By Mike Ward and Anita Hassan
Houston Chronicle
AUSTIN — Faced with a worsening housing shortage and no prospect of a quick solution, officials quietly have started putting together “home plans” for most of the state’s 185 sex offenders deemed too dangerous to live unsupervised in society.
So critical is the housing problem, officials said, that a two-time child molester freed from prison on Friday had to be temporarily placed in an already-full Houston halfway house after nearly 100 nursing homes refused to take the man, who is confined to a wheelchair and is developmentally disabled. State officials said he would not return home because several of his immediate family members also are sex offenders.
“We have no places to put the ones that are coming out of prison, and we have no place for the 185 who are in halfway houses and have to be out in August,” said Marsha McLane, executive director of the Office of Violent Sex Offender Management that oversees Texas’ civil-commitment program for repeat sex predators. “I would say we have a crisis on our hands.”
Should the agency eventually implement the “home plans,” the men would be sent back to live in their communities under supervision, required to wear ankle monitors to track their movements 24 hours a day. Caseworkers would check in on them each day.
Such a move is sure to stir controversy in the Texas Legislature already concerned about the growing cost and operational disarray of the state’s 15-year-old civil commitment program that keeps those sex offenders deemed most likely to reoffend under continued supervision, mostly in jails and halfway houses, after they finish their prison sentences. A year-long series of Houston Chronicle stories has detailed mismanagement, contracting irregularities and serious legal questions about the way the program is operated - findings confirmed by state audits and a legislative inquiry.
Top state officials are working to resolve those issues with a bill that would make sweeping changes to the troubled program, but the measure will not address the housing crisis. The halfway houses that now hold most of the offenders in the outpatient program have demanded they be removed by Aug. 31, and state officials have been unable to locate a place for them or the nearly two dozen who are coming out of prison between now and August.
Program derailed
The crisis has only worsened in recent days:
After one offender walked away from a Fort Worth halfway house, the Oklahoma company that operates the facility ordered seven other sex offenders in the civil commitment program to quit their jobs, without clearing that order with the state. That has derailed the treatment program there, officials said, and left the state with seven idle and unhappy men who now could be in violation of their court-ordered civil commitments.
In Austin, the agency has been forced to hire a security guard outside a boarding house where 15 offenders live because a nearby charter school has expanded too close and put the men in violation of court orders to stay at least 1,000 feet away from any school. The school wants the men moved, but officials have nowhere to put them.
An east Houston halfway house has seen an increase in fights and unruliness among the 75 sex offenders it houses, officials say, because the civil commitment program is perceived to be in limbo until lawmakers pass the bill to overhaul the troubled program.
“What is happening is very destructive to a program like this,” said Ezio Leite, a Fort Worth sex-treatment specialist whose clients include the seven men forced to quit their jobs. “Halfway houses are not a good place for these men. They are too much like a prison environment when it is not supposed to be prison.”
Top state officials who have been searching since last summer for housing for the offenders say they have looked at more than 300 sites statewide, from empty youth prisons to vacant probation centers to nursing homes to empty jails without success. In most cases, local leaders have protested the location of the sex predators in their communities even if they are closely supervised.
“We’re not in a good place,” said Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire, a Houston Democrat pushing to get the reforms approved by lawmakers despite growing questions over the costs and details of the proposed changes. “This isn’t a case where we can’t do nothing, because if we don’t fix the problems the courts are going to tell us our current program is unconstitutional - and then we’ll have an even bigger crisis.”
Similar woes elsewhere
Texas is one of several states with a civil commitment program in limbo. Minnesota lawmakers are scurrying to make reforms to that state’s civil commitment program under the threat of a court ruling that legal experts say could place it under federal control or shutter it altogether.
Last fall, the Missouri Attorney General’s Office halted civil commitment trials in the Show Me State for six months while it prepared to fight a class-action federal lawsuit claiming the program is unconstitutional. That trial is set for later this year.
“Everyone wants to rush to incapacitate people they feel are dangerous, but nobody wants to pay to the price to run a constitutionally adequate program,” said Nicholas Hughes, a Houston lawyer who has represented several men in the program.
Created by the Legislature in 1999, Texas’ civil commitment program was designed to provide outpatient treatment for violent repeat sex offenders who have completed their prison sentences but are deemed to have a behavioral abnormality that leaves them a continuing threat to the community.
Records show, however, that none of the more than 350 men ordered into Texas’ program by a court have completed the treatment program and been released in its 15-year history. Nearly half of those have been sent back to prison - some for life - for violating rules, including some as simple as being late for group therapy or failing to recharge ankle monitors properly.
Texas is the only state with a civil commitment program that imposes such criminal penalties, a difference legal experts say could lead to it being declared unconstitutional by a court.
Last May, McLane was appointed director of the Office of Violent Sex Offender Management after her predecessor was forced out because of a growing controversy over the agency’s decision to move more than two dozen offenders into the Acres Homes neighborhood in Houston and to contract to build a facility for up to 100 more outside Dayton, all without consulting neighbors or local officials.
When she started, McLane found almost no records or computers in the agency’s Austin headquarters and a staff that worked mainly from home. Legislative leaders ordered investigations. A state audit found contracting irregularities, questionable management practices and lax supervision of operations.
Under the reform bill, the program would be changed so offenders could advance from confinement to possibly live in the community again under supervision, if they successfully completed several stages of rigorous treatment programs. A Conroe court that now has sole jurisdiction over all civil-commitment cases would be stripped of that authority, and the courts that originally sentenced offenders to prison would determine whether they should be committed. The agency would have greater latitude to tailor the offenders’ treatment and to sanction them if they misbehave.
$13 million cost
The bill was approved by the Senate last week but now faces a less-than-certain future in the House, partly because of its estimated $13 million cost, roughly twice the current budget, and partly because the legislative session is just over a month from ending, a time when bills are prone to be derailed by procedural logjams.
Even if the reforms are approved, the housing crisis will remain.
Officials said the only site that remains under discussion, even with fierce opposition from local officials, is a vacant, 300-bed youth lockup in Beaumont that the state gave to Jefferson County several years ago. State officials are interested in the site because it could be put back into operation without much cost, in just a matter of months.