Conn. Budget Problems Delay Sex-Offender Facility

 HARTFORD (AP) — The Legislature last year approved creating a $2 million residential treatment center for sex offenders on parole or probation, but it has not gone forward because of the state’s budget problems.

The lack of such a center is the main reason why, on Thursday, a rapist will be released from a Connecticut prison with nowhere to go. The Hartford Courant reports that 52-year-old Ransome Lee Moody is considered so dangerous and untreatable that sex offender programs in eight states have denied him admission.

Moody, a three-time convicted rapist, will instead be waiting in line on Christmas Eve for a bed at Immanuel Baptist Homeless Shelter in New Haven, where indigent offenders who have done their time often go for housing when there are no other options.

“It’s potentially dangerous for the public if the defendant doesn’t get the benefit of the right services,” said Moody’s public defender, James S. McKay. “Yes, it’s expensive. But there are also costs for not doing it.”

Judicial officials say Connecticut’s budget problems have prevented the creation of the treatment facility.

The Legislature approved the treatment center as part of a 2008 bill that also tightened the state’s criminal laws in the wake of the 2007 home invasion in Cheshire in which a woman and her two daughters were killed, allegedly by two men out on parole.

Part of the bill’s $10 million allocation would have paid to provide inpatient treatment to newly released sex offenders in a restricted facility or, if they were capable of looking for jobs and a new home, for transitional or permanent housing.

A contractor already has been picked for a plan to provide housing at Corrigan-Redgowski Correctional Center in Montville for 24 sex offenders on parole and probation, but it’s now on hold.

“I realize that tough decisions have to be made but if I was the governor, I would put a secure facility up and running for [Moody] and others like him who could potentially be a threat to public safety,” said State Representative Michael P. Lawlor, D-East Haven, an advocate of creating a treatment facility for sex offenders.

When it appeared that an inpatient sex offender treatment program was coming to Connecticut, a judge ordered Moody into such a facility as a condition of his probation. Now, there is not one to which he can be sent.

Probation officials plan to monitor him with a GPS device, and he will be required to report seven days a week to a program for training in life skills.