Twenty states authorize civil commitment of sex offenders who have completed their criminal sentences but are deemed too dangerous for release. Minnesota, which deploys that option against a larger share of its population than any other state, spends $100 million a year to detain about 750 individuals who are deemed "likely" to commit sex offenses. Although those detainees are notionally eligible for release when they no longer pose a threat, that rarely happens: As of last September, just 21 of 946 people committed to the Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP) had been fully discharged, while 94—more than four times as many—had died in custody.
In effect, the MSOP, which is overseen by the Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS), imposes life sentences on its "clients," not as punishment for crimes they have committed but in anticipation of crimes they might commit in the future. That system, researchers at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul argue in a new report, is not only unjust but also highly inefficient, squandering public resources on a preventive detention scheme that delivers little, if any, public safety benefit. The program is so riddled with conceptual and practical problems, they conclude, that it should be abolished.
