Montpelier — Vermont courts are stumbling in the dark when sentencing sex offenders, a judge and a state's attorney said yesterday morning at a hearing of the state Senate Judiciary Committee.

The state's chief administrative judge, Amy Davenport, told the committee that judges lack key information about treatment, such as which kind of program will be available to prisoners, and how long it could take to complete.

Other testimony pointed to the likelihood that evaluating sex criminals for treatment before they are sentenced would prove costly.

The Vermont Department of Corrections usually evaluates sex offenders for treatment only after they have been sentenced. A bill before the Vermont Senate, already approved by the House, would give state courts the ability to direct the department to assess a defendant's risk of reoffending and his or her psychological and sexual history prior to sentencing.

"We want as much information as possible ahead of time," Washington County State's Attorney Craig Nolan told the committee. "If we don't have this, we can't make good arguments to the court about what (sentence) is appropriate."

Vermont has three treatment programs, one for highrisk offenders which lasts two to three years and another for moderate to highrisk offenders which lasts from one to two years, said Georgia Cumming, head of the department's sex offender programs. The third program, for lowrisk offenders, began this year, she said.

Pre-sentencing evaluations for all sex offenders would be expensive and would not entirely remove the guesswork from sentencing, Cumming told the committee.

"It's hard at the front end, at the time of sentencing, to make an absolute determination of where someone is going to," said Cumming. "It is really, really hard...to say (treatment will take) 12 months or 24 months."

Also, once sentenced, an offender may change his story, which could affect whether he would be eligible for treatment, Cumming said.

"The offender may say, 'Well, I just copped a plea,' " Cumming said. A prisoner must admit guilt to participate in treatment.

The conversation highlighted what Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Sears called a "huge conflict" between the Corrections Department and the court system.

The Corrections Department did 280 presentencing investigations in 2005, said John Perry, the department's director of planning. Of those, only 56 were for sex offenders, or 20 percent of all offenders sentenced last year.

If the courts asked the department for a presentencing report on most sex offenders, it would increase the total number of reports required of the department by more than 50 percent, Perry said. To meet the demand, it would likely need to hire two or three more officers at a cost of at least $140,000, he estimated. Vermont Defender General Matt Valiero added that if presentencing reports become standard in sex offender cases, his office would also need more money for its own experts.

The potential for creating more work for probation officers, who frequently also perform the risk evaluations, concerns many municipalities, said Karen Horn, representing the Vermont League of Cities & Towns.

The more time county probation officers spend evaluating sex offenders, the less they have to track other types of parolees in the community, which strains local police departments, said Horn.

Some testimony concerned other issues addressed in the bill, such as mandatory minimum and maximum sentences for sex offenders and special investigative units for sex crimes.

Nolan said that, unlike many of his state's attorney colleagues, he agrees with mandatory minimums. However, he believes that a fiveyear minimum for aggravated sexual assault is more appropriate than 10 years or 25 years, he said.

Sears questioned Horn and other witnesses about whether municipalities would be willing to help fund and staff the investigative sex-crime units that the bill would establish in each county.