A group of sex offenders at a northern Minnesota treatment center is refusing to attend therapy sessions, while others are wearing black clothing as a show of solidarity, amid growing unrest after three men housed there died and scores more were sickened by the novel coronavirus.
The acts of defiance were organized to call attention to what offenders see as poor infection-control practices and the historically low rate of release from the state’s prisonlike treatment centers in Moose Lake and St. Peter. Most of the nearly 740 offenders held at the centers have completed prison sentences for sexual offenses but remain locked up for years or even decades under Minnesota’s civil commitment law.
Tensions have been rising for months over the program’s response to a large outbreak of COVID-19 within the state-operated treatment program, including complaints that many staff members and clients weren’t wearing masks in common areas or remaining apart.
Since the start of the pandemic, 101 staff members and 88 clients at the Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP) have had confirmed COVID-19 infections. At least three clients have died at the Moose Lake center since early December, and periodic lockdowns have been imposed to prevent the virus’ spread in the sprawling complex.
“You would think that a mental health treatment facility would be exceptionally aware of the additional stresses and burdens put on those clients confined 23 ¾ hours a day, especially those who received the additional stress of a positive [COVID-19] test result,” Feeney wrote in his personal journal that he shared.
–Chris Serres • 612-673-4308 Twitter: @chrisserres
Alcoholism is also a mental illness.
Are they going to be able to start putting alcoholics in prison indefinitely? They kill hundreds of times more people each year than those on the registry. If not , why not? Why are there different sets of rules for different people?
Alcoholics actually do have a very high recidivism rate unlike those on the registry.
Why must former SOs who have completed their prison sentences be tasked and persecuted the same as those undergoing a civil commitment regime? These “treatment” groups are nothing more than a way for a captive clientele to be squeezed of every last dime they have; some are forced to drive to a two-hours roundtrip location only to be treated like pieces of @&%#$. SCOTUS has already decreed in “Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Dept of Health” that mentally competent people have a constitutional liberty interest to refuse unwanted medical treatment of any kind. Experts like Dr. Melissa Hamilton (who has more degrees than a thermometer on this subject) has already written a number of definitive documents disproving a conflation of sex offenses with mental illness, which is the only reason “treatment” has been thought to be necessary.
Interesting they call them “clients.” Like they chose to be there instead of inmates who have no choice to be there.
More than 22,000 inmates in the Michigan prison system have tested positive, with at least 130 deaths from COVID-19. It’s a horrifying situation when you can’t protect yourself from a killer pandemic no matter what precautions you take. Even worse in Minnesota where you have people being held long after they served their sentences.