T.H.E. | Sex Offender Containment & Research Facility

Sex Offender Containment & Research Facility

Sex Offender Containment and Research (SOCR) Facility: THE BASICS

What SOCR is intended to be:

The Sex Offender Containment and Research (SOCR) facility refers to a community-based residential campus setting designed to provide a safe (for the community) place for sex offenders to live and from which they can go to and from work. This will be far safer than the current situation in which thousands of sex offenders are living throughout the community. It is impossible to control them this way. It is expected that the sex offenders in SOCR will be able to live their entire lives in this facility unless they are not cooperative in which case they will be returned to prison. The possibility will exist for some offenders to move out of SOCR if they truly change. That is not expected to happen often because repetitive sex offenders have personality disorders that are unlikely to significantly and reliably change.

As the first, “for-life,” community based facility dedicated to managing sex offenders, SOCR will play a significant role in community safety as well as researching this huge problem in our society.

What SOCR is currently:

At this time SOCR is part of a community effort to get sex offenders managed safely. This effort involves a large community education project informing the citizens about the nature of sex offenders and what it will take to manage them safely. The effort also focuses on creating the resources necessary to do the management job.

SOCR currently exists as a concept/plan for a most needed resource – a place to house and closely monitor our sex offenders who are in the community. This project is being promoted by T.H.E., the Sex Offender Containment and Research Project (S.O.C.R. Project), and business and community groups who are joining together to make our communities safe from sexual predators.

Who owns/controls SOCR:

SOCR will be owned and controlled by a, to-be-formed, community group that has no other agenda than community safety regarding sex offender management. This community group will create a partnership with government in the management of sex offenders.

Note: In order to help people better understand the issue of safely managing sex offenders, we have come up with a “Safe Community Equation.”

Where SOCR fits in the Safe Community Equation:

The SOCR facility is only part of the effort needed to have a way to safely deal with the sex offenders in our community. There will need to be Criminal Justice System changes, legislative changes, appropriate funding and a large community education effort.

What is the Safe Community Equation:

The Safe Community Equation

Citizen Leadership + Business Support + Relevant Professionals
=Safe Community

These are the three necessary parts of the equation required to produce community safety:

Citizen Leadership – Similar to the public safety problem taken on by Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, achieving the safe management of sex offenders in our community will have to be driven by citizens who want it and will take responsibility for creating the necessary changes and resources.

Business Support – While business is not directly responsible for creating public safety, business is the beneficiary of a safe environment. The citizenry who are going to drive the changes must have the backing of business to create the needed changes. Citizens cannot do it without support.

Relevant Professionals – The leading professionals (criminal justice, mental health, politicians, etc.) have to serve the citizenry by providing (the citizens) their expertise to achieve the safe management of sex offenders.

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What follows is an outline, from problem statement to solution, of the Safe Community Equation.

The Problem: What can we do with the convicted sex offenders who are loose in our community and re-offending?

Communities like the Denver metropolitan area have a great need to have a place to house (contain, control & imprison) its dangerous people. Denver has yet to succeed with building a much overdue jail, and that does not even get to the sex offender management problem. Sex offenders cannot be expected to reliably, permanently, and safely manage themselves, ever.

There are several inhibiting factors making it difficult to build enough and up-to-date facility spaces:

1. Creating such settings is an expensive project costing a great deal of tax dollars. It expensive to build and operate.

2. Citizens do not want a closed facility in their community, even if it could be shown that such a facility reduces crime in the immediate neighborhood and is a source of employment, i.e., Not in My Back Yard, NIMBYism

3. Siting such a facility is political hemlock for politicians involved in site selection. No politician wants to be seen as putting such a facility in the community of his/her constituencies.

But there is a way to get these difficult, ugly human management needs accomplished.

The Solution: its benefits

1. We can reduce the cost.

2. Citizens will support the model.

3. The press will support this approach.

4. We can create a new site selection process that result in a site getting selected without costing the involved politicians their careers. Instead, involved politicians will be seen as working effectively with their constituencies.

5. The model that is being developed takes from existing approaches and combines them in a way that provides solutions that are needed throughout the country and can be replicated. It represents the best use of learning from experience.

6. The model is a fresh use of a wide range of community, business, legislative and criminal justice groups and leaders.

The Solution: its key elements

1. Citizen Driven. Since historically the primary resistance to such a facility is the sited neighborhoods getting up in arms and resisting – usually very effectively – the whole process of building the volume for the demand for such a facility will come from the community, not the professionals and the legislators. This will be the citizens’ facility to house its dangerous members.

A citizen driven process will reduce the political partisanship, which will benefit both the project and the politicians.

2. Solve Several Problems At Once. Lets solve more than one of the difficult, “where to put these dangerous people,” problems in one effort. It consumes too much human and financial capital to tackle them separately.

Build a county jail and sex offender containment and research facility (SOCR) on one campus.

A combined effort will get much more citizen involvement and attention.

3. Site Selection By The Citizens. The site selection will be run by the citizen and will use a blind selection method. The selection will be preceded by several stages of community voting. The community will have input on the process for site selection and how the facility will be run. While the jail part of the campus has more clearly defined ways for management, the SOCR facility will require special citizen involvement and community education. There will be clearly defined stages of development with citizen participation and leadership all along the way.

Stated succinctly: the site selection will be blind and run by a citizen group, not politicians.

4. Community Safety is a “Business” Issue. To date, all sex offender management has been driven by a business model that does not work. It does not match the problem. Sex offenders are effectively, not curable, yet they are managed with the expectation of being mainstreamed back into society. This relies on the offender to choose to use the tools he learned in treatment to keep from doing that which he loves to do (sexually assault).

We have to shift from this bad business model, which does not produce community safety to an effective and reliable business model where the capital we invest will produce community safety. Since managing sex offenders is never going to be a profit center for society the only measure of success is whether or not we achieve community safety, at least with the sex offenders we catch and on which we spend our money.

Investing in the Safe Community Equation is investing in making our government effective. Also, this project offers long-term value for the community and those who participate in making the community safe.

Members of the business community have the greatest “signaling” capacity to advise the government that the Safe Community Equation makes sense and should be implemented.

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