The Special Treatment Unit at Avenel, New Jersey, sounds like a medical center. In fact it’s a prison facility where people are held indefinitely and without trial, after having already completed their full prison sentences on charges of rape and sexual assault. No other convictions, no matter how grave, such as cold-blooded murder, can legally be treated this way.
This attack by the bosses’ government is a serious blow to constitutional freedoms that the working class needs.
New Jersey is one of 20 states with similar “civil commitment” laws and facilities that disregard the right to a trial and protection from cruel and unusual punishment by the government.
Many of these programs were established after state governments adopted “sexual predator” laws during the late 1990s, which require those convicted under them to “own” their crimes to be considered for release. This means they have to abandon any effort to maintain their innocence or fight to get their convictions reversed.
These blows to constitutional protections were carried out by the capitalist rulers using arguments that these laws were essential to defend women’s rights.
In 2023 some 6,000 people were incarcerated in these prisons nationwide.
New Jersey offers no way to challenge court-ordered civil commitment requested by a state attorney general with the agreement of a judge. Once inside, men are forced to undergo intensive “therapy” programs until authorities deem they are “cured” and can safely be released. For many it’s a life sentence.
Since the Avenel unit was opened in 1999, 750 people have been imprisoned there, but only 57 actually set free. A further 253 have been “conditionally” discharged, with restrictive conditions imposed. They can be reimprisoned at any time. One man was sent back to Avenel in 2020 after being caught smoking marijuana. Another was ordered back in 2009 after running a stop sign while driving without a license.
Nine people have been held there since the unit was opened 26 years ago.
Russell Tinsley, who had been convicted of rape in another state, served his time and was released. But he was then placed in the special treatment unit in 2010 after serving a two-year prison term for a conviction for car theft in New Jersey. Two doctors, who didn’t bother to interview him, urged his confinement saying he lacked the skills to safely function outside.
“I think they want to keep me here until I die,” Tinsley told the New York Times last month. He just turned 70.
Rodney Roberts was committed to the unit in 2004 after serving a seven-year sentence for a rape he has always maintained he didn’t commit. In prison he was repeatedly denied parole because he refuses to “acknowledge his guilt.” When he finally won his release, he was immediately recommended for placement in the unit for refusing “to accept responsibility for his crime,” the Times reports.
After a decade in the unit, Roberts’ appeal of his original conviction led to a DNA test that showed he hadn’t committed the rape. He was released and in 2015 sued the state for wrongful conviction, a case that is still in the courts.
Rape charges used in cop frame-ups
The dangers of the unconstitutional use of “civil commitment” therapy based on previous sexual assault convictions is underscored by authorities’ attempts to pin frame-ups on militant unionists and working-class fighters using similar charges.
During the labor upsurge in the 1930s, meat packer and union organizer Frank Ellis led a powerful sit-down strike at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota, in 1933. Strikers fought a widely supported battle, winning recognition for the Independent Union of All Workers, which years later became Local P-9 of the United Food and Commercial Workers.
Ellis, who collaborated with the Socialist Workers Party-led Teamsters in Minneapolis, was framed up and convicted on charges of abduction of a minor for immoral purposes. He was driving from Austin to Minneapolis on March 22, 1934, and gave a lift to two young women, Frances Exelby and Teresa Hall, who asked him for a ride. Ellis was going to Minneapolis to meet with SWP and Teamster leader Ray Dunne.
After the meeting, Ellis heard the young women had nowhere to stay and arranged a separate room for them at the hotel where he was staying before they drove back to Austin. Eighteen months later he was arrested and charged. Despite a union-led defense campaign, he was convicted.
After eight months in prison, the Northwest Organizer, the Teamsters’ paper, announced his sentence had been commuted by the state parole board.
“It is the opinion of the labor movement in the state that Frank Ellis was framed up by reactionary employers in the Southern part of the state for his activities in behalf of the union movement,” the Organizer wrote.
Cops launched a similar frame-up case decades later against SWP member and unionist Mark Curtis, who was part of a fight against attacks on immigrant co-workers at the Swift packinghouse in Des Moines, Iowa. In the midst of the fight, he was beaten, arrested and framed up by cops there on charges of attempted rape and burglary.
Local unionists and others set up the Mark Curtis Defense Campaign and won support worldwide for his freedom. But prison authorities demanded Curtis complete a Sex Offenders Treatment Program. Getting parole, they strongly suggested, required Curtis drop his fight to get his conviction overturned and admit he was guilty.
Curtis refused to buckle to the pressure. His defense campaign took on and exposed authorities use of these so-called treatment programs to deal blows to workers’ rights.
The international defense campaign won Curtis’ freedom in 1996.