It was a late summer morning in 1989 when Washington Governor Booth Gardner came to work at the state capital to find thousands of empty tennis shoes dumped at the capital steps. The shoes were left there by demonstrators calling for harsher punishments for sex offenders. The group did it in response to several gruesome crimes that had happened earlier that year; crimes which the activists argued were enabled by lax sentencing laws and early releases for violent prisoners. The group called themselves the Tennis Shoe Brigade, and the shoes they brought were meant to represent the forgotten victims of rape. Their action prompted Governor Gardner to assemble the Task Force on Community Protection.
That fall, as the Governor Gardner's task force deliberated, serial child rapist Westley Allen Dodd raped and murdered three young boys in Vancouver, Washington. Despite Dodd's long criminal history of child molestation, he never served a full prison sentence for his crimes. Even Dodd himself felt the legal system had failed him and his victims, telling one reporter, "If you add up all the prison time I was given but never made to serve, I'd be in prison until 2026... and those boys would still be alive." Dodd wrote a pamphlet advising children on how to avoid violent sex offenders like him.
In the wake of Dodd's crimes, the task force penned the Community Protection Act of 1990. This act required law enforcement to keep a sex offender registry, and allowed for the civil commitment of Sexually Violent Predators, or SVPs. This meant that this special class of sex offenders could be legally and indefinitely detained after they'd served their criminal sentences if the court deemed them likely (aka. more than 50% likely) to re-offend, if released into the public. But, per the law, civil commitment would be rehabilitative, not punitive, and therefore wouldn't violate double jeopardy. The act passed into law RCW 71.09 also known as the Sexually Violent Predator law.
In order for a sex offender to be deemed an SVP in Washington, they must meet three criteria:
1) They must have been convicted or charged of a sexually violent crime.
2) They must be suffer from a "personality disorder" or a "mental abnormality", and
3) That condition must make them likely to commit predatory acts of sexual violence if not confined in a secure facility.
In Washington State, that secure facility is the Special Commitment Center (SCC) on McNeil Island. It's not a prison–it's a treatment facility administrated by Washington State's Department of Social and Health Services. They told us that 242 people are confined on McNeil Island as of publish date.
There have been two supreme court challenges to Washington's SVP law (other states have challenged too). One plaintiff claimed inadequate treatment, the other claimed they were serving a second prison term. Both times, the court ruled in favor of Washington's law.
