Gov. George Pataki has proposed turning a woodsy upstate prison into a pseudo-prison for certain convicted sex offenders who have already done their time. His impulse is understandable: rather than allow men who seem likely to repeat terrible crimes back onto the street, why not lock them up for psychiatric treatment until they get their impulses under control? The United States Supreme Court has declared the practice permissible for people deemed "mentally abnormal," and 16 other states have so-called civil-confinement laws.
But it isn't necessary to be a raging civil libertarian to be queasy about the Pataki plan, under which the state would spend $130 million to raze and replace Camp Pharsalia, 50 miles north of Binghamton, with a new treatment center run by the State Office of Mental Health.
There will never be an easy or wholly satisfying solution to the problem of violent sexual criminals. Sickened by highly publicized crimes against children and dubious about the odds of rehabilitation, Congress and the states have been adopting ever-tougher laws governing where and how sex offenders can live, work and travel.
But peace of mind has been elusive. An era that began with laws requiring freed sex offenders to register with local law-enforcement officials now features laws requiring notification of neighbors when offenders move in, the posting of offenders' names on the Web, electronic monitoring and restrictive "distance laws" meant to keep them away from places like schools and parks.
Preventive detention for violent sex offenders is the natural end point of the logic embraced by Mr. Pataki and his allies: that these are a special class of misfits whom existing laws are incapable of subduing, and that no price is too high for safety. But while no one disputes society's obligation to protect the innocent, it is fair to ask whether the state's limited resources might be better deployed at the front end of the problem. A bill sponsored in the Assembly by Speaker Sheldon Silver and Joseph Lentol, while allowing for the civil confinement of sexual predators, places a heavier emphasis on treatment behind bars. The current prison treatment system, underfunded and understaffed, typically offers six months of group therapy run by corrections officials. The Assembly bill would require at least two years of treatment by mental health professionals for everyone imprisoned for a felony sex offense, and provide for continued treatment after release.
But treatment is not the entire answer. Few would deny that the universe of sex criminals includes a small number of repeat offenders who do not respond to therapy, and that the criminal-justice system will eventually run out of ways to deal with them. The admittedly imperfect answer in that case would be to seek longer sentences for violent sex crimes to reduce the chances that dangerous predators will be released too soon, and to aggressively monitor offenders upon release with electronic bracelets and a strengthened parole system.
Psychiatric treatment in prisons, intensive outpatient therapy and close monitoring are, in the main, preferable to a questionable reliance on preventive detention. The remaking of Camp Pharsalia, in fact, seems more like an upstate jobs program. We should not forget that only last year lawmakers were urging Mr. Pataki to keep Camp Pharsalia open somehow, lest its neighbors lose 100 jobs and $11 million in economic activity.
We are all for upstate development, but the more urgent questions have to do with public safety and whether lavishing resources on a place for warehousing a small subset of sex offenders - rather than aggressively treating and keeping tabs on a far larger cohort of criminals - will really make all of us safer, or just make it seem that way.