Taxpayer Financed Sex Campus:

A few years ago, states decided that people convicted of sex crimes might need rehab before they were reduced into society. Sounds like a good idea. Guy commits some sex crime and goes to jail for fifteen years, he's going to need some adjusting before we can trust him back in society, and those fifteen years in jail, all too often, do nothing to dissuade him from reverting to his bad behavior after he gets out. (So much for the learning curve where punishment is concerned.)

But here's the problem, it just ain't working. The New York Times has been running a series of articles, including one today, exposing what's all too often really going on behind these closed doors:

Inside a privately run treatment center here for pedophiles and rapists who have completed their prison sentences, where they are supposed to reflect on their crimes and learn to control their sexual urges, bikini posters were pinned to walls.

Two men took their shirts off, rubbed each other’s backs and held hands, while others disappeared together into dormitory rooms. Some of the sex offenders appeared to be drunk from homemade “buck” liquor secretly brewed and sold here.

And some of the center’s employees, who openly ignored the breaking of rules (“As long as they are happy, we let them go,” one explained), reported that a high turnover rate among staff members was mostly because of female employees leaving their jobs after having had sex with the offenders.

This is the description of one facility in Florida.

So what's actually happening here? Well, the cost to taxpayers, it turns out, per prisoner/ex-prisoner is three times higher in rehab than it costs to keep them in prison. So, a guy is convicted of a sex crime, spends a number of years in jail, and then goes to rehab for an—get this—an indefinite period of time (until he's rehabilitated and fit for society) and then let out. Ooops! As it turns out, very few of these men are let out. It's just way too profitable to keep them in rehab. Not for the taxpayer, of course, but for whoever is receiving the $100,000 or more per prisoner/patient received while the guy's in rehab.

To make things perfectly clear, nobody is being rehabilitated. Got that? The deal is that states set up a program that appeals on paper at least to both conservatives and liberals, but the only thing that transpires within these programs is the transfer of taxpayer funds. And in the meantime, our sex offenders enjoy their sex camps, on our dime.

Is this just too good to believe or what?


In Other Domestic News:

The price of gasoline is climbing again, and it isn't even summer. Up 32 cents a gallon around my neck of the woods. Look for Exxon Mobil to announce new record profits soon. Yes, the current administration has done an excellent job. Could it be payback of the Oscar Gore got? (Nothin' like a good conspiracy theory, and when it comes to oil companies, there's always a likelihood of some truth in them.)