When most people hear the phrase “court-ordered therapy,” they picture something helpful. A trained clinician. A private room. A person working through problems so they don’t repeat them. That mental image is comforting, and it is one of the main reasons the public rarely questions what happens inside mandated sex offense treatment programs.
The reality described by a listener writing in from a South Dakota prison looks nothing like that image. In this segment of Registry Matters, Andy and Larry work through a letter that lays out, in plain numbers, what a person must do and pay in order to walk out the door. Three weekly classes. A polygraph. A price tag that changes depending on when you pay it. A requirement to describe your private sexual history out loud to a room full of other prisoners. And, if the polygraph doesn’t work on you, a device that measures physical arousal while you look at images.
What follows is a breakdown of what was described, why the hosts are skeptical, and what people facing these requirements should actually be asking.
The listener — hoping to submit a commutation application and be paroled in under two years — recently learned that the Department of Corrections requires attendance at three separate weekly classes. They are called therapy classes.
Here is the structure as he understood it:
- Class one: 12 weeks long, no charge, but mandatory. It must be completed along with a polygraph examination before release.
- Class two: 12 months long, weekly, and available while still incarcerated. He only learned this after the fact, which cost him time he can’t get back.
- Class three: No information available. He suspects nobody ever got that far in the explanation.
Ongoing weekly costs run $50 to $90 per session. The polygraph costs $100 if paid before parole, or $325 if you don’t have the money up front.
Read that last line again. The same test costs more than three times as much if you’re broke. That pricing structure is what prompted his blunt assessment: “I’m sensing a money machine.”
Attendance Isn’t Optional — and Neither Is the Drive
The enforcement side is where the human cost becomes visible.
Miss a class, or show up late, and you risk being sent back to prison as a violator. That’s the whole rule. There’s no meaningful distinction between skipping and being delayed by weather, traffic, illness, or a car that won’t start.
The listener offered an example that should stop anyone cold. His former cellmate Don was 93 years old. Don’s wife drove him one hour each way to Sioux Falls every single week so he could sit in a required class. She kept doing it until he died.
Think about what that requirement assumed: that a man in his nineties had a spouse healthy enough to drive, a working vehicle, gas money, and the physical stamina for a two-hour round trip weekly. Strip away any one of those and the same requirement becomes a ticket back to a cell — not because of anything he did, but because of what he could no longer manage.
This is how compliance costs quietly become a wealth test. People with money, family support, and reliable transportation clear the bar. People without those things fail it and get labeled violators.
“Share Your Fantasies” — With the Room
The part of the program the listener objects to most strongly isn’t the money. It’s the disclosure.
Somewhere in the required coursework, participants must share their private sexual experiences and fantasies — not privately with a licensed clinician, but out loud, with fellow inmates in the room alongside the instructors.
He drew a pointed comparison. He’d just watched a news story about a woman awarded $40 million in a privacy lawsuit involving TikTok. Meanwhile, in a state facility, disclosure of the most intimate details of a person’s life is a checkbox required for freedom. His view: it “reeks of porn so others can learn how to be more deviant.” And he noted that no other category of offense — with the possible exception of substance-related programs — demands this level of intrusion into a person’s inner life.
Larry didn’t have South Dakota specifics, but he recognized the pattern immediately. He’s described this model for years with a phrase worth remembering: a collaborative fishing expedition. Not treatment aimed at a known problem. A search, conducted with the subject’s forced cooperation, for anything else that might be there.
Who Pays? The Medicare and Medicaid Question
The listener hoped Medicare or Medicaid would cover the weekly fees. Larry was doubtful, and his reasoning is worth understanding.
- Social Security benefits are suspended during incarceration, which complicates the Medicare picture immediately.
- Medicare eligibility flows from age, blindness, or disability — none of which automatically means it will cover a correctional program fee.
- Some states can access Medicaid funding for incarcerated people at certain stages, but this varies enormously and shouldn’t be assumed.
Larry also noted the political irony he’s watched play out for decades: the states loudest about federal overreach are frequently first in line with their hands out for federal dollars.
His practical advice was simple. Don’t build your release plan around coverage you haven’t confirmed. If the classes are required to get out, the money will have to come from somewhere — so start identifying that somewhere now, not the week before your hearing.
The Polygraph Problem Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud
A standard requirement in these programs is a sexual history disclosure, followed by a polygraph examination testing the answers.
Larry raised the obvious flaw. A 79-year-old man is not going to remember every sexual episode of his entire life — unless he only ever had one. How would anyone document that? How would anyone verify it? And what happens when an honest person fails a test because memory is imperfect?
The listener described a case that shows where this logic ends up. A man in one of his classes had genuine memory problems, and his instructor acknowledged it: I can’t trust your polygraph results, because you might not even recall what you did.
The solution wasn’t to abandon the testing. It was to escalate to a different device.
The Plethysmograph: Measuring the Body, Judging the Mind
The device is a penile plethysmograph. The hosts had some fun with the pronunciation before getting to the substance, and the comedy is doing real work here — it makes an uncomfortable topic possible to discuss.
Mechanically: imagine a blood pressure cuff, scaled down and placed on the genitals. The subject is shown images. The device measures physical arousal response.
Andy’s objection cuts to the core: so what?
Suppose someone registers a response to a particular image. That doesn’t establish they’ve done anything. It doesn’t establish they will. He offered two comparisons that land hard:
- Show a violent offender images of violence — does a reaction prove a future act?
- Show a person in recovery pictures of drugs — does a reaction prove relapse?
Larry’s answer was direct: it’s thought crime. Arousal is not conduct. A physiological reading is not a prediction.
He did allow a theoretical case for the technology. If a program genuinely wanted to help someone build impulse control, knowing where the pressure points are could inform real therapeutic work. But that’s not how it’s deployed. “Nothing is used legitimately” was his assessment.
The GPS Precedent: How Tools Become Revenue
Larry’s most useful contribution is a pattern he’s watched repeat for decades, and GPS monitoring is the cleanest example.
When electronic monitoring was introduced, the pitch was straightforward and appealing. We can track people continuously, so we can release them. Prisons will empty. Taxpayers will save enormous sums.
What actually happened:
- Very few people were released who wouldn’t have been released anyway.
- Prison populations did not meaningfully drop.
- Monitoring expanded outward — now nearly everyone on pretrial supervision wears a device.
- An entirely new supervision apparatus was created, with an entirely new revenue stream attached.
The technology didn’t replace incarceration. It extended control over a much larger population, and someone got paid at every step.
Larry expects testing devices to follow the same arc. Introduced as a tool for narrow, careful use. Expanded into a routine requirement. Billed to the person required to take it.
What Real Treatment Would Look Like
The segment’s most affecting story is about a man who did exactly what we tell people to do.
He was struggling. Driving home past a park, he found his attention going where he didn’t want it to go, and many of the people there were minors. So he called the probation department, believing he’d reached a help line. He said out loud that he needed help.
He was detained.
In a functioning therapeutic system, that call is the best possible outcome. It’s a person identifying a risk before anything happens and reaching out. Larry described what a real response would have been: Okay. Let’s work on those urges. Tell me what you’re thinking.
Instead, the honesty became the evidence. And every person who hears that story learns the lesson the system actually teaches: never tell them anything.
Andy identified the structural reason this can’t work as designed. Private, self-selected, one-on-one treatment with a provider you chose is a genuinely different thing — it can build the trust therapy depends on. But a mandated classroom with a dozen other people in it, where disclosures may be reported and non-professionals are listening, isn’t a therapeutic environment. It’s a data collection exercise wearing a therapy label.
Why “It’ll Save Money” Isn’t Enough
Larry closed with a hard truth for advocates. A man in Colorado working to get people off the registry asked what his strongest argument was. When he led with cost savings, Larry’s response was blunt: that argument does nothing. Keep going. What else do you have?
Society is being taken for a ride on these programs — and by and large, it doesn’t care. Fiscal appeals assume the public is optimizing for efficiency. On this issue, it isn’t. Reform arguments have to reach further: due process, the difference between thought and conduct, the fact that punishing honesty makes everyone less safe.
Three Takeaways
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Get every requirement in writing, early. The listener lost time because he didn’t know a 12-month class could be completed while still inside. Ask for the full sequence, the timeline, and the total cost the day you become eligible — not the month before your hearing.
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Solve the money problem before you need it. Don’t assume Medicare or Medicaid coverage. Confirm it in writing, and if you can’t, identify family support, nonprofit assistance, or a payment plan. Note especially that prepaying a polygraph can save $225.
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Understand that disclosure is not confidential. Anything shared in a mandated group setting is shared with non-professionals and may be used in supervision decisions. That’s not a reason to lie — lying carries its own severe consequences — but it is a reason to know exactly what you’re walking into and to ask about confidentiality limits before you speak.
Help Wanted
Larry closed the segment with a direct request. Neither host has detailed knowledge of South Dakota’s specific program structure, and the listener needs real answers before he files. If you’ve been through these classes, know the funding rules, or can point to the governing policy, reach out to the show by email or phone. Larry is in regular contact with him and will pass along anything reliable.
That’s how this works. The information doesn’t come from the agencies. It comes from the people who’ve already had to live it.