Texas’ civil commitment system imprisons sex offenders indefinitely

Jennifer Williams’ son, Justin Sanchez, was a teenager when he committed the crimes that would land him behind bars. Now 31, he is still a prisoner—even though he’s served his sentence for the two sexual offenses he committed at ages 15 and 16.

Like many others who have served their time for sex crimes, Justin is trapped indefinitely in the Texas Civil Commitment Center (TCCC).

The TCCC is a retrofitted former juvenile prison in Littlefield, Texas. Justin is not allowed to leave, to have a job, or to talk with his mother on the phone. The institution is supposed to help reintegrate its inmates into society via therapy. In reality, Justin and the 500 or so other inmates spend most of their days reading, watching TV, and playing video games. Six hours a week, if that often, Justin has group therapy.

Justin’s wife Stacy Sanchez, whom he met and married while in custody, points out that he has “never been a free adult….He’s never driven a car or been able to have a job.”

Justin had a tumultuous childhood. “My son had a hole in his mattress from peeing the bed so much,” Williams says. He was frequently beaten.

Justin’s first crime happened in 2009, when he was 15. He showed porn to a 12-year-old neighbor. Justin then placed his penis in the victim’s anus, then unsuccessfully tried to have him perform oral sex. He was convicted of two counts of indecency with a child by contact; he was given two years of probation, required polygraph exams, and sex offender treatment.

The second incident happened in 2012, when he was still on probation. (Court records say he was 17 at the time of the incident; Justin says he was 16 but not charged until after his birthday.) His victim was an 11- or 12-year-old male cousin. They watched porn, and Justin forced him to sit on his penis and also made him perform oral sex. This time Justin was convicted of aggravated sexual assault and given a six-year sentence.

He was first sent to juvenile prison. “He could have been released from the juvenile facility on a probationary period, had he stayed out of trouble,” Williams says. But he was caught tattooing people and smoking synthetic marijuana. “So the day he turned 19 years old, they sent him to Tarrant County Jail.”

Williams was partly relieved. The jail was much closer to her home than was the juvenile facility, only a 10-minute drive. But when she first visited him, she saw something was wrong. He told her he’d been raped. She began punching the glass between them. She found an employee and begged him to get Justin out of there. Justin was put in solitary confinement for nine months and then moved to a Clemens Unit prison in Brazoria County for four years.

Nine months before he was supposed to be released, when he was 23, Justin was told he’d be moved to another facility to be assessed by a psychologist. According to Williams, the psychologist concluded that Justin had a behavioral abnormality that placed him at a high risk to reoffend. Because he had two offenses, he was put on trial to determine if he should be placed in civil commitment.

“I’ve never heard of civil commitment at this time, and I’m researching it, and I was like, ‘There’s no way they’re ever going to do this to my kid,'” Williams says. She couldn’t afford an attorney, so Justin was assigned one. He lost the trial. The judge had Justin civilly committed and labelled a sexually violent predator (SVP).

Civil commitment in Texas involves a self-paced therapeutic program with five tiers. If her son passed through these tiers, Williams was assured, he would be released. Tiers 1 through 4 occurred within the center. According to the Texas Civil Commitment Office (TCCO), which oversees the program, all tiers require individuals “to participate in six hours of group sex offender treatment per week…attend a weekly therapeutic study hall, and participate in individual treatment sessions every quarter.” Tier 1 involves learning unspecified “problem solving skills.” Tier 2 has men participating in “disclosure groups” where they discuss “offending behaviors, relationships, and sexual history.” Tier 3 helps men “develop the skills to control psychological risk factors” by learning the skills “to develop and maintain an emotionally close relationship with adults…and share with others in a more empathic and emotionally healthy manner.” Tier 4 teaches men to “reinforce the skills they have learned in treatment and prepare to return to the community.” During Tiers 1 through 3, the men are held in former prison cells. If they reach Tier 4, the prisoners get their own apartments, also in the center.

Justin, who was 24 at the time, was the youngest person at the center, where the average age was 59. Six years later he is only in Tier 2, with no idea of when he’ll be released.

Justin is one of about 6,300 Americans in such centers nationwide, according to a 2020 report by the Williams Institute at UCLA. (The federal government doesn’t provide data on people civilly committed for sex offenses). Few of these men—and they are nearly all men—have any hope of leaving.

The TCCC is one of 21 such facilities in the United States. About 1 percent to 5 percent of sex offenders are civilly committed after serving their designated prison sentences but before being sent home, according to the Sex Offender Civil Commitment Programs Network. The men range in age from their 20s to their 90s. Some are uneducated; others are professors.

Most states’ requirements for civil commitment involve an offender having multiple convictions, a mental disorder, and a perceived likelihood to reoffend. If these criteria are met, the offender is labelled an SVP and receives a civil commitment trial to determine whether he should be locked away in one of these facilities.

Civil commitment is an outgrowth of the sexual psychopath laws that emerged in the 1930s. These laws indefinitely committed people labeled “mentally disordered sex offenders.” At the time, one could receive that label for consensual sex acts considered normal today: oral, anal, or same-sex sex. A person didn’t even have to be convicted of a crime to be civilly committed.

While today a person can’t be civilly committed for cunnilingus, the fact that civil commitment still exists is surprising, given the decades-old research challenging its effectiveness.

In 1977, the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry published a report making the case that civil commitment wasn’t an effective or ethical treatment, which led most of these laws to be overturned. It has become an expert opinion that civil commitment is, as practiced, neither constitutional nor effective.

“Confining civilly committed sex offenders to prison and prison-like facilities is punishment—regardless of legislative intent—when the conditions of confinement are indistinguishable from the typical conditions of criminal incarceration…and because such civil commitment schemes are punitive, they are illegal,” wrote Arielle Tolman, a Stanford University lecturer who specializes in criminal and constitutional law, in 2018. “This ongoing criminal punishment is imposed through civil proceedings that deprive sex offenders of the constitutional protections that must precede criminal punishment—including substantive due process, the privilege against self-incrimination, and the prohibition of double jeopardy.”

It’s obviously impossible to know whether someone will commit a crime in the future, and it seems unjust to keep people prisoners after their legal sentences have ended. The tool used to predict reoffending is the STATIC-99R, a 10-item actuarial assessment which uses information such as a person’s age, the number of victims and sex offenses, and whether the perpetrator has “ever lived with a lover for at least two years,” to determine risk. The data used to inform it were based on research done in the Canadian legal system, which is much different than America’s, says Corey Rayburn Yung, a research professor at the University of Kansas School of Law who studies civil commitment. One of the most contentious questions on STATIC-99R is whether the person had a male victim. “When you ask that question, you’re basically assigning an extra risk point to all nonheterosexual people,” says Trevor Hoppe, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. In Texas and New York, for example, “we found that there were far more people in civil commitment with same-sex crime victims than there were on the sex offender registry.” Yung says STATIC-99R has other problems as well. “It is the worst kind of actuarial data prediction. It looks at actuary categories without trying to control for other variables, and just tries to see how many people commit crimes within that category.”

People justify civil commitment by arguing that SVPs are more dangerous to society than other criminals who serve their sentences and are set free. But that’s not true, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. “People convicted of violent and sexual offenses are actually among the least likely to be rearrested, and those convicted of rape or sexual assault have rearrest rates 20% lower than all other offense categories combined,” its report on the subject says.

The practice isn’t therapeutically effective for the prisoner either. “The research that does exist suggests that the impact of these policies on sexual violence is quite limited,” says Hoppe, who has studied civil commitment extensively. “For example, a Florida study found that men released from civil commitment had roughly the same 10-year recidivism rates as men who were never committed at all. And that just suggests that the program really didn’t have an effect on these men. We spend tons of money, billions of dollars, if not trillions, on law enforcement, corrections, and programs like this civil commitment. But are we safer as a result? To me, as a scientist, the evidence seems clear: no.”

Yung considers civil commitment unconstitutional and largely therapeutically ineffective. “[Treatment] is largely based on talk therapy and hope, which might work in some cases, but it’s nothing magical. There’s nothing going on in these places that couldn’t already be done in a prison or potentially done on an outpatient basis,” he says. Locking offenders up postprison sentences doesn’t make much sense, Yung argues, because most sex offenders commit their crimes between ages 18 to 30, and by the time they get to civil commitment they’re typically much older.

Yung cautions that our data on civil commitment aren’t strong, because it’s understudied. “States that have studied [civil commitment] have not found that there are reasons to think it’s effective or cost effective, but there’s not a great study to firmly say…it doesn’t decrease sex crimes, because we’re dealing with such small numbers of people and noisy data,” Yung says. The best data we have is a study from the Department of Justice completed 30 years ago, he notes. The study, he says, found that “sex offenders were only a little bit more likely to commit rape upon release than the assault-with-a-deadly-weapon people….We have no reason to think this class is particularly risky in the way that we justify this unique separate facility of incarceration.”

The fear of sexual offenders is strong, though, and in 1990 Washington state began civilly committing sex offenders. Other states followed suit. The Supreme Court took up Kansas v. Hendricks (1997), a case challenging such laws. The Court declared civil commitment constitutional if it is focused on treatment, if it is not punitive, and if people are released on a reasonable timeframe if they are judged unlikely to reoffend.

Yet most civil commitment centers operate and look just like prisons. In 2016, TCCC Executive Director Marsha McLane admitted to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal that it “looks like a prison, walks like a prison…has razor wire fences and rooms that look like prison cells.” Still, she insisted, “we’re not running it like a prison.” When reached for comment by Reason, the TCCO insisted: “The individuals assigned to reside at the Texas Civil Commitment Center (TCCC) are clients, not inmates.”

Prison is arguably more humane than civil commitment—at least prisoners know if and when they are supposed to get out. In Minnesota, six times more men have died in the center than have been released. (In 2015, a federal district court judge ruled Minnesota’s sexually violent predator civil commitment law unconstitutional, but the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals then reversed the decision. In the end, the law itself was deemed constitutional but the way the civil commitment center was operating was declared unconstitutional. The center has nonetheless been allowed to keep running.)

Civil commitment costs taxpayers $538 million a year, according to a 2022 study co-authored by Elizabeth J. Letourneau, director of the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse at Johns Hopkins University. “The estimated cost of incarcerating the current cohort of Sex Offender Civil Commitment inmates with sex crimes against children will exceed $10.7 billion” over their lifetime, she and her colleagues wrote. That money is supposed to keep communities safer, but there’s no evidence that it does.

Before Texas began forcing its civilly committed sex offenders into inpatient treatment, it stored them in halfway houses with parolees. In 2015, officials spent three days driving around Texas in a prison bus, rounding up civilly committed SVPs, and driving them to the TCCC. “The idea [was] that they would be there for six to nine months, and they’re still there 10 years later. It’s a freaking nightmare,” says Williams.

Writing about the civilly committed in Texas is harder than reporting on actual prisoners. I interviewed four people who are or were trapped in the state’s civil commitment system, along with their parents and spouses. The two currently committed men had to be interviewed by their wives on my behalf, since I was not on the men’s “contact lists.” These men have spent decades behind bars, shuttling between civil commitment and prison. The therapy they got in commitment, they said, was worse than they’d experienced elsewhere.

Clarence Brown was one of the people moved from a halfway house to the Littlefield civil commitment center in 2015. “I was in the community….I had a job. I was able to go [on] public transportation to work, to the V.A., to the law library, to shopping,” Brown says. He wore a monitor so the state could track his location, but he did have a degree of freedom.

He and four other men filed an injunction in federal court in 2015 to avoid being placed in the center, but the court said that it was too speculative because there wasn’t complete certainty that the center would actually be inpatient. He was imprisoned in the TCCC on September 1, 2015. He says he wasn’t able to vote in the national election. His treatment worsened. As an outpatient, he had a longtime doctor he liked who had helped him overcome his sexual urges. At the center, he cycled through 12 different therapists. His roommate, Ray Jenkins, had 18. Turnover was high.

The facility became overcrowded, with only 113 beds for 210 inmates, Brown says. The kitchen and day room were crammed with beds, and according to Brown inmates were sent back to actual jail for minor violations because “they needed the bed space.” The TCCO denied these claims in response to a request for comment, saying “TCCO does not house clients in the kitchen nor does TCCO have clients prosecuted to free up bed space.”

Brown graduated to Tier 5 in 2021, six years after he arrived. He did then get his own apartment, but his case manager could show up at any time—sometimes at 3 a.m. with a body camera on. (A TCCO spokesperson claims “each client subject to body worn camera recording has consented to such recording.”) Brown also had to pay for his therapy, which was sometimes $505 a month. “I’m glad that I was committed to receive treatment. I am, I really am….I needed therapy,” he says. “It did me a lot of good, but at some point it became detrimental.” He says he was given 30 special assignments that were unrelated to his crimes or to rehabilitation.

Brown graduated from the program in 2024, and Jenkins in 2022. They are two of only 26 people to do so in the 10 years it has been in existence. Nearly as many people, or perhaps more, have died: 21, according to a public records request to the TCCC, or 39, according to Texans Against Civil Commitment. Civil commitment is essentially a life sentence for these men, who have already served years if not decades in prison.

The justice system doesn’t treat any other class of offenders this way. Murderers don’t serve their time and then get placed indefinitely in facilities for fear they will kill again. America’s treatment of sex offenders is so singular and egregious that Yung, the research professor, calls it “Sex Offender Exceptionalism.” While murderers, armed assailants, gang leaders, and spousal abusers return to the streets of America after their sentences are complete, sex offenders are treated differently.

Not all residents within the TCCC seem at risk of reoffending; some even seem physically incapable of doing so. “There’s a man that sits in a wheelchair 24/7,” Williams says. “He’s, like, over 400 pounds. They shower him by spraying him with water….There’s another man paralyzed from the neck down. Why is he there?” One man lay dead for 10 hours before he was found by guards, she says. The TCCO responded to a request for comment on this matter with a statement that it was “unable to comment on any specific individual clients or specific circumstances.”

Without good evidence that the TCCC is keeping Texans safer, the facility is nonetheless growing—largely because people are so rarely released. The number of people labeled sexually violent predators has doubled in Texas since 2014, according to the TCCO, and the facility is expanding. “When you start locking people up for decades, if not life, then the program is going to expand until you get to the median,” Hoppe says. The TCCO currently has a budget of about $24.6 million, but it requested a $37,874,329 budget for 2027 in anticipation of holding 637 inmates.

The TCCO is a state agency; since 2019 operations are run by the for-profit Management and Training Corporation. A 2023 state audit of the TCCO found that it had “improperly extended the length of its contract” with the company from five years to 20 years and omitted that the total cost to the state would be $91.5 million. (Texas law requires the TCCO to go through a “competitive procurement” process if it extends the contract for a mere six months and to report the contract changes to the governor, lieutenant governor, speaker of the house, and Legislative Budget Board.)

Kirsten Budwine, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, says the TCCO has less oversight than a Texas prison, where family members can at least complain to an ombudsman if their loved one is mistreated and the prison will be required to investigate. “I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that there is no person holding this agency or facility accountable,” Budwine says.

She’s concerned about S.B. 1610, a new law that took effect on September 1, which penalizes residents in civil commitment more severely for their actions. If they throw water at a TCCO employee, for example, they will be charged with a third-degree felony. “This [bill] fundamentally shifts civil commitment from a therapeutic framework to one of punishment,” Budwine says.

The aura of sex offender exceptionalism infects many of the people managing what is supposedly a therapeutic, not punitive, experience. Mandi Harner-Brady is a former TCCC employee now married to a man held there. During her training, she recalls, one employee revealed what he thought of the men being held at the Center. “He told us…these men have committed the worst crimes you could imagine, and that they were the biggest pieces of shit that you could ever encounter,” she recalled. He said the men had been convicted of sex crimes and some were mentally unstable.

When her relationship with her now-husband, Felton Brady, was discovered, he was placed in solitary confinement for six months; Harner-Brady was eventually fired for it. While in a solitary locked room (euphemistically called a “special management unit”) for 23 hours a day, Brady was not allowed to attend group therapy; those in solitary are viewed as a “threat.”

A month after he got out of solitary, Brady learned there was a warrant for his arrest. He hadn’t registered his social media account with his probation officer, and thus had violated sex offender registry rules. He was given an 18-month sentence and moved to Lamb County Jail, which meant Harner-Brady was at least able to talk with him daily and visit him twice a week.

Since he was sent back to the TCCC in January 2023, his wife hasn’t seen him at all. “They say that I am not beneficial for my husband’s treatment because I broke rules and I enabled him to also break rules,” Harner-Brady says. She’s tried multiple times to be added to his contact list, to no avail. She blames her advocacy. “I am extremely outspoken. I’ve helped organize protests at the Capitol. I attend every quarterly TCCO meeting in Austin….I have testified before the Senate and the House of Representatives and the Corrections Committee multiple times,” she says.

Regarding restrictions on contact with family members, a TCCO spokesperson said: “It is an unfortunate reality for many clients (just as it is for many people everywhere who are not civilly committed) that the family member’s actions or behaviors may not be healthy or supportive and contact may be harmful or detract from the client’s greater goals.”

At one point, Harner-Brady says, a therapist at the center accused her of making light of Brady’s crimes. “I don’t,” she says. “I totally understand that there were victims, that this was extremely horrible. I also understand he was [a teenager]. I also know that he’s not that person….This man’s been incarcerated his entire life. He served his whole sentence, and when he was supposed to go home, he never got to go home.”

Even after she contracted cervical cancer, the best the TCCC system would do for her was a Zoom session with her husband, with a case manager present, before each procedure and surgery. She’s not even allowed to send her spouse money for the commissary, despite being his wife and having power of attorney. She has spent about $10,000 on legal fees, psychiatrists, and doctors to help get him out of civil commitment. She paid for an independent assessment of her husband, and the evaluator determined that Brady does not have a behavioral abnormality or a great likelihood of reoffending.

Civil commitment “is a waste of money. He could be home, he could be working, he could be spending time with his family…and he could still attend his six hours of required treatment,” Harner-Brady says. So why is he being kept behind bars? It comes down to money, she suspects. The facility gets compensated per man it houses. The more men, the more cash.

Though the Texas civil commitment system is supposed to be devoted to therapy, Justin and others in the TCCO report that reform and treatment weren’t the focus. “It’s basically a prison with casual clothes,” Justin says.

The “tiers” the men move through require repetitive worksheets and constant sharing of sexual thoughts and behaviors during a relatively small number of hours of therapy a week. An audit of the TCCC found that in 2022, only 70 percent of the required group therapy sessions were offered. Men are also supposed to have a one-hour session with a therapist every 90 days, but these aren’t necessarily that helpful. “They ask you, ‘Where do you want to be in three years?…How do you feel about the way you’re doing in treatment?'” Justin says. And only 67 percent of these individual sessions were actually provided. The state charged the TCCC $694,622 in sanctions in 2022 for failure to provide adequate therapy.

The TCCC is not devoted to rehabilitation and treatment, says a woman who worked in its therapy program for three years, quitting in May 2025. (Technically, her employer was the Management and Training Corporation.) She was one of about 13 therapists, with about 50 individual clients each.

“The whole program is supposed to be about getting these guys into a place where they can be safe in society, right? But the whole system is designed to never let them go,” she says. “This is a treatment facility. It’s not supposed to be like a prison, right? But it’s very much a prison, like max security level.”

There are onerous restrictions on interactions, she reports. She explains that residents aren’t allowed to touch each other, even in casual, nonsexual ways. “If they shake hands or give a little side hug, like a bro hug, they get a write-up.” A verbal warning means they can’t get packages in the mail for six months or take computer classes, and a tracking monitor is placed on their leg. Restrictions on some forms of touching, such as making out, she understands, but she considers hugs “pro-social” behavior.

It’s not surprising that men whose behavior is so restricted are willing to risk punishment to connect with people on the outside. Like many men in civil commitment, Justin got a cellphone—which aren’t allowed until you get to Tier 3. A mailroom employee smuggled it in. Justin joined Facebook and connected with his future wife, Stacy, who knew his mom and lived in Idaho. They started dating online.

In August 2021, an officer caught him with the phone. He tackled Justin to the ground. Another officer raced over and began punching him in the head. Eventually five officers restrained him. His phone tumbled to the ground.

Justin’s mom shared the story of what happened. She says Justin told her he’d thought about his phone contacts. He realized staff would discover he’d been calling his mom and girlfriend, which meant they’d be removed from his approved contacts. So he stomped on the phone. The guard kicked the phone away from Justin; Justin tried to stomp again, and he caught the guard’s foot.

Justin was charged with felony assault. His time in civil commitment was up. He was sent back to jail and prison for two years. His mother got a call from his case manager asking if she knew about the phone. She answered honestly that she had. She was removed from his contact list.

Justin was sent back to the TCCO in December 2023. Justin was allowed one supervised phone call per month to his mother, while Williams awaited approval to go back on his contact list. As part of the approval process, Williams was ordered herself, not even an inmate, to attend eight sex offender treatment therapy sessions and sex offender chaperone classes; she had to pay for them. She was also asked to create a “self-care plan.” All these vexatious demands came with no guarantee she’d be allowed to speak to her son even if she completed the process.

In May 2024 she attended a TCCO board meeting and discussed all the onerous processes she was forced into. A week later she got a phone call from Justin’s treatment team. “My dumb self thought, ‘Oh, wow, I must have made an impact on these people. They must see that what they’re doing is wrong,'” Williams says. Instead, she was accused of making derogatory statements about them and said she could no longer have even supervised phone calls with Justin. She hasn’t talked to him since April 2024. The TCCO declined to comment on Justin’s case.

In September 2024 she petitioned the 5th Circuit Court to speak to her son. “I’m really hoping that this judge is going to look at this and go, ‘Hey, this is an abuse of power,'” Williams said at the time. “I just want to tell him I love him, and everything’s going to be okay, but, I can’t do that….The most anti-therapeutic thing I think they could do is take a mother away.” But about a year later, she decided against taking the lawsuit any further. “I am very worried that if there is any action on my part that will hinder my contacts with Justin,” she says. “I have started my sex offender treatment and am desperately trying to get my contacts back with Justin.”

Williams founded a nonprofit group called Families Against Committing Texans Stand Up (FACTS). Justin thinks that’s why his mother has been cut off from communication with him. “It’s because she’s so vocal and adamant about trying to right the wrongs that this place is doing. And she’s not fighting just for me, she’s fighting for everybody, and she’s not afraid to put her name on what she says. And I think it’s coming around to bite her,” Justin says.

With the help of the Texas Civil Rights Project, Williams and Sanchez have been campaigning at the capital alongside other women whose loved ones are in TCCC custody. “We had people driving really close to us at high rates, like they were going to hit us, flipping us off, screaming at us, because all they hear is sex offender, right? And they think that we’re like pro–child molestation. And that is not the case,” Sanchez says. “How many people who have murdered have spent less time in prison and then get released?”

She’s been surprised that most lawmakers have no idea what civil commitment is, so FACTS has been distributing one-pagers and talking to committee members about deficiencies in a TCCO funding bill. “Nobody wants to seem soft on sex offenders. But…these men are no different than the man today that’s getting out of prison that has two sex crimes,” Sanchez says.

Sanchez thinks men with sex crime convictions should still be monitored. She thinks they should be placed on the sex offender registry and have ankle monitors. But civil commitment, she believes, is unconstitutional. Next year, the state’s sunset commission is scheduled to investigate the process; she hopes that will lead to change.

Since Williams can’t talk to her son, she gets updates from his wife. Justin wasn’t allowed to talk to me either, but Sanchez offered to ask him my interview questions during a recorded phone call. According to Justin, who says that the TCCO “treat[s] everybody kind of like animals,” he shares a space the size of a living room with 13 other people. They have two bathrooms. There are windows, but they don’t open, so there’s no ventilation. For part of the day, Justin can go outside to an open field, while wearing an ankle monitor. (Ankle monitors are required in Tier 1. In later tiers, they are used as punishment for rule violations.)

The situation in the TCCC got worse for everyone during the COVID-19 lockdown. According to Harner-Brady, men piled together like sardines were getting sick and a dozen died. “I either saw them personally pass away, or I sat with them in the hospital while they were on ventilators,” she says.

Frances Womack is also married to a man in the TCCC, whom she met while she worked at a prison he’d previously been in. Her husband, Rick, is 66, and he has been behind bars or in civil commitment for 35 years. When she first began visiting, the guards allowed her to pick up Pizza Hut and bring it to share with him. She said that stopped being allowed a while ago.

“All the staff now are ex-prison people, and the rules they abide by are all prison [rules],” she says. Her husband needs food because they don’t provide enough, Womack says: “The portions have gone from man-sized meals to grade school size portions.” He particularly needs good nutrition now, because he was just diagnosed with inoperable stage 2 pancreatic cancer.

Rick isn’t alone. The former therapist says one of her clients had a stomach pain for a year and was never treated, even though he couldn’t swallow or eat and lost a lot of weight. “I finally threw a fit. I was like, ‘What the actual fuck?’ And they finally sent him to see a specialist to shut me up, and he had cancer, and he died.” Womack worries Rick will be next.

Justin is trying to make the best of life, even in this desperate and punitive atmosphere. He’s playing handball. Sanchez has been sending him packages of food from Walmart and Amazon (which is allowed), because the food they serve him consists of things like corn dogs and stale pop tarts. (Three weeks after Sanchez interviewed her husband on Reason‘s behalf, the TCCO removed her from Justin’s contacts. No reason was stated.)

Sending food and money to those on the inside is costly, unless you’re a spouse. It’s taxed at a rate of 25 percent. Money sent by a spouse isn’t taxed unless they send over $100 a month. “I don’t know what they do with that money, and they just call it TCCO fees,” Williams says. (The TCCO claims the money is for “cost recovery” of “housing, treatment and GPS tracking.”) The TCCO even took a third of the men’s COVID-19 stimulus checks, according to TX CURE, a criminal justice organization. “And if every man got their check, that’s $350,000. Where the hell is that money?” asked Williams.

Sanchez was recently reprimanded for sending her husband a picture of herself in a tank top. Guards confiscated the picture because there was a hint of cleavage. “What are they afraid of? He might masturbate to a picture of his wife?” she asks.

How Justin masturbates has now become the business of the state, because he and the other residents are required to keep logs where they report when they masturbated, where they were, and what they were thinking about. “Do you honestly think that if a man were having mental fantasies that were inappropriate, that they’re gonna write them down and hand them over?” Sanchez adds.

Despite being at the TCCC for six years, Justin remains in Tier 2. He says that’s because he’s refusing to take more penile plethysmographs, a test of sexual arousal that usually involves placing a ring on the penis and measuring blood flow and erection size. In civil commitment, every two years residents have equipment placed on their genitals while they’re shown a variety of pornography, as well as a voice over of men talking about molesting children.

“A creepy old man will say, ‘There’s a baby on the table in front of you, and you’re going to open his diaper, and then you’re going to put your finger into his anus,'” Sanchez says Justin told her. She compared it to the scene in A Clockwork Orange where a prisoners’ eyelids are opened with clips and he’s forced to watch scenes of violence. If the results show they’re getting erections while hearing about sexual scenarios with kids, they can’t move further in their treatment.

Penile plethysmographs can be used to guide treatment plans for people with paraphilias, but are not admissible in court. (Some studies, however, have found that they are accurate predictors of whether an offender with pedophilic tendencies will reoffend.) “Residents are often given polygraphs for things like contraband, deviant masturbation, relationships, etc.,” Justin says. “If the polygrapher says the polygraph results were inconclusive or they had no opinion about the polygraph, TCCO will automatically consider that a failure of the polygraph, which will result in disciplinary consequences.”

Few men in the TCCC are ever judged well enough to leave. Few even get to Tier 4. Graduating to this tier requires approval by a board made up of victims, law enforcement, and lawyers—plus director McLane, who worked in the TCCO for 11 years and makes $240,000 a year. (McLane did not respond to a request for comment.)

At one point, Justin believes, he was moved to solitary because while he was talking to his stepfather on the phone, his mother could be heard in the background. When I last communicated with her, Sanchez told me she hadn’t heard from Justin in months and was unsure if he was still in solitary. “They’ve also taken all of his food packages that his family had purchased for him and they’re having them returned as a punishment,” she added. “The attorney had said all of this is wildly illegal…it’s incredibly unconstitutional.”

“I don’t think that this punishment is fitting of the crime,” Justin says. “I did every second of my [prison] time. I’ve done it twice over in this place. I was 16. My mind was not thinking as an adult when I was younger…but I have matured since then, and I’ve grown up, right? You know, mentally, physically, emotionally.”

Justin’s mother believes strongly that sex offenders need treatment. “My son had never been able to talk to me about what happened when he was a kid, ever, until he went to treatment. [Now] he’s very insightful about everything,” Williams says. But treatment can happen outside the facility, she argues—and it should for people who have already served their sentences. “The majority of them just want to go home and hug their families and get a job and just try to be normal again.”

David Prescott, a psychologist, is director of the Safer Society Continuing Education Center, a nonprofit dedicated to preventing sexual violence. He previously supported civil commitment but is much less enthusiastic about the idea now. For most people convicted of sexual offenses, he believes therapy can be done closer to home. “Working in these places has made me more of a civil libertarian, and not less,” he says. “It’s really made me question the value of big institutions when we seem to get a better bang from our buck from specialized community supervision.”

Prescott acknowledges that some men in civil commitment might struggle to be reintegrated into society. “There are some really, really, really, truly scary people in there that would leave any reasonable person saying, ‘My God, what do we do with somebody like that?'” he says.

But most people in civil commitment aren’t like that. “There are many people we end up committing who really don’t need to be there,” says Prescott. “What seems to get lost in the mix is the capacity of people to change.”