Contend they aren’t getting adequate treatment in secure facilities
By Rick Karlin Updated 10:17 am EDT, Monday, October 14, 2019
Marcy
Voting blocs, where people support candidates on specific issues, have long played an outsized role in New York politics – from labor unions that focus on workplace rules, to environmentalists who place clean air and water at the top of the list.
But now an unusual bloc is emerging from an unexpected place: the locked sex offenders unit at one of the state’s major psychiatric hospitals.
Convicted sex offenders at Central New York Psychiatric Center are joining a PAC, or political action committee, which could conceivably raise money for candidates they favor and serve as a vehicle to mobilize voters.
Rather than gathering cash, however, they are looking to form a voting bloc where they could back state – and even local candidates – based in Oneida County where the Central New York Psychiatric Center is located. The center houses 283 people who have been civilly confined after serving prison terms for crimes such as sexual assault.
Under the state’s 12-year-old Sex Offender Management and Treatment Act, convicted sex offenders can be kept in secure psychiatric hospitals indefinitely after their prison terms expire.
That happens if an offender is deemed to have a mental abnormality that makes the person likely to commit another sex crime. State officials can go to court and request the offender be indefinitely committed to a hospital.
Creation of a PAC is the latest chapter in ongoing efforts, mostly in court, by some of the confined men and prison reform advocates to protest what they view as vague, open-ended confinement periods after their prison terms have ended.
“We count a little bit here, politically,” said Kerri Kotler, one of CNYPC residents who recently set up the OMH Resident Political Action Committee. OMH stands for the state Office of Mental Health which operates the Psychiatric Center and its sex offender unit.
So far, almost 200 residents have signed on to the PAC and Kotler hopes that by writing lawmakers and using the bloc vote he can get some action.
He’s not planning to raise money at this point, which means he doesn’t yet need to register with the state Board of Elections. Mostly, he sees it as a way to rally voters in the hospital and make sure they are all registered.
Still, those outside the hospital say they can’t imagine how elected officials would seek an endorsement or political support from a group of convicted sex offenders.
“I told him I didn’t think that was a particularly wise way of going about it,” said Jim Murphy, a Schenectady-area prison reform advocate and member of CURE or Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants, a group that works on behalf of people who are civilly confined.
“It’s not going to be a winning issue,” said Murphy.
Kotler has been sending copies of the PAC’s mission statement which is “to secure fair treatment,” to lawmakers.
Like others who have battled OMH in court, he contends they are getting inadequate treatment for the mental illnesses that have landed them in the hospital.
OMH disagrees.
“The health and well-being of the people we serve is OMH’s highest priority, and all our facilities are adequately staffed to ensure all our patients get the medical attention and treatment they need,” said an agency spokesman.
Others, though, have successfully argued in court that they have been wrongly confined, since there are specific criteria for holding people after their prison terms expired.
A few have won on those grounds. One resident, for instance, was released in 2014 on grounds that he had “difficulty,” but wasn’t “unable” to control the urges that drove him to commit sexual assaults.
Another Greene County resident, who had a long and violent history, was released after the state Court of Appeals found that his “anti-social personality disorder” didn’t meet the criteria for civil commitment under the sex offender law.
The plaintiffs in these cases aren’t named due to federal patient protections, since they are deemed as mentally ill.
This story has been updated to correct the spelling for Kerri Kotler
rkarlin@timesunion.com 518 454 5758 @RickKarlinTU