Costs of new sex crime laws add up

"MN Budget"

02/13/2006

Push for tough penalties adds millions to Minnesota budget

BY RACHEL E. STASSEN-BERGER
Pioneer Press

One of the few things the governor, the attorney general and both houses of the Legislature have been able to agree on is that Minnesota needs to get tougher on sex offenders.

In recent years, public outcry over sex offenders generally and the kidnapping and killing of university student Dru Sjodin, allegedly by a convicted sex offender, have prompted lawmakers to strengthen penalties against sexual predators. But longer prison sentences, treatment programs and other measures carry a hefty price tag.

Minnesota now spends almost $117 million a year to house, treat and monitor those convicted of sex crimes, and that figure is likely to surge by $50 million by 2010, according to a Pioneer Press analysis of sex-offender-related costs. The costs have already jumped at least 10 percent in the past five years.

Those numbers don’t include the money cities, counties, courts and others spend to catch, try and track sex offenders. Nor do they include the millions of dollars in new or upgraded facilities for sex offenders that have been proposed this election year.

Lawmakers, the governor and others say that public safety is one of government’s top priorities and that they will find the money to do the right thing. Public opinion polls suggest it is a sentiment most Minnesotans share.

“This is not a ‘How much public safety we can afford?’ type of question,” said Eric Lipman, Minnesota sex-offender-policy coordinator.

While Minnesota’s crackdown on sex offenders may be more expensive in some ways than similar efforts in other states, cost is seldom a focus of those discussions.

“Money doesn’t play in to this debate as much as it does in many others because it is so emotionally charged,” said Blake Harrison, criminal justice analyst for the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures.

“It is hard to do a cost-benefit analysis for the benefit you get for the criminal justice services that are provided,” he said. “What is the value of preventing one sex offense?”

Still, the numbers are revealing and demonstrate the attention drawn by concerns about sex offenders and what to do with them, even as lawmakers have reduced or limited spending in other areas to balance the state’s budget.

Each Minnesota taxpayer now spends about $34 a year to house, treat and keep track of sex offenders— the price of several movie tickets.

How much it costs to lock up or treat a sex offender depends largely on where they are placed.

The most expensive are patients who have been committed to secure state hospitals, generally after serving prison sentences, because a judge determined they are too dangerous and mentally ill to be out on the streets. There are currently 299 sexually dangerous or psychopathic patients in Minnesota, each costing $281 a day.

That population is expected to reach 800 by the end of the decade. That’s mostly the result of changes in policies and politics after Alfonso Rodriguez was arrested and charged with kidnapping and murdering Sjodin, a University of North Dakota student from Pequot Lakes, Minn. After his arrest, many state officials said Rodriguez, of Crookston, Minn., should have been civilly committed after serving his sentence.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty has proposed borrowing $50 million, which eventually will have to be paid back by taxpayers, to build an additional hospital for those sex offenders and to design a second new facility.

Another 2,436 sex offenders were serving time in state prisons as of last summer, records show. Each of those inmates — about 28 percent of the entire prison population — costs the state $79 a day.

Those numbers, too, are expected to rise, albeit at a much slower pace than that of hospitalized sex offenders. Last year, lawmakers passed a tougher sex-offender sentencing scheme that could put an additional 240 prisoners behind bars within 20 years.

That works out to almost $29,000 a year — about $5,000 more than the national average for such offenders, according to the Maryland-based Center for Sex Offender Management. One reason for the higher cost could be that Minnesota tends to offer more treatment and training for all offenders than corrections systems elsewhere.

The least expensive are the 5,000 sex offenders on supervised release or probation. The most intensive option, in which offenders are checked frequently, costs $21 a day. Probation is the least expensive at just $4 a day.

That’s also a population that might increase. Last week, Sen. Jane Ranum, DFL-Minneapolis, and Rep. Debra Hilstrom, DFL-Brooklyn Center, proposed a measure that would allow corrections officials to monitor the growing population of criminals who violate their parole by possessing or distributing child pornography after leaving prison.

That could cost more than $1 million a year.

Last month, Rep. Jeff Johnson, R-Plymouth, pushed a proposal to monitor several hundred sex offenders by satellite for years after their release. That program could potentially add another $3.8 million a year to the state’s sex offender costs.

Johnson, a fiscal conservative who is running for attorney general, said when he unveiled his proposal that the state “will find the money somehow” to pay for the program. Although lawmakers always have to consider costs, he said, they shouldn’t be the primary factor when it comes to public safety.

Ranum said she would like to see more resources devoted to victim services and prevention.

Steve Sawyer questions whether state money is spent as wisely as it could be and suggests investments need to be added in other areas. He is the executive director of St. Paul’s Project Pathfinder, a nonprofit organization that offers sex-offender treatment.

“What are we doing in prevention and how much are we investing in primary prevention?” he asked. “The challenge is we still need research … about what’s the pathway from childhood to adolescence to adult sexual offense.”
Legislation that punishes offenders, he said, is only a short-term solution. Research, prevention and treatment, he says, will help mitigate the problems sex offenders pose and save money in the longer term.

Still, he and others praise Minnesota for having as many treatment opportunities available for sex offenders as it does.

“There is some willingness to fight the quick reaction, which is ‘lock them up forever,’ “ he said. “Minnesota is a leader in many, many areas in the amount of treatment that is available, in the use of probation. There are many resources here that aren’t in all states. In many ways, we have a forward-looking system.”