After completing prison sentences for sexually related crimes, prisoners in California’s Department of Corrections are evaluated to be considered “sexually violent predators.” Under the authority of the Department of Mental Health, state evaluators make a recommendation to have sexually violent predators detained in civil confinement. Those not classified as sexually violent predators are granted parole and released into society. On Aug. 25, 2005, the California Department of Mental Health celebrated the opening of Coalinga State Hospital (CSH), California’s newest state mental health hospital and the first constructed in more than a half century.

State and local officials touted the facility as a leader in mental health services for challenging populations, which includes sexually violent predators, many who transferred from Atascadero State Hospital. Adjacent to Pleasant Valley State Prison, officials also claimed the facility would be an economic engine for the Central Valley.

Detainees, however, are saying their civil rights are frequently violated.

“This place is a disaster,” said Mike St. Martin, a gay detainee. “Most people working here are grossly unqualified for their positions. We have executive level administrators with final decision-making and policy-setting latitude who possess no more than high school diplomas.”

The former prisoners, including St. Martin, now detained at CSH, claim the conditions at the facility are inhumane and unconstitutional. They say the restrictions and privations imposed on them go far beyond the constraints of the law.

The U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled it is constitutional for states to detain sex offenders after they’ve served their prison sentences, says post-prison detention should not punish offenders for the crime they’ve served time for.

St. Martin, along with other detainees, are working to expose what they say are medical and mental health abuses in the system.

“They’ve sold this as a wellness-and-recovery program, but they are deceiving the public,” said Greg Peters, another detainee at CSH, according to the Los Angeles Times. “You guys are out there paying taxes for this.”

Department of Mental Health and facility workers say, however, the detainees claims are exaggerated, and maximum-security is necessary to protect community members from sex offenders.

“This facility is a critical part of Governor Schwarzenegger’s very clear goal to protect Californians from sexual predators,” explained Department of Mental Health Director Stephen Mayberg in a 2005 press release. “Rather than having some of the most serious sex offenders released into the community after serving their criminal sentences, these predators will come to this maximum-security psychiatric hospital to receive critical treatment and evaluation.“

St. Martin says, as a young man he was dyslexic and unable to communicate or interact with other adults. His father was a 30-year veteran of the United State Marine Corps, and St. Martin said he did not feel comfortable expressing his sexuality.

As a result, he says, he was closeted and did not develop relationships with other people his age. He identified more with children, he said, and eventually crossed the line.

In 1991, he was arrested for two counts of oral copulation on two boys under the age of 13.

“I’m not proud of anything I’ve done in my life,” he said. “But I’ve dealt with my demons and have tried to move on with my life.”

As is the case with most of Coalinga’s detainees, St. Martin served a lengthy prison sentence and was transferred to Coalinga. Under a 1995 law, some sex offenders can be classified as high-risk and mentally ill. They are then committed to psychiatric facilities for an indeterminate amount of time.

“This place is far more maximum security then the prison facility I’d been in,” said St. Martin of Coalinga. “In fact, I had more privileges in the pen then I have in here, and according to the law I’m supposed to be held in the least restrictive manner possible. But, the Department of Mental Health is punishing me in the most severe way possible. The California Department of Corrections medical treatment is far better than the treatment provided by the DMH … Being at Coalinga is far more restrictive [then being in the pen], and the staff is very manipulative. They go out of their way to incite you, to cause problems every day. I never had problems like this in the pen. The six years I’ve spent in the DMH has been the most abusive situation I’ve ever found myself in, in my entire life.”

The perceived conditions at Coalinga have prompted some detainees to go on “strike.” They contacted the LA Times, which printed a story titled “Treatment Replaced by Turmoil,” in November.

According to the LA Times, significant treatment at Coalinga is rare, and administrators acknowledged that three-quarters of the hospital’s 600-plus detainees refuse to participate in a core treatment program.

As part of the strike, detainees are also refusing to eat for days at a time to protest what they call inadequacies in the system. They also boycott the facility’s other services.

Detainees say clinical assessments are rare, the medical care is abysmal, there is no independent or professional oversight of the facility, and letters and phone calls are subject to scrutiny. According to some patients, men were also not allowed to form a gay men’s support group in the facility, and have been denied gay-themed books and films, including The Laramie Project and Slutty Summer. They also say re-offense rates are no higher (between four and six percent) for civil detainees than for offenders who are set free.

“[Mike St. Martin] isn’t happy about being detained, that’s for sure,” said Department of Mental Health spokesperson Nancy Kinkaid. “His claims are largely exaggerated or patently false. Are there staff shortages? Yes. Are they affecting care? No.”

“[The detainees that are contacting the media] don’t want to be civilly committed. They think they were given a sentence to serve, and they’ve served their time so they should be done,” she said. “But the court has ruled that it’s not unconstitutional to detain them for further psychiatric treatment, so their only recourse is to see if they can get the state to stop funding the hospital. A number of television reporters came [to Coalinga] last October, and one of the reporters spoke with some of the other patients. She asked what he thought of people like St. Martin, to which he responded ‘I don’t have time for people who make those remarks and don’t admit they have a problem. I get all the care I need here.’”

Bill Price is one of the detainees who isn’t involved with the strike.

“I’m in treatment so I don’t care to comment on the conditions of confinement,” Price said. “I’m in treatment and I accept the conditions, be they good or bad or worse than prison. My treatment is my only concern. I have a mental disorder called pedophilia and until I feel my risk for re-offending is two percent or lower I don’t want to be released.”

Unlike Price, St. Martin has no qualms questioning the quality of treatment at Coalinga.

“Dr. Deirdre D’Orazio, head of CSH’s Sex Offender Treatment had, at the time of her appointment, less than one year of experience following receipt of her psychologist’s license from the state of California. How is it that she came to assume such an important position? The program she’s in charge of is one of the largest sex offender treatment programs in the world. Just to be an evaluator in the system, it’s required that clinicians have five years licensed experience working with sex offenders, and the woman who is running the program had neither. She was licensed and less then 60 days later she was put in charge of running this entire hospital and its treatment program. In a recent article printed by the LA Times she’s quoted as saying she wouldn’t be working here if it was a scam – but if it wasn’t a scam she wouldn’t have been hired without any experience.”

Calls to D’Orazio were not returned.

“When you undertake something of the magnitude of Coalinga, there is a growing and learning experience,” Stephen W. Mayberg, director of the state Department of Mental Health, said to the LA Times. “Where we are right now is certainly, I think, moving in the right direction.”

The Times also reported, “The hospital denies having a problem, though a former employee familiar with the hospital’s medical operation acknowledged that patients weren’t seeing necessary specialists.”

Kinkaid denies the claim.

“The evaluations he says are not being done, are being done,” she said. “The individual who made that statement doesn’t even work there anymore, and I’m disappointed that the writers of that article quoted a disgruntled employee who hadn’t worked there for quite some time.”

According to a summary prepared by the California Attorney General in 2006, Proposition 83, known as Jessica’s Law, aims to “protect our children by keeping child molesters in prison longer; keeping them away from schools and parks; and monitoring their movements after they are released. Law enforcement professionals know there is a high risk that a sexual predator will commit additional sex crimes after being released from prison. Prop. 83 keeps these dangerous criminals in prison longer and keeps track of them once they are released.”

The law, which was passed in 2006, makes it easier for authorities to designate someone a sexually violent predator and hold the offender indefinitely. It also restrict patients abilities to challenge confinements, according to the Times.

Detainees and their supporters, however, say the confinement is unconstitutional and a violation of the detainees’ civil rights.

“The civil rights of CSH detainees are being violated,” said Allen Marshall, Friends and Family Spokesperson for CSH Detainees. “This system requires these people make all kinds of divulgences of their lives. The treatment regiment is so intrusive that it seems predicated on destruction of the individual so as to erode the individual’s sense of self. To completely break them down and then reconstruct them in a way the therapist finds acceptable.”

According to the Center for Sex Offender Management, the majority of sex offender treatment programs in the United States and Canada now use a combination of cognitive-behavioral treatment and relapse prevention (designed to help sex offenders maintain behavioral changes by anticipating and coping with the problem of relapse). Offense-specific treatment modalities generally involve group and/or individual therapy focused on victimization awareness and empathy training, cognitive restructuring, learning about the sexual abuse cycle, relapse prevention planning, anger management and assertiveness training, social and interpersonal skills development, and changing deviant sexual arousal patterns.

Marshall believes the treatment and punishment in some cases don’t fit the crimes.

“Isn’t this a victimless crime?” he said. “What they [detainees] did wasn’t violent. They performed oral sex on boys under the age of 14. My friends like to give blow jobs to boys who are willing to receive them and that’s different than forcibly raping a boy, but all these people get lumped into the category ‘sexually violent predator.’ These types of crimes are undifferentiated in our society and that’s a terrible thing. People suspected of being affiliated with NAMBLA [North American Man/Boy Love Association] are moved to the top of the list of people to be civilly detained, but gang members who may well have committed rapes as part of their crimes, for whatever reason, don’t meet the criteria for consideration so they go to parole.”

The Center for Sex Offender Management reports persons who commit sex offenses fall into several different categories, though. In a 1995 study, researchers found that offenders who had extra-familial female victims had a re-offense rate of 18 percent and those who had extra-familial male victims re-offended at a rate of 35 percent.

When St. Martin was asked if he expects empathy from others, he said, “I don’t know if empathy is the proper word for this. But the public is being ripped off big time. It costs $43,000 per year to keep someone in prison. Here? We get less of everything and it costs $200,000 per year to keep each of us here. I got better treatment in the pen.”

Kinkaid said she was surprised by St. Martin’s views, and vowed to uphold the voter-approved Proposition 83.

“[At Coalinga], sexually violent predators can sign themselves out of their dorm area in the morning and walk around with their coffee mugs,” she said. “They can take part in art therapy, talk treatment and participate in library activities. You can’t do that in prison. In prison you’re escorted everywhere. This is not a prison – this is a state of the art facility, and it has state of the art medical and dental facilities. But if the detainees refuse treatment, that’s their choice. Last summer St. Martin made a statement to the press saying that [his goal] was to get the funding to CSH cut off so [he and the other civil detainees] will no longer be committed. That’s not going to happen. The voters spoke when they voted to pass Proposition 83 and we’re going to continue to enforce the legislation that was passed.”