www.citizensforreform.com *** P.O. Box 172, St. Peter, MN 56082 *** e-mail: cfrjustice4all43@msn.com
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April 2002 Twenty-fifth Edition By: Concerned Citizens
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Thinking Errors
We all have thinking errors in a given day, however, this is an issue that the Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP) uses as a component of their “state of the art treatment schemata.” MSOP requires that treatment participants use the journaling process to document physical and psychological reactions to events that an individual might encounter in a given day.
This scientific approach to helping the individual overcome thinking errors has been misused by the MSOP on numerous occasions. Regardless of the legitimacy of an event that a resident/patient might encounter, MSOP clinical staffing often find that the individual has thinking errors associated to the event he has documented. Thinking errors may also be pointed out during an operational team meeting designed to review various treatment issues with an individual as well.
Recently several residents/patients of the MSOP were subjected to a facility wide lock down and were requested to perform a “strip search” of their body in front of security staffing. Although residents and outside professionals believe that the strip search may have violated various residents/patients Constitutionally protected rights as well as numerous Patient Bill of Rights, residents were told that they had thinking errors associated with this issue. MSOP seems to be using the scientific thinking error approach as a diversionary tactic in order to divert the residents thinking elsewhere in order to evade responsibility for their actions.
In other words, this is like passing the buck in order to escape responsibility for violating the residents/patients protected rights. The Hospital Review Board has responded harshly to the MSOP on this issue in the past by stating that certain clinical responses to patients/residents thoughts on issues has been sarcastic and dehumanizing.
We do not all think alike, our individual thinking is based on various components such as our individual upbring-ing and associated concepts that derive from those that raised us or from those that presented themselves as role-models in our lives. Thinking often times is based on individual moral beliefs, nationality/geographical customs, ethnic customs and other beliefs etc.
The MSOP’s scientific concept of helping individuals with their thinking is not supposed to be a vehicle for the evasion of responsibility. It is also not a vehicle used to pass the responsibility back onto the patients residents alleging that he/she may have thinking errors associated with what he/she believes may have been a violation of his/her personal rights. This type of “state of the art treatment” may be hazardous to the health of the individual receiving it.
The 1969 Supreme Court case of Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557 (1969) provides significant support for the existence of a First Amendment right to be free of interference with mental processes. In this case the Court concluded that the state “cannot constitutionally premise legislation on the desirability of controlling a persons private thoughts.” Id. at 566
Significantly, the Stanley Court rejected Georgia’s argument that just as it could protect the bodies of its citizens by prohibiting the possession of things thought detrimental to their welfare, it also could protect their minds from the effects of obscenity. Stanley, 394 U.S. at 560, 565. This contention, the Court found, amounts to a state’s assertion of the authority “to control the moral content of ones thoughts.”
Mental processes must remain presumptively immune from governmental control in a system committed to the values of the First Amendment. Government alteration of mental processes, even if designed to restore the individual to some prior or “normal” mental state or to accomplish other beneficial results, should be subject to scrutiny under the First Amendment.
The programs abuse of violating what appears to be a protected First Amendment right needs to be reviewed. The MSOP might use the argument that their program is designed to restore an individual’s control over their own thoughts by liberating it from the effects of their illness, however, this argument totally misses the mark.
Although Citizens For Reform brings this to your attention, this abuse happens regularly because of the defi-ciency of professional experience of those treating patients/residents at the MSOP sites. A GED would not qualify one to delve into the thoughts of patients/residents, and it certainly would not qualify one to analyze and offer clinical rational for ones assumed “thinking errors.” This approach seems to be an avoidance of respon-sibility for various violations of the patient/resident rights, or it could be used to fill in the absence of professional experience that has obviously been pointed out by the Hospital Review Board on prior occasions.
Who will be responsible for any psychological injury sustained by the residents/patients by this type of scientific psychological witchery? Maybe the MSOP will want to read tealeaves or the end trails of wild animals to predict the future recidivism or in predicting the dangerousness of those individuals warehoused at its sites as a part of their “state of the art programming.” The above has about as much predictive value of what has already been used to rob these individuals of their liberty.
Is the Minnesota Government ever going to wake up to what their knee jerk legislation created, or will Governor Pawlenty continue to fund a program that continues to injure those receiving Minnesota’s “state of the art” sex offender programming.
