Ben A. Reid is a halfway house that seems to be having a little retention problem:
Timothy Rosales Jr.: Yet Another Escapee from a Houston Halfway House
Timothy Rosales Jr. is the first rapist of 2011 to escape from the privately
run Ben Reid halfway house, and the second to escape in a little over a month.
The 39-year-old sex offender fled from the Beaumont Highway facility around 6:15 Monday night, according to the Department of Public Safety. He’s considered armed and dangerous. And, like Arthur William Brown, the rapist who escaped in late December, he was able to remove his electronic monitoring ankle bracelet.
We wrote about the unsecured Reid facility, and its parent company, the Florida-based GEO Group, in December. Two months before the story ran, Anthony Ray Ferrell escaped from Reid and allegedly shot and killed a 24-year-old good samaritan who intervened in a gas station purse-snatching. Another rapist split the Reid facility a few weeks before Ferrell slipped out.
Although the place is like a freaking sieve, there is nothing in
GEO’s contract with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice about a
maximum number of vicious sexual predators that can be let loose on the
public in a given amount of time. And once these monsters step off the
Reid premises, they’re no longer GEO’s problem: It is up to actual
real-life law enforcement officers to apprehend the escapees. All GEO
personnel need to do is pick up the phone and make a few calls once they
realize an offender hasn’t returned on time.
I was curious (rather, wanted to confirm my suspicions) about what this place has to offer, so I found their brochure posted online and see that they provide something called Therapeutic Relapse Assistance Program (nice acronym, dumdums). But if you do a search on that “program,” what appears at the top of the search list is… the same brochure, and there is no other reference to this program. Scroll down the brochure, though, and you’ll find this:
Key Services
The following voluntary programs and services help
prepare residents to return to their local communities
and provide for their well being while at the facility.
- Substance abuse and addiction counseling services
are provided through Alcoholics Anonymous and
Narcotics Anonymous.
“Services provided through…”? Really!?! Really. [Channeling Amy Poehler here!]
Maybe they’re having such a hard time keeping people in their facility because they’re using AA’s definitions of retention and recovery. Is this when Recovery Landlords patiently explain “We’re not affiliated with them; they’re affiliated with us.”
BONUS QUESTION: Why do they call people who rape “rapists”? The “ist” at the end makes it sound like some kind of a skill or art. Why not “raper”?
