A Backdoor Around Double Jeopardy
The original sin of so-called “sex offender civil commitment” laws is that they were never meant to be “nonpunitive”. Legal scholars, civil libertarians, and human rights defenders, have challenged the prison-length nature of these carceral institutions. Many of these opponents to systems of pre-crime preventative detention focused on how these laws have been applied in practice to impose de facto life sentences on those who have already repaid their debt to society. The following quote comes from a state report published two years before the first so-called sex offender “civil commitment” law was passed in the United States and…
