Treatment Programs For Inmates Raise Deep Questions

Treatment Programs For Inmates Raise Deep Questions

Constitutionally legality of correction facility's treatment programs for sexual offenders and violent offenders in Vermont.

An article about treatment programs in Vermont dealing with sexual and violent offenders. Programs in Vermont deal with the rehabilitation of inmates with questionable methods that some argue are not constitutional. Mello, Pithers, and Bush, three authorities on the subject provide counter arguments and a description of the programs purpose and execution.

Serrell, Nancy

Valley News

HIST 298, University of Mary Washington

1993-10-26

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Vermont

Vermont prides itself on its progressive approach to incarceration, especially in its treatment programs for offenders. But a recent visit to the state by the American Civil Liberties Union's National Prison Project is bringing those programs under closer scrutiny, and raising questions that cross and recross the lines between philosophy, physiology, and law. Do these programs mean to punish people or change them? Do they work> Are they Legal?
Last month, the ACLU sent Gov. Howard Dean a long letter criticizing conditions in Vermont's prison system. In the letter the ACLU claims that the states treatment programs for violent offenders and sexual offenders are "of an extraordinarily intrusive and dubious nature," that they are coercive, and that they force prisoners to waive their rights to confidentiality.

Drawing on reports from inmates and their lawyers, the ACLU also criticism the way programs are staffed, claiming that the programs "vest untrammeled power to practice 'psychotherapy' in the hand of unqualified guards, ex guards, caseworkers and contractors, whose attitude towards prisoners is usually hostile and adversarial at best, and not infrequently vindictive and sadistic."

The ACLU refuses to comment on the letter, which has been obtained by the Valley News, or on its past prison activities elsewhere in the country. Nor would Department of Corrections Commissioner John Gorczyk talk about the ACLU's criticisms of the state's treatment programs other than to say they are "more philosophical than legal in nature."
The Comment is telling. Mental health professionals, lawyers and corrections officials interviewed for this story had difficulty restricting their comments and observations exclusively to their own disciplines.

"It's a problem you encounter whenever you introduce medicine, or mental health, into law," says Michael Mello, a Vermont Law School professor who specializes in criminal and constitutional law. "The agendas are so different it introduces a warping effect."

The agenda of psychiatry is to make people well, he says. The agenda of criminal justice "is ot making people well but making them act right, behave a certain way, and also to punish them even if they're well and are acting right now. The punitive dimension is the most dramatic difference."

Punishment is the issue that falls under Constitutional protection.

The Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provides protection against cruel and unusual punishment. Since the early 1970s, the legal test of that provision has been "whether a punishment violates the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society," Mello says. "It;s a good, evocative term, supplied most often in capital punishment cases. And, as it implies, the standard of what's constitutional changes as the cultural norms change."

Vermont's program for violent offenders is mandatory for all inmates convicted of violent crimes, as well as those who are determined to have a history of violence. Inmates serving time for sexual offenses are told that parole and probation may hinge on their successfully completing a program for sexual aggressors.

Is that coercion? "Probably no more coercive than plea bargaining," Mello says.

But similar policy on sex offenders, passed by the Kentucky legislature in 1986, is being challenged in the state's circuit court, according to Barbara Jones, general counsel for the Kentucky Department of Corrections.

The Legal issue, says Jones, is that in order to participate in the program, a sex offender must admit his guilt. "Some don't believe they have a problem," she says. "Others, who are challenging their conviction on appeal, have been advised by their attorneys not to admit." And there's the rub: Admitting guilt could be self-incriminating, and might mean a conviction for a second crime.

So far, the state court has ruled that the program and the requirement to admit are constitutional, Jones says. "But out case, or someone else's, could wind up in the (U.S.) Supreme Court."

In the past the Supreme Court has upheld the prosecution of criminals for crimes they admitted to under treatment, Mello says. "But I wouldn't want to make book on the way these questions would be resolved by the Supreme Court and presently constituted." Nor would he wager on the outcome under Vermont's Supreme Court. "That court has always gone beyond the minimum standards to protect the rights of suspects."

Vermont's sex offender program also requires that offenders admit guilt, says William Pithers, a clinical psychologist and director of the Vermont Treatment Program for sexual Aggressors. In the 11-year history of the program, Pithers can remember only one istance in which an inmate's admission led to a second conviction. "His sentence ran concurrently, so he would up not doing any more time than his original sentence," he says.

Under state law, teachers, doctors and counselors in Vermont are required to report the sexual abuse of minors to authorities. Counselors in Vermont's treatment program are bound by this mandate as well. Minors are given this protection because the state assumes they may not have access to treatment otherwise, Pithers says. Counselors are not required to report crimes involving adults.
Sex offenders who agree to treatment are required to sign a waiver of confidentiality, according to a published description of the program. The programs are constructed and supervised by mental health professionals.

Although the treatment team makes recommendations to the parole board, the board is under no obligation to follow the recommendation. "The parole board is an independent agency and has, in the past month, paroled four people against the recommendation of the treatment program," Pithers says. "That's the way it should be - a system of checks and balances."

Pithers emphasiszes that the program itself is not coercive. Offenders are taught that committing a crime is a personal choice - actually, one in a long series of choices that has resulted in their arrest and conviction.

Counter to popular myth - and to old, disproven theories - sexual aggressors are not mentally ill, they are not swept away by irresistible impulses, and they are not oversexed, Pithers says. Nor are sexual aggressors suffering from a simple lack of self esteem.

The philosophy behind the program: what sexual aggressors need is to become conscious of the choices the make that lead to acts, and to recognize the consequences of their behavior on other people.

The focus of treatment is teaching others to empathize with their victims, and to identify the patterns of thoughts, feelings and beliefs that lead them into abusive behavior. Depending on the individual, offenders are taught to acknowledge their emotions and their "thinking errors," to manage their anger, to alter abusive sexual fantasies and urges. The goal: to give offenders the skills they need to catch themselves slipping into old patters and correct the behavior and ultimately to prevent relapses.

A Corrections Department study using cumulative figures from 1982 to 1991 shows the treatment to be most successful for child sex offenders, somewhat less so for rapists. Since the beginning of the program, about 30 of the 473 offenders treated have been brought back to prison for repeating their crimes.

"No form of treatment wil eliminate all recidivism by sexual aggressors. No form of treatment can remove a person's ability to exercise free choice," Pithers says.

The philosophy behind the treatment program: Sexual aggressors need to become conscious of the choices they make that lead to criminal acts, and to recognize the consequences of their behavior on other people.

But when does treatment become punishment?

A technique that raises red flags to civil libertarians is the use of an instrument called a penile plethysmograph. The device, when attached to the penis of a male offender while he views slides or listens to tapes of people in various sex acts result in arousal. Proponents of the device say it is necessary to break through the denial that keeps many offenders from seeking treatment for their deviance. "Some men don't get aroused until they hear that blood is spurting from the face of the women they have just punched," Pithers says. "They can deny it, but a counselor in the next room can see the evidence clearly." In some cases, recognizing a deviant pattern of arousal is a necessary step toward treatment.

Pithers says that Vermont uses the plethysmograph primarily in a mandatory assessment of offenders before treatment begins. Offenders are alone when they use the device, which is attached to a measuring instrument in an adjoining room.
"Even I wish those things weren't necessary. It would be wonderful to be able to treat individuals who are turned on to fantasies about assaulting people by making them feel better about themselves, but the reality is we can't.

Violent Offenders Program

Unlike Vermont's sex offender program, the State's treatment program for violent offenders is mandatory and is not supervised and carried out by mental health professionals.
"We don't assume people are sick. We assume they're lawbreakers," says Jack Bush, a consultant who designed Vermont's program.

Bush, who has a Ph.D. in philosophy, says that the program doe not rely on confidential disclosures or an intimate alliance with a therapist. "The program is very pragmatic and methodical," he says.

Though treatment is mandatory, it's a soft shell, Bush says. Inmates are told "your history demonstrates you're a high risk offender. Our solution is to incarcerate you for the maximum sentence. Another is to teach you skills, give you the ability to control your own risk. You get to choose your course." If offenders successfully complete the program, they may be released earlier on parole.

The program, like the state's treatment for sexual aggressors, is built around the theory that violent behavior is a choice, based on patters of thought, feelings, and beliefs. Once a person is aware of that pattern, he can chose to change it. "This is not a therapy we impose on offenders or something we do to offenders. It's a technique we teach them, a rational hopeful process," he says.

Treatment takes place in groups, where offenders listen to each other vocalize the thoughts that run through their heads in situations that inspire them to violence. Offenders are taught to recognize false assumptions and to substitute non-violent problem-solving techniques. They keep journals - or Thinking Reports - of their efforts to recognize and change their own abusive patters.

Offenders are also taught that partial lapses do not mean total failure, that a chain of events that results in a crime can be stopped at several places.

The program was deliberately designed to use corrections officers, not mental health counselors, because it is meant to be integrated into day-to-day life inside the system, Bush says, not separated from it. Ideally, the program could be an impetus for system-wide change, a model of a new, collaborative relationship between corrections officers and inmates.

At a training workshop sponsored by the New England Council on Crime and Delinquency in Burlington earlier this month, Brian Bilodeau, a former guard and now a case work supervisor at the Northwest Stat Correctional Facility in St. Albans, offered himself as an example of someone who'd turned around from a punitive attitude toward inmates to a positive one. It was his participation, as a corrections officer, in the violent offender program that made him aware of the destructive role he was playing, he said. For more than an hour, he and a small group of consultants and corrections officers talked about the difficulties in translating a good idea and a hopeful vision into real change.

"We're not very good at implementing ourselves into a new vision," said Bush. "But there are glimpses of the light all over here."

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Vol. 42: Number 158

Stroh, Cooper

Williams, Megan