A California state board reviewing ways to better manage sex offenders when they get out of jail calls the “containment model” the most important thing the state can do to reduce recidivism, reports the San Diego Union-Tribune. The program augments traditional supervision – house searches, job-site visits, surveillance – with lie-detector tests and targeted behavior-modification treatment. There's no mention of it in Chelsea's Law, the offender crackdown named for slain teenager Chelsea King that cleared its first legislative hurdle yesterday in Sacramento.
The bill's author, Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher, said he wants to keep the measure narrowly focused on the highest-risk criminals, although he's open to introducing other improvements – including the containment model – in separate legislation. Seven years ago, San Diego County was among the first in California to use the model. In one local case, a man convicted of indecent exposure who was on unsupervised probation went to a therapist who ordered a sexual-history polygraph. During the test, the man admitted he had been stalking young girls. The man was brought into court and put on formal probation with GPS monitoring. He said he would rather just finish serving his sentence behind bars. So that's where he went. “It works that way on a regular basis,” said Phyllis Shess, a deputy district attorney. “You have eyes on them from many different directions, all focused on keeping them from re-offending. They don't fall off the radar.”