Locked Up in Limbo

Prisons are an outsized business in California, and these days Californians have an outsized monument to their fear of something prisons cannot contain: sex crimes. At Coalinga State Hospital sex offenders who have served prison terms are serving more time, having been involuntarily committed as "sexually violent predators." Californians appear determined to fill the place and then some, as a referendum last November expanded the commitment law to make virtually every sex offender in the prison system eligible for lifetime detention. And so the numbers at Coalinga, now about 670, will never stop growing.

Coalinga is preventive detention in perfect form. The inmates are confined for what they think, or what they might do if released or, more precisely, what a psychologist guesses they might do. If that seems unconstitutional in a 1970s kind of way, the courts are largely unmoved. And if people are locked up for years before a court asks too many questions, it is because of what some lawyers call "the pedophile exception to the due-process clause."

Maybe it would be surprising if America, now accustomed to the terrorist exception to the Constitution, was not warm to a pedophile exception. But legal scholars and psychiatric experts have almost nothing good to say about using the mental health system to institutionalize offenders. The idea has proven an especially bad one in California, whose mental hospital system is under federal monitoring because of widespread civil rights violations. The costs of running Coalinga, already galloping, are compounded by the costs of processing thousands more offenders; under the new Jessica's Law, the number referred for evaluation has risen from fifty to about 750 each month.

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