"A Record of Failure at Center for Sex Offenders" (3/5/07 p. A1)

If you’re like me, I always wonder what prison is like for pedophiles and rapists. Are they tortured for their hideous crimes? How do they sleep at night? Do they sleep at night? Well, in Florida’s reality, these convicted criminals are living the high life, bikini posters an all.

According to the article that front paged the New York Times, “A Record of Failure at Center for Sex Offenders,” is enough to catch anyone’s eye. Failure and sex offenders in the same sentence aren’t a good mixture.

The ethics in this article pop up all over the place. For one, employees ignoring poor and inexcusable behavior are nothing short of unethical. To top that off, the employee turnover rate is very high at the center mostly because female staff members were having sex with the offenders. That known fact alone is ground enough that something drastic needs to be done.

When it comes to what is ethical and what isn’t in regards to this particular issue, it needs to be taken into consideration that whomever these sex offenders actually hurt is still damaged from the incidents. They suffer and don’t get off as easy as the criminals do. If treatment for these kinds of people were taken more seriously, they’d find themselves time behind bars, where they belong.

It is also unethical that the prisoners are the ones that were reported to having been the ones that run the facility. Doug Sweeny, a mental health counselor stated that these facilities were “A cesspool of despair and depression and drug abuse – of people being lost.” Drug abuse? In prison? Must be nice to get away with such things, even in prison.

The Times reported that the Liberty Health Care Corporation was founded in 1986 as a provider of mental health, developmental disability and primary care services. In its earliest days, it had no experience treating sex offenders and its officials said there was never a particular moment when company officials said to one another, “Let’s go into the sex offender business.” This is obviously noticed by the fact of their lack of security and persistence in enforcing necessary rules.

The ethical issues at state follow a nice string of embarrassing failures, which include an escape, a death caused by a fight over a bag of chips. And a sit-in. On top of that, only one of the hundreds of men here progress far enough in therapy to earn a recommendation from company clinicians the he be release. Again, how are these facilities still in operation? The blame is put on Florida as insufficiently financing its commitment program, according to Liberty. There is an ethical dilemma. Blaming poor operations on the state. Hmmm?

The incident that most caught my eye that raised worrisome questions and the first hints of conflicted over the center was the escape. According to The Times, too few Liberty staff members were in the yard when the escape occurred, a report by state officials found. The Center’s director had ordered the razor wire removed from a security fence because he said the wire was damaging volleyballs from a nearby court the residents used. Because the wire was inexistence, the prisoner easily got away. Escapes from prison are rare, and when they do occur, consequences are terrible. I bet they were nearly as terrible behind Liberty’s walls.

Other questions of ethics that surfaced throughout the article were questions of whether this place was a prison or a mental health care center. Or, is it facilities were people are clients? The center is so deranged that these questions remain quite murky.

It is a scary thought to think that if you encounter an individuals convicted of a sex related crime that came out of this Liberty Florida center, chance are they would like nothing more than to go back to the place that did nothing but make them a more dangerous person. And where they can freely play volleyball.

Article by: ABBY GOODNOUGH and MONICA DAVEY