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| Female sex offender joins male inmates at prison |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 05/10/2004 |
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For the past six years, convicted child rapist Laura Faye McCollum has lived a lonely existence inside the state's women's prison. Last week, she moved to the new Special Commitment Center on McNeil Island to live among 190 other dangerous sex offenders -- all of them men. McCollum is worried about attending therapy sessions with the men, and many experts say treating both genders together could be harmful. "Would you want to sit in a bunch of men who talk about what they did to women and how they'd like to do that to women again?" McCollum said. She was convicted in 1990 of repeatedly raping an 18-month-old girl and trying to suffocate her. She has admitted to sexually assaulting 15 children -- mostly girls ages 2 or 3. McCollum, 46, is one of only three female sex offenders in the nation considered dangerous enough to be civilly committed -- a process by which offenders are sent indefinitely to tightly controlled treatment programs after they have completed their criminal sentences. The other women -- one in California and one in Minnesota -- are housed and treated apart from men. If McCollum is put into group therapy with men, it will be with offenders who do not pose a threat to her, said Alan McLaughlin, an associate superintendent at the Special Commitment Center. State officials say the new center is better equipped to handle McCollum's needs. She now lives in a mobile home on the grounds of the women's prison. "I believe things will be better for her in the new facility," said McLaughlin, who added that McCollum will be housed in a separate wing from the men. |
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