This article was produced in partnership with Harper’s Magazine, with support from the Puffin Foundation.
On Taisa Carvalho Mick’s first day as a psychotherapist with Larned State Hospital’s Sexual Predator Treatment Program (SPTP), her co-workers warned her to be careful around her patients. She shouldn’t get close to them or believe a word they said, other staffers told her. They were untrustworthy predators, liable to manipulate her — or worse. Mick was surprised. She didn’t hear anything about empathy or treating patients with respect, even though the ostensible goal of the program was to provide therapy.
Larned, Kansas, is a city of 3,700 people surrounded by wheat fields and cattle farms. Like nineteen other states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government, Kansas detains many former inmates convicted of sex offenses after they finish serving their criminal sentences. They remain confined in treatment facilities until an evaluator deems them unlikely to reoffend and a judge agrees to their release. Supporters of this practice, which is called civil commitment, defend it as a form of medical treatment necessary for public safety. The handbook provided to those detained at Larned puts it this way: “It is the vision of the SPTP to provide residents with the knowledge and tools needed for their reintegration back into society.” For Mick, the residents were simply people in need of care. They had committed crimes, but they had completed their sentences. “No human being is beyond redemption,” she told me.
Mick is a mother of two, has tattoos and nose rings, and wears purple braids in her hair. She emigrated from Senegal as a teenager in 2012, joining her older sister in Waco, Texas. When Mick arrived, she spoke Portuguese and French but hardly any English. She learned the language quickly, though, and excelled academically. After graduating from college at Fort Hays State University, in Kansas, she earned a graduate degree there in clinical psychology. She soon obtained a temporary therapist’s license and, in July 2023, began working at the SPTP.
Although her family worried for her safety around convicted sex offenders, Mick was excited to start her new job. As a graduate student, she had done clinical work testing people for personality disorders, and was fascinated by the complexity of their cases. Her clinic’s director suggested she consider a job with the SPTP, where many patients have personality disorders. Even though Mick had heard that the SPTP was an awful place to work, she decided to apply. “I like working with unpopular populations,” she told me.
But upon her arrival, Mick found that the SPTP resembled a prison more than it did a place for therapy. A perimeter of sharp wire ringed the four buildings to which SPTP residents were confined, and security guards roamed the grounds. Residents — almost all of whom were men, though a few identified as nonbinary or transgender — reported substandard medical treatment, terrible food, and little time outdoors. Their telephone calls were monitored, as were their conversations with one another. Outside of a sparse weekly schedule of group therapy sessions, classes, and menial labor at the facility, residents mostly spent their days watching TV or simply sitting around.
(A fact-checker from Harper’s Magazine sent the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services, the agency that oversees Larned State Hospital, an extensive list of this article’s claims about the SPTP and its employees. In response, a spokesperson confirmed Mick’s employment and declined to comment further, citing privacy law, and concluded: “The Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services will not be entertaining any further discussion on the matter as her claims are categorically false.”)
According to the Association for the Treatment and Prevention of Sexual Abuse, sexual abusers vary widely in both their treatment needs and the level of risk they pose to society. As such, the organization recommends that they receive dignified, individualized therapy and clear benchmarks of progress. At the SPTP, however, Mick discovered that treatment seemed directionless and outdated. Her patients didn’t appear to understand what personality disorders even were. They told her that staff members sometimes shamed them, and that when they complained about their confinement or the treatment they received, they were often reprimanded and had their meager privileges revoked. They could be punished for countless minor infractions: swearing, smoking, getting tattoos, sharing food. Unlike in prison, where some over-the-counter medications are available for sale, accessing something like throat lozenges at the SPTP required getting a doctor’s order; residents sometimes had to beg for medical attention. Their use of the internet was severely restricted, and they were obliged to disclose their assets, their credit and debit card numbers, and an annual credit report. Those who made more than $127 per month were required to pay half their earnings to Larned.
Despite the severity of these measures, however, Mick found that her patients rarely resembled the monstrous criminals her colleagues had warned her about. A few residents she met did seem to pose a threat to public safety, but they struck her as outliers. Most of her patients seemed relatively harmless, and she never felt unsafe around them. Some had developmental or intellectual disabilities. Many had been there for years, even decades — a number of them were in their seventies or eighties. They clearly weren’t progressing through any genuine treatment program. In fact, Mick believed, some had received improper diagnoses after leaving prison. She told me about one such patient, who had been committed at nineteen, and who had admitted a decade later that he still had sexual fantasies about his ex-girlfriend, whom he had dated when they were both teenagers; this became the basis for a diagnosis of hebephilia (a sexual attraction to children in early adolescence), which made him unlikely to ever be released. And there were others who had been confined on the basis of crimes they’d committed as juveniles, and who lacked lengthy criminal records that might suggest a propensity for recidivism. “They’ve already served prison sentences, and they would have been fine doing outpatient treatment,” Mick told me.
She came to believe that the SPTP would never release most of these people, no matter how eagerly they participated in treatment and kept up good behavior; her job wasn’t to treat these patients but to perpetuate the illusion of treatment. Whatever the program claimed, Mick grew convinced that it was designed to lock people up indefinitely, not to rehabilitate them.
In 1989, following public outcry over a string of high-profile murder and sexual-assault cases, Booth Gardner, then the governor of Washington, appointed a task force to consider how the state might strengthen its laws against violent crimes. In the course of its work, the task force coined a legal term: “sexually violent predator.” SVPs were defined as people charged with or convicted of a sexually violent crime, who have also been determined by psychological evaluators to be likely to re-offend because of a “mental abnormality” or personality disorder. The task force recommended using this term to adopt a new statute enabling the state to confine sex offenders indefinitely under civil commitment — a procedure that has historically also been used for treating mental illness in other contexts, such as when patients pose a danger to themselves. The legislation, which passed in 1990, became the nation’s first modern law authorizing civil commitment for sex offenders. To its architects, the practice seemed poised to prevent violent crimes by keeping sex offenders — who might otherwise have reentered society — off the streets. Other states across the country soon followed suit.
Kansas passed its civil-commitment law in 1994, after a Pittsburg State University student and waitress named Stephanie Schmidt was raped and murdered by a co-worker on conditional release from prison, where he had served time for rape and aggravated sodomy. “It is for those extremely dangerous people that we can prove in court are predatory and will likely strike again,” one Kansas district attorney explained after the law’s passage. While some protested that accurately predicting who would commit crimes was impossible, he told the Kansas City Star that doing so was easy: “If you want to be able to predict the future in just about anything, look at the past.”
This law established the SPTP at Larned as the state’s sole facility for civilly committed sex offenders. Shortly after the SPTP’s founding, the program’s director at the time, Janet McClellan, told a reporter that program residents would become eligible for release once administrators had “reliable, valid, scientific assurances” that they wouldn’t commit further crimes. But the details of how one might meet such a burden of proof were left to the discretion of evaluators. “I can’t deny that there may be some people who could end up here for a very long time,” McClellan acknowledged. “Some might even be here for life.”
As a wave of civil-commitment laws passed in the Nineties and Aughts, many critics questioned how effective they would be at curtailing sexual abuse. More recently, a growing body of research has borne out their concerns: as a 2013 Brooklyn Law Review article put it, “SVP laws have had no discernible deterrent or incapacitation effects.” Some opponents have argued that civil commitment diverts resources from more effective programs such as structured therapy and education and risk-management programs. In 2024, for instance, the SPTP’s budget was $33.7 million, which works out to nearly $130,000 per resident. Rather than spending billions on a “regime that has continued to fail to adequately protect children,” a 2023 Johns Hopkins University–led study concluded, states should invest in programs that can better “prevent child sexual abuse in the first place.”
Even some who oversee long-established civil-commitment programs have questioned their efficacy. Robin Wilson, the clinical director of Florida’s civil-commitment program from 2007 to 2011, believes that treatment should begin at the outset of a prison sentence, not after it has ended, and that most programs start treatment too late to be psychologically helpful. “You end up having people who potentially end up going to treatment long after the treatment would have been most effective, and ultimately for much longer and more intensively than their risk profile suggests,” he told me. “There are better, more efficient, more scientifically defensible, more ethical ways to do this.” In 2014, the research director of Minnesota’s Department of Corrections, Grant Duwe, called on states to consider more intermediate, community-based alternatives to civil commitment, such as intensive parole.
The admissions processes for civil-commitment programs vary from state to state, but in most cases, when a person incarcerated for a sex offense approaches the end of his sentence, prosecutors can appoint a psychological evaluator to assess whether he should be classified as an SVP. The findings of this evaluation are then sent to a judge — or, in some states, a jury — who will determine whether the person meets the legal criteria of that state’s SVP statute. Many experts argue that these evaluations are arbitrary, biased, and scientifically flimsy; the American Psychiatric Association’s Task Force on Sexually Dangerous Offenders urges psychiatrists to oppose SVP laws, viewing civil commitment as a violation of civil rights and a misuse of psychiatric methods. A 2020 report by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law found that black sex offenders were twice as likely as their white counterparts to be civilly committed. One common evaluation tool is a ten-item questionnaire that asks, among other things, whether an offender had any male victims; if the answer is yes, he is deemed more likely to reoffend. Such apparent pretensions to precision exasperate critics, who often point out that “sexually violent predator” is a legal designation, not a medical one. “Overly broad terms like ‘mental disorder’ and ‘abnormality’ have no medical meaning,” said Ilan H. Meyer, one of the report’s authors. And in some states, SVP evaluations are so likely to result in civil commitment as to make precision seem beside the point. In Kansas, for example, the portion of those evaluated who are then designated as SVPs has at times reached as high as 94 percent, according to a Lawrence Journal-World investigation.
No state has adopted civil commitment since New York did so in 2007 — a sign, perhaps, that many have come to recognize the inefficacy and exorbitant cost of such programs. But in states where such programs have long existed, few politicians, if any, have shown interest in dismantling them. “It’s become a political third rail,” Eric Janus, the director of the Sex Offense Litigation and Policy Resource Center at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law, told me. That’s not only because of the bad optics of shuttering a program meant to protect the public, he explained, but also because the facilities provide jobs. Larned State Hospital, for instance — where the SPTP is the largest program— is one of the biggest employers in town. “You’ve got a lot of people in the community who are just dependent on those jobs,” Rick Cagan, the former executive director of the Kansas chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, told me. “It is a huge cash cow.”
Mick grew convinced that the program was designed to lock people up indefinitely, not to rehabilitate them.
Legal challenges to these programs have largely proved unsuccessful. In 1997, the Supreme Court ruled 5– 4 against a man in Kansas who argued that civil commitment constituted a form of double jeopardy. The process was civil, not criminal, the ruling explained, and therefore not a form of punishment. In 2002, the court again upheld the practice, expanding the grounds on which states could commit someone, and leaving little hope for the roughly six thousand people currently held under civil commitment.
Many experts reject the Supreme Court’s reasoning. “The underlying idea of [civil commitment] is essentially . . . punitive,” Janus told me. And in 2023, an unpublished internal survey of programs in seventeen states conducted by the Sex Offender Civil Commitment Programs Network, an association of facility employees, found that patients spend far more time in “recreational [and] vocational programming” than they do receiving treatment. The survey also found that the vast majority of those who have entered civil commitment have never been released. Under Missouri’s SVP law, unconditional release isn’t even an option. In Kansas, only 16 of the 380 people ever committed have been discharged; 14 have received conditional release; and 65 have died in custody. Virtually everyone else remains locked up.
By the time Mick arrived at Larned, critics had long alleged that the SPTP wasn’t upholding its obligation to treat patients and prepare them for societal reentry. “Many residents aren’t progressing through the Program’s phases on a timely basis,” noted a report by the Kansas Legislative Division of Post Audit in 2005. “I don’t think the state has been extremely honest about what goes on,” a former SPTP clinical group leader told the Lawrence Journal-World that same year. “I think they’re disingenuous in how willing they are to let people go through the program,” he added. “That was really one of the things that caused me to leave. I couldn’t any longer look at the residents and say, ‘Work hard, and you’ll get out.’ ” Another counselor, who had started working at the SPTP in 2012 and resigned two years later, has described the program as “an abomination.” She told a reporter that only a handful of her ninety patients were too dangerous to be released, yet most get stuck in a “vicious cycle,” ultimately boycotting treatment out of frustration.
In 2014, twenty-five SPTP residents filed a lawsuit claiming inadequate treatment. Three years later, after a resident alleged that the state had failed to conduct an annual review of his case, as required by law, for four of the first six years he was detained, the chief judge on Kansas’s second-highest court wrote that the court was “deeply troubled by the general lack of attention by the district court to the periodic review component of due process.”
Sean Wagner, the SPTP’s administrative program director from 2014 to 2017, told me that there was a push around this time to make treatment more structured and individualized. He wanted residents to feel more incentivized to participate in group therapy, for example, and for classes to better target specific needs, such as overcoming addiction. But many staffers resisted or outright refused to implement these initiatives. He attributes this in part to widespread prejudice among the staff: “I had two hundred thirty-seven civilly committed sexual predators, and they were basically a piece of cake compared to the two hundred fifty employees I oversaw,” he told me. Half of them, he said, believed the residents “ought to be hung up by their nuts on the closest fence post.” There were nurses who “thought all these guys needed to be shot.” Norma Aguilera, a nurse at the SPTP in 2022 and 2023, told me that she was instructed in her orientation to view her patients as dangerous. “They pretty much put it in you to hate them,” she recalled. “So when you get there and see that they’re just average guys — it’s the safest unit! They’re being treated like they’re rats or the untouchables.”
It wasn’t only the employees who felt the residents deserved their confinement. Once, when Wagner decided that several residents were ready for conditional release, word quickly spread through town, he said. “There were a lot of people in the community pissed off that we were even thinking about letting these guys get a job in the community.”
Wagner had many disagreements with how the SPTP was run, and he believed his role there represented an opportunity to make the program more effective and humane. But, he told me, he encountered opposition to making changes at every turn, both from staffers and from his supervisors in the Department of Aging and Disability Services. Finally, in 2017, after several years of butting heads with state officials over his objections to the harshness of SPTP policies, he was reprimanded and reassigned to a different department.
In her conversations with SPTP residents, Mick often encouraged them to tell her about their experiences at the facility; in turn, some residents warned Mick that her compassion might arouse the suspicion of administrators. Still, Mick tried to speak out on their behalf when she could. Once, Mick reported, she saw a resident being moved into a room with a puddle of urine on the floor and asked that someone be sent to clean it up; another time, when she saw a staff member yelling at a resident, she suggested that her colleague take a step back and breathe.
Some patients had cycled through dozens of therapists. They were taking the same courses over and over.
Soon after these incidents, Mick said, she was summoned for a meeting with Brad Base, the president of Sunflower Behavioral Health, a company that contracts with Kansas to provide mental-health staffing to the SPTP. Base told Mick that he had high hopes for her future at the SPTP but, given all the scrutiny the program had been under, he preferred his staff avoid criticizing it. (Base declined to comment for this story.)
By August, Mick had come to understand just how ineffective the therapy offered at the facility was. The SPTP has three tiers of treatment through which residents theoretically progress: the first is meant to help them avoid criminal behavior; the second teaches them to lead independent lives; the third is a transitional phase focused on seeking employment and establishing a support network. Mick found the metrics for progress highly arbitrary: a patient who happened upon a difficult therapist might remain on tier one indefinitely. Some had cycled through dozens of therapists. They were taking the same courses over and over for years.
Eventually, Mick wrote to Base outlining her concerns. She was trying to work with her patients on relapse prevention, she told him, but felt there needed to be more concrete criteria for advancement through the tiers. She went on:
Some of these guys have been there for so long, and have had so much taken away from them. They get punished for a lot, but on the flip side How can we actually try and motivate them to move forward.
Base did not reply to Mick directly. His management style, she told me, more often involved sending somewhat coded emails to his entire staff, instructing them on how to approach their work at Larned. Mick felt these messages were sometimes directed at her. “Some of you are engaging in very helpful activities with your coworkers,” he wrote in one such email.
However, before you go too far down that path, remember who our client is. We serve the State. The State is our client, not the person sitting across from us in sessions. If we are going to be effective in bringing about change to the person sitting across from us in sessions, we must first gain the trust and ability to work effectively with our client, the State.
As Mick spent more time at the SPTP, she began to take particular notice of a resident named Dustin Merryfield, whom other residents often consulted for advice. Merryfield, residents told her, had a sophisticated grasp of the intricacies of civil-commitment legislation and SPTP policies — he had self-published several books on the topics — and he had regularly helped others file complaints and understand the legal process. When Mick finally met Merryfield, she found him to be quiet, courteous, and intelligent. During his years of civil commitment, Mick learned, he had earned a bachelor’s degree in theology from Liberty Bible College and Seminary, as well as certificates in computer repair, accounting, criminal justice, and paralegal studies. He regularly filed lawsuits challenging his confinement. Mick was struck by what seemed to be his wasted potential, and how his ordeal seemed to encapsulate much of what was wrong with Kansas’s civil-commitment system.
Merryfield was born in 1981 in central Kansas. His father was a felon and an abusive alcoholic who was only intermittently present. At the age of ten, Merryfield began to be shuttled between various state mental hospitals and shelters. When he was fifteen, he sexually assaulted a fifteen-year-old girl. (Merryfield maintains, incorrectly, that the girl was eighteen.) He was convicted of rape and sentenced to a juvenile correctional facility for two years. Then, while on conditional release, Merryfield groped a ten-year-old girl on a playground. (Merryfield told me that he didn’t know the girl’s age, and that he believes he was far too immature to understand the consequences of his actions.) In 1998, he was tried as an adult and then sentenced to two years in a Kansas prison.
Toward the end of Merryfield’s sentence, Mick learned, he received an evaluation from a psychologist who recommended that Merryfield needed “structured, intensive parole,” in which he would live in a halfway house, find work, and be prohibited from contact with children. “The overall picture is of a young man, so overwhelmed with an inconsistent, chaotic past that he has little sense of self,” the evaluator wrote.
Judging from his attempts to normalize his past and his eagerness for an education, it would appear that he is desperately searching for meaning in his life, but hasn’t found that meaning either at home or in his many placements.
Image: Matt Rota for Harper’s
Around that same time, Merryfield told me, he also received a separate evaluation, conducted by a psychotherapist named Rex Rosenberg. Rosenberg, a former chaplain in the Christian Motorcyclists Association, was interested in demonology, and, in the Nineties, had created a ninety-six-question survey that he claimed could accurately ascertain whether a person was under “demonic influence”; signs of such influence included severe depression, compulsive masturbation, homosexuality, and being “unable to read the Bible.” (Rosenberg told Harper’s that his demonological pursuits had no bearing on his work conducting SVP evaluations for the State of Kansas.) Rosenberg concluded that Merryfield fit the definition of an SVP. Merryfield was then committed at Larned in 2000.
By his own telling, Merryfield’s time at Larned has been imperfect. In 2007, when two staff members were searching his room, he hit them with a trash-can lid, because he felt the search was unfair. In 2018, however, after maintaining a largely clean record for about a decade, he was approved to advance to tier three, and was then sent to Maple House, a reintegration facility on the grounds of Parsons State Hospital, in southeastern Kansas.
After about a year, however, a Maple House staff member accused Merryfield of making sexual remarks to her. She reported that Merryfield had complimented her looks and made sexually insinuating comments about her private life. Merryfield argued that the staff member had initiated the interaction.
To Mick, the incident — an inappropriate but nonviolent encounter with an adult following a year in close proximity — seemed like an ideal opportunity for a therapeutic intervention. “That would be a good teaching opportunity for him,” she told me. Instead, in August 2019, Merryfield was returned to Larned, back to tier one. Although he committed his only crimes as a juvenile more than twenty-five years ago, Merryfield, now in his mid-forties, is still at Larned, with no release in sight.
Once a week, Mick joined her colleagues at Larned to discuss new policies, any progress residents might have made through treatment, and any grievances they had recently filed. “Denied Outside recreation,” read one resident’s complaint. “Denied the ability to do a Yoga Routine,” went another. Others were less specific: “Absolute denial of personal autonomy and all due process.” Complaint after complaint went unresolved.
Mick found most of these to be valid grievances, while the restrictions regarding residents’ privileges and behavior seemed unnecessarily punitive and arbitrary. She was particularly disturbed by how the SPTP interfered with personal and romantic relationships. Visits from those outside the facility were subject to approval. Mick recalls one staff meeting that was spent discussing whether a man on tier three — “community reintegration” — should be allowed to be visited by his girlfriend. Such situations weren’t uncommon: residents’ family and friends sometimes introduced them over the phone to people on the outside. Relationships might develop during supervised, pre approved visits, and some residents even got married. Mick found administrators’ policing of these relationships excessive, and considered them counterproductive to the independence and dignity that might have helped residents prepare for a life outside.
The longer Mick worked at the SPTP, the more disillusioned and angry she became. One resident showed her a letter his lawyer had sent him, explaining why his impeccable behavior in treatment was irrelevant to his prospects for release. “The States [sic] response is that you have been in a controlled environment and they are not willing to risk it in a non controlled environment.” Mick saw this logic as circular: If therapeutic progress and good behavior within the program weren’t indicators of readiness for release, what was? In September 2023, she emailed SPTP’s administrators, explaining that while she respected their depth of experience, she felt she needed to call attention to problems she saw at the facility:
I see a lot of staff here yelling at residents, being inappropriate, and not conducting themselves professionally, which I do bring attention to despite the backlash I may get. . . . As I believe that both staff and residents deserve to be treated as humans I try to model . . . empathy, warmth, as well as strong boundaries with the residents.
Meanwhile, Base continued to urge his employees to bring complaints directly to Sunflower. “They are not the State’s problems, and anything that makes us look weak to the State hurts us in the long run,” he wrote. “As many of you have already seen, the State is not a forgiving environment nor one that is logical. We have to do all we can to protect our name and our people.”
In October, Mick received her full therapist’s license. When she informed Base in a text message, his response surprised her. “I’m proud of you! That’s awesome,” he wrote.
Now, we need you to be invisible, sort of, for about 4 months. We need the State, in all their wild weirdness, to remove their focus from you and put it back on the residents whom we serve.
Satisfying the demands of the state while still providing treatment was a challenge, Base added:
We have to see the long game. The big picture. I want you focused about 45% [on] treatment and perfecting your clinical skills, 40% on learning the political picture and how to navigate with grace and ease, and 15% on the business side.
But Mick had little interest in the political picture, and even less in the business side. She wanted to focus entirely on treatment. She found herself becoming increasingly anxious, worrying constantly about her patients and her job. She never knew when she was about to be reprimanded. She had trouble sleeping, with recurring nightmares of being chased or locked up at Larned herself.
That November, the SPTP had a COVID outbreak. Residents were confined to their units save for brief windows of time to shower or use the phone. Concerned for everyone’s well-being in isolation, Mick planned to deliver their mail to their rooms. But Christine Mohr, the SPTP’s clinical program director, sent Mick an email instructing her not to enter the units. The N95 face mask Mick was planning to wear had not been approved by the SPTP administration, Mohr noted — the kind of bureaucratic hang-up that Mick told me frequently hindered work at the facility.
The next day, however, Mick learned that one of the patients was in distress, and — after receiving permission from a nurse, she says — she went to his unit to check on him. While doing so, she told me, she heard her name called over the intercom, summoning her to the administrative offices. When she arrived, three security guards were waiting. They told her they had orders to escort her from the building. She had been fired, she later learned, for disobeying Mohr’s instructions. They took her badge and walked her off the grounds. Mick had lasted five months.
That night, Mick phoned some of her patients to tell them she wouldn’t be seeing them anymore. They would have to start treatment anew with different therapists.
“You need to stop calling units immediately,” Mohr told Mick over text message. “This is unethical and unprofessional.” Mick responded that it was a measure of respect that her patients deserved. “It is not,” Mohr wrote back. “They’re no longer your responsibility. We will address them and handle it.”
After Mick was fired, she found a job as an outpatient therapist in a community mental-health program, specializing in personality disorders. Her goal is to work with teenagers who have been sexually abused and who have begun exhibiting problematic sexual behaviors of their own — those who she worries are at risk of one day ending up in a place like the SPTP. “What I’m learning is that a lot of these teenagers, all they need is just to be understood and to have a safe place to talk . . . about their trauma,” Mick told me. “They’re kids, and I don’t think they should be called a predator or held accountable for their whole lives. All they need is treatment.”
Mick also joined an informal group of advocates working to bring attention to the ongoing failures of the SPTP. Some have family members in the program, and hope to persuade state legislators to close the facility. They have been grateful for the light Mick has shed on what goes on inside. “She’s brilliant, she’s helpful,” Eldon Dillingham, a local advocate whose son has been civilly committed for more than a decade, told me.
In April, Mick and others from the group traveled to Topeka to distribute pamphlets to state legislators. Mick handed out written testimony about the “abuse, medical and psychological malpractice, and inhumane conditions” she had witnessed at the SPTP. The pretension to treatment there was a “façade,” she wrote, and the SPTP effectively a “shadow prison masking as a treatment facility. . . . These individuals are treated worse than inmates, and with absolutely no oversight regarding their rights.” In her conversations with these lawmakers, Mick was surprised by how little they appeared to know about the program. Some seemed unsure which government department was responsible for it. Out of sight, out of mind: this is the attitude most people seemed to have about those in civil commitment, no matter the human cost. But Mick cannot forget what she saw at Larned. She believes that people like her former patients deserve an honest chance at rehabilitation, and she will keep f ighting for their rights and dignity, no matter how unpopular this cause may be. “They told us that they’d love to see us again at the beginning of this upcoming legislative session,” she told me. “We will be there.”
The reporting is also supported by a grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights in conjunction with Arnold Ventures, as well as a Lipman Fellowship.