing up his sentence in prisons in both states, he was detained by the state of Washington for possible civil commitment. He's currently languishing at the SCC, awaiting a hearing. Nelson is unique among the sex offenders at the SCC, because he's seen how sex-offender treatment centers work in other states. Before he was extradited here to complete his criminal time, he participated in a voluntary, 18-month treatment program at a prison in Lansing, Kansas. Nelson's experience there has turned him into a treatment junkie: He can talk for an hour straight about what's worked, what hasn't, and how best to manage his sexual impulses toward children.
During a discussion of the SCC in the center's visitation area--a nondescript room with vending machines, anesthetic light, and round, cafeteria-style tables--he says, "I've been extremely disappointed. How can they justify 45-minute classes once a week with a different therapist every week who doesn't know what the other therapists have done? It's ridiculous. There's no continuity. [Therapy is] just slapped together I'm left frustrated and angry that they consider this treatment."
In Kansas, Nelson crafted a Personal Maintenance Program Contract [PMPC], an analysis of his own sexual history and the patterns of his sexual deviancy. The more comprehensive the PMPC, the greater the indication that the sex offender who wrote it has progressed in understanding--and therefore managing--his problem. Nelson's PMPC is 70 pages long. "I've been working with guys who've been in the [SCC's] program for five years," he says. "And they look at my PMPC and they say, 'We haven't even gotten this in-depth.' And I've sat down with them and said, 'Have you worked on this? On that?' They'll say, 'Well what's that? What's that mean?' They've been in here for five years, supposedly in treatment, and they haven't even touched on half the stuff that we did in Kansas [in 18 months]."
Nelson chooses to participate in the SCC's programming even though he thinks it's useless. A full third of his fellow residents are "treatment-resisters." Some avoid treatment because they don't believe they have a problem. Others think they'd undermine their legal challenges to the center if they submitted to treatment. Andre Young, the plaintiff in the case that's headed to the Supreme Court, is among those who won't attend sessions with SCC psychiatrists and psychologists. Young is declining media interviews, but he can't help but give one short comment on why he's resisting therapy.
"I'm not a fool," Young said over the phone to The Stranger. "If there was any treatment in here, I would have gotten my ass in treatment. When I saw what was happening, I filed suit."
THE LAW UNDER ATTACK
Young's case won't mark the first time this model of civil commitment has been reviewed by the Supreme Court. In 1997, the high court upheld Kansas' civil commitment program, which was modeled after Washington's SCC. Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the majority opinion, rejected outright the idea that conjoining criminal punishment with civil commitment violated plaintiff Leroy Hendrick's civil rights.
That might have been the decisive word on the issue, except that the vote was a narrow 5-4, and Justice Anthony Kennedy, who cast the decisive swing vote, wrote a concurring opinion indicating that he might have had a more skeptical view of civil commitment if the facts of the case had been different. Kennedy seemed comfortable ruling with the majority against Hendricks, because Hendricks was a pedophile. Pedophilia is "at least described [as a mental abnormality] in the DSM-IV," Kennedy noted. The DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) is the psychiatrists' clinical bible.
Kennedy may look differently at Young, because Young's problems don't fit a neat clinical definition. When Young was civilly committed, he was diagnosed with a "personality disorder not otherwise specified" and a sexual disorder "not otherwise specified." These two concepts are legislative; that is, they were created by lawmakers and are meaningless in the world of psychiatry. "I think that [Young's psychiatric condition] will be an important issue in this case," says Robert Burochowitz, the public defender who's representing him. It's worth noting that a significant number of other SCC residents--85, in fact--defy the clinical definition of mental abnormality.
Kennedy also stressed in the Kansas case that he would be more skeptical of a civil commitment facility if he believed the state wasn't operating it as a mental-health center--"if the treatment provisions were adopted as a sham or mere pretext" to punish sex offenders. Kansas' program was able to show that it was serious about treatment. Washington's, on the other hand, has many documented shortcomings. SCC residents and their advocates hope that, if the high court--particularly Kennedy--gets a glimpse of the SCC's problems, it may order the closure of the center.
Despite its uncertain future, the state of Washington is standing firmly behind the SCC. Gov. Gary Locke has once again raised the specter of community safety, telling the P-I in April that closing the center would mean letting more than 100 dangerous sex offenders loose upon society. Locke called it a "dangerous gamble with public safety."
The state is also continuing to pump huge sums of money into the center and is even planning a new building, thanks to a recent $14-million budget allocation from the state legislature. The SCC's operations manager, Timothy Whalen, was eager to show me the plans. He used a spacious work table to stretch out a few giant, color-coded maps depicting exactly where the brand-new structure will go: on a recently cleared, nine-acre parcel on a plateau above the SCC's current location.
Planning for a new facility makes one wonder whether the SCC has been stricken with a huge case of denial. But SCC officials hope the project will appease Judge Dwyer and possibly the Supreme Court, allowing the center to stay open. The building would separate SCC residents from the neighboring prison. "The building itself is being designed to provide its own security," gushes Whalen, an intense planner in his 30s. By using a series of security doors with magnetic card-keys, Whalen says, there will be no need for unsightly razor wire.
The new building would be so efficient, in fact, that it would allow the SCC to hold more sex offenders than ever before. When completed (by 2006, if all goes right), the 240,000 square-foot structure would be able to house up to 402 additional SCC residents. Which means, of course, even more expense. Each SCC resident costs the state $130,000 a year (a third of that expense goes toward legal fees defending the center against charges that it is unconstitutional). In the next decade, the SCC--if allowed to continue operations--could cost us around $72 million a year.
THE EXPERTS WEIGH IN
Is it wise to be spending so much money on the SCC? Howard Zonana doesn't think so. A professor of psychiatry at Yale University, he successfully lobbied the Connecticut legislature to reject a proposed civil-commitment statute. Using statistics from Washington state as an example (Washington has become a model for how not to run a commitment center), he and other activists showed that the enormous legal costs and operating expenses just aren't worth it. "I haven't seen any reports yet where somebody's been willing to get on board and say that [civil commitment] is the best way to do this," Zonana says.
Last year, Zonana chaired a task force of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) that studied sex-offender legislation. The task force came out strongly against civil commitment in a comprehensive report. "How can you prove that somebody's not going to be dangerous in the future?" Zonana reasons. "Once somebody's in one of these [civil commitment centers], how do you get them out?" The task force report recommended a number of reforms, including banning centers like the SCC and rewriting the sentencing laws. Instead of indefinite civil confinement, the task force proposed re-introducing parole boards. If a parole board decided an offender was still a danger to the community, then that person would not be let out.
Maybe Washington could learn something from Canada. In the United States, a sex offender can be in prison for years and never be psychologically evaluated. In Canada, each prisoner is evaluated before they are sentenced, providing valuable information to the presiding judge. "There are a large number of people who are treatable," says Dr. John Bradford of the Royal Ottawa Hospital, a member of Zonana's APA task force. "Part of the key is to evaluate [for the courts] who's treatable and who isn't." The treatable are routed into programs as they serve their time. A network of independent, contracted psychiatrists ensures that therapy continues even after offenders are released from prison.
It's a system that works. Sex offenders know from the beginning how much time they are going to serve. They get therapy. And the Canadians aren't overwhelmed with costly lawsuits from sex offenders who claim their civil rights have been violated. Our setup, on the other hand, is full of holes. Here's a statistic that should hit close to home: Right now, there are about 1,000 sex offenders in Washington state prisons who have asked for mental-health treatment. Instead of getting it, however, they've been put on a waiting list. The commitment just isn't there to help them.
The state prison system is short on mental-health workers, leaving 40 to 50 unfilled beds in the Department of Correction's voluntary Sex-Offender Treatment Program (SOTP), located at the Twin Rivers Corrections Center in Monroe. In the past, the program could accept anyone who wanted to participate, says Dr. Art Gordon, head of the SOTP. Now--because of budget cuts and an increasing focus on SCC-style incarceration--the Department of Corrections has to choose who to admit, based on two criteria: the type of crime committed and the amount of time the person has left to serve. "If he's a low-risk guy, we have to tell him, 'Sorry, you did everything you're supposed to do, but we just don't have the room,'" Gordon says.
Twin Rivers' SOTP seems like a good investment, certainly a better expenditure of money than the SCC. The treatment program costs only several thousand dollars per year per offender above the cost of incarceration. Unlike the SCC, Gordon has at his disposal a network of doctors who can provide after-prison treatment. Most important of all, his program is proving that treatment does help lower recidivism rates among offenders. When the SOTP tracked men who had completed the program and continued treatment in the community, it found that only two percent were re-arrested for sex-related charges. Compare that to the Department of Correction's statewide average for sex offenders--19.8 percent.
WHAT HAPPENS NOW?
Last April, Judge Dwyer held a hearing to see how the SCC had been doing. Dr. Janice Marques was there to submit her 17th progress report, which did include some positive comments about the SCC. This past spring, the state legislature came to the SCC's aid, appropriating $3 million for new staff hiring and training. Marques noted that, after 10 years, the SCC had finally developed individual treatment plans for residents.
As Marques read through her painfully detailed report, Dwyer politely asked her to cut to the chase: Can the SCC now provide constitutionally adequate mental-health care? Marques could say only that the center had made significant progress since it was ruled in contempt of court last November, but that it still had a long way to go.
Dwyer held off on the $5,500-plus per-day fine he'd threatened to impose, and set another court date for this November. If the SCC hasn't made additional progress by then, said Dwyer, it will retroactively owe its own residents tens of thousands of dollars each.
Despite the stern warning from Dwyer, the news buoys Mark Seling, the center's director. "Civil commitment models have been judged to be constitutional," he says in a smooth, practiced voice. "It's our task to make sure [the center is] adequate in all ways. There's still a huge controversy over whether this is the way to go, but we have all the treatment we need now to have an adequate program."
The postponement of fines will surely help the state's upcoming case before the Supreme Court. But will it be enough? And will the improvements last? Dwyer's latest order is cynical. "There is no doubt that this [progress] was caused by the contempt order," he wrote. "At all previous stages, the state agencies moved slowly, and often reluctantly, to make improvements. Faced with a sanction, they have moved with speed and determination."
The center's biggest problem still has not been resolved. The SCC does not have a halfway house to help released residents make the transition back into society, though the center has made attempts. This spring, the SCC chose a double-wide mobile home on a 10-acre plot of land in Lacey, a suburb of Olympia, as a halfway house. Word got out, however, and appalled neighbors protested. A couple of weeks ago, two local developers, anxious to avoid a potential drop in real-estate values, bought the property out from under the SCC, reportedly for three times its assessed value. The developers, who are being hailed as local heroes, have thrown up a sign on the property: "No sexual predators welcome."
The SCC had intended to use the Lacey property to house two residents it is recommending for release, a move designed to appease Dwyer's demands for progress. One of the residents is Mitchell Gaff, who was convicted of rape in 1984. Gaff, a burly man with short hair, looks like the star member of a college wrestling team. Pent up at the SCC since 1994, he is willing to talk to me, even though his attorney has advised him not to.
"If they had been honest, this would have happened five years ago," Gaff said the day after he was informed that he might be going home. The process has moved slow since then. On a late Friday afternoon in mid-May, he was taken, chained and handcuffed, across Puget Sound by ferry and to Everett by police car. He spent a weekend at the county jail in an isolated cell where the light never went off. When Monday rolled around, Gaff was taken to a courtroom, where he was met by Snohomish County Prosecutor Paul Stern.
Local prosecutors don't have to take the SCC at its word. They can challenge the center's decision to release a resident, and that's exactly what Stern intends to do. A jury trial to determine Gaff's future is set for this month. "Convicted of multiple felonies... one of which involved rape after the entry into someone's home," Stern recounts Gaff's transgressions, slowly and deliberately. "The rape of a 14- to 16-year-old girl involved 27 penetrations... the use of objects.... It's a pretty horrific crime."
Gaff is not looking forward to a trial. He wonders what the jury will pay more attention to: a psychiatrist's dry opinion of his psychological condition or the emotional description of a terrible crime he committed 16 years ago. "Every time he says 'sexually violent predator,' they're not going to see me, they're going to see a monster," Gaff says. "To me, it's more true that you can say I'm a grandfather than a sexually violent predator."
And what would Gaff's psychiatrists really be able to say in his defense? That recidivism rates are lower for those who have been treated? That he's managing his problem? There's no iron-clad guarantee that any offender will walk the straight and narrow after release--and prosecutors like Stern know that. Gaff's attorneys and doctors will have their work cut out for them, given public perceptions of sex offenders and the lousy reputation of the SCC's treatment program.
Of course, if the Supreme Court rules the SCC unconstitutional, Gaff will be released anyway. Useful treatment or not.
