
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, July 5, 1995                   TAG: 9507060095
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SNEERING AT REHABILITATION

LIBERALS, conservatives, therapists and corrections officials agree on this: Many sex offenders cannot be reformed or rehabilitated by present-day treatment programs in prisons. They are prime candidates for lifelong incarceration.

But concluding that such treatment programs are useless because they won't help all sex offenders is like saying that chemotherapy is useless because it doesn't help all cancer patients.

In abruptly pulling the funding for the state's first and only therapeutic treatment program for sex offenders, at Bland Correctional Center, did the administration of Gov. George Allen follow that mistaken logic? Was it unmindful of, or did it simply choose to ignore, research indicating that similar programs in other states are reducing recidivism rates among sex offenders?

Or is the administration so fettered by the lock-'em-up, throw-away-the-key approach to crime control that it doesn't give a hoot about results?

Take your pick. Whatever, the decision runs counter to Gov. George Allen's touted determination to reduce crime and protect the public.

Behind the governor's sneering verdict - that rapists and other sexual deviants can ``heal themselves'' - is this stark reality: They won't. Sex offenders are among the most resistant of all criminals to traditional ``corrections,'' the punishment of incarceration.

The recidivism rate for untreated sex offenders runs 70 percent or more. In Virginia, according to the State Crime Commission, 65 percent of incarcerated sex offenders are repeat offenders. The majority of sex offenders now doing time in Virginia - 2,265 at last count, out of a total adult inmate population of 23,412 - eventually will be released from prison and go back on the street.

The $220,000-a-year Bland program, with 72 inmates enrolled, was approved by the General Assembly following a Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission report in 1991 that blistered the state's corrections system for failing to provide any comprehensive treatment and rehabilitation programs for, among other types of inmates, the hundreds of sex offenders behind prison walls. The program - following models in states that have reduced recidivism to between 15 and 30 percent, depending on type of sex offense - was designed as a ``therapeutic community'': Participants were to receive intensive treatment for at least two years, separated from the general prison population.

The designers recognized that many inmates - hard-core pedophiles, for example - would not benefit from such a program. They also knew it would take about five years to measure the outcome.

To be sure, such programs are expensive. Success in reducing recidivism isn't guaranteed. Nobody knows for sure whether the Bland program would have proved its cost-effectiveness.

But what happens in the absence of rehabilitation efforts is known all too well. Most sex offenders commit their crimes again, at great cost to their victims, and are returned to prison, at great cost to the taxpayers. Ending the program before a single inmate had completed the two-year therapy, and before its effectiveness could be evaluated, was irresponsibly shortsighted.

by CNB