Senate OKs sex crime overhaul
Troubled program will have new judges, regimen
AUSTIN — A bill to overhaul Texas’ controversial civil-commitment program for repeat sex offenders won new life with a favorable vote by the state Senate Thursday, after weeks of delay over the growing cost to fix the troubled program.
The bill, filed after a series of Houston Chronicle revelations about legal issues and mismanagement, would strip a Montgomery County District court, whose judge has been accused of bias in handling the cases, from having sole authority over the state’s civil commitment program. Instead, the cases would go back to the courts that sentenced them to prison for the sex crimes that landed them in the program.
The bill also would establish a five-level treatment regimen that would start with a period of confinement and then allow convicted sex offenders who complete successive levels eventually to live in the community under supervision via 24-hour ankle monitoring.
“This bill is designed to address a growing crisis in the state’s civil-commitment program, a program that was beyond broken,” said state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, the spon-
sor of Senate Bill 746. “These are changes we must make. We have no choice.”
Even is the measure makes it through the House, where it faces an uncertain future, the bill would do nothing to address a more immediate problem: where to house the 185 men currently in the program, as well as another two dozen or so who are set to be released into the program from prison this year.
Halfway houses in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and El Paso that hold most of the 185 men in the program have told the Office of Violent Sex Offender Management, the state agency that oversees the civil commitment program, that all of the offenders must be out of their facilities by August.
“We’re going to solve one problem, and then we’ll solve the next one, to get this program back on track,” Whitmire said Thursday after the Senate vote. “In all my years, I’ve never seen a program that was in this much trouble.”
No men have been released
Created by the Texas Legislature in 1999, the civil commitment program allows the state to keep violent sex offenders deemed to have a “behavioral abnormality” that make them a continuing threat to society under supervision following their release from prison in what is supposed to be an outpatient treatment program. A year-long series of stories by the Houston Chronicle revealed than none of the more than 350 men ordered into the program by a court have completed treatment and been released in its 15-year history. Nearly half of those have been sent back to prison — some for life — for violating program rules.
While civil commitment programs for sex offenders have been upheld by the courts, legal experts and critics say Texas’ questionable treatment and frequent use of prison time to punish rule-breakers could violate constitutional standards. Texas is the only state with a civil commitment program that imposes such criminal sanctions.
Even though the state officially lists it as an outpatient program, all but a few offenders are required to live in halfway houses and jails.
Whitmire’s bill would change that. The bill also would allow the Office of Violent Sex Offender Management to decide the levels to which offenders are assigned, rather than having a judge do so.
Whitmire said there are many signs that the state’s current program could not withstand scrutiny by the courts. Several of the men in the program have pending federal lawsuits. If reforms are not made quickly, Whitmire said, the state could face a federal court ruling declaring the program unconstitutional,
forcing the release of the sex offenders.
“That’s something we absolutely don’t want to do,” he said.
In the House, the bill faces opposition over its now-estimated $13 million cost, more than double the program’s current budget.
No place to house offenders
Even if the reform bill passes the House, the program’s troubles would be far from over.
Whitmire and Marsha McLane, executive director of the Office of Violent Sex Offender Management, said the state must find housing by the end of August for the men currently in the program. It also has no place to house the nearly two dozen men scheduled to come out of prison into the program in the coming months, including one wheelchair-bound child-sex offender scheduled for release by next Friday.
McLane and other state officials have been working without success for months to find a new site. Several weeks ago, a vacant former state youth lockup in
Beaumont appeared a likely solution to the problem, but Jefferson County officials loudly have opposed the move.
Fifteen men in the program who now are at a boarding house in east Austin also must be relocated because a charter school is expending nearby, putting the sex offenders within the surrounding child-safety zone they are prohibited from entering.
Thurday’s Senate vote was 282, with Sens. Bob Hall, R-Edgewood, and Jose Menendez, D-San Antonio, voting no. Menendez said he voted against the bill because he does not want the violent sex offenders coming back to Bexar County, even for a hearing.
“Considering who these offenders are and what they’ve done, I don’t want to run the risk having them come back at all,” he said. “It’s better to err on the side of caution.”