TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) - Kansas is looking at converting a soon-to-close juvenile corrections center into a new unit for holding sex offenders indefinitely for treatment after prison, a top social services administrator told legislators Tuesday.
Tim Keck, acting secretary of the Department for Aging and Disability Services, said the agency is working with the state fire marshal’s office to determine how the juvenile facility in the western Kansas town of Larned would have to be renovated to hold sex offenders.
The Department of Corrections plans to close the 152-bed juvenile facility in March. The state has more than enough space at its juvenile corrections complex in Topeka for its current population of about 230 young offenders. Also, lawmakers earlier this year overhauled the juvenile justice system to have a greater number placed in community programs.
The state operates both a mental health center for adult prison inmates and a state mental hospital in Larned. The Sexual Predator Treatment Program is part of the mental hospital, and its population is growing.
“We need to be prepared for that,” Keck told a joint legislative committee reviewing mental hospital operations. “We’re trying to be proactive in determining whether or not the juvenile correctional facility can be something we can use.”
The committee’s chairman, Republican Sen. Jim Denning, was skeptical of the idea, saying it’s difficult to recruit physicians and other licensed medical personnel to work in Larned.
But he added “the building’s going to be empty. The worst thing that could happen is it could rot.”
Patients are committed to the sexual predator program by the courts after serving their prison sentences and can remain indefinitely. Legislators created in the program in 1994.
A critical audit last year said that at the end of 2014, the sex predator program housed 243 patients. The number has grown since to 261. The audit said in the program’s first two decades, three patients completed treatment, while 28 died.
Keck’s department and Larned State Hospital overhauled the program in the fall to make treatment more structured and personalized. The number of patients who’ve completed the program has grown to eight.
Keck said some of the predator program’s patients are infirm, and “there’s about 20 or 25 people that would be probably, I think, better served in a different situation than where they are now.”
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