James Sturtz (above) began his long history of incarceration in 1980 when he raped a 4 year old girl. During his first stay in prison he earned his G.E.D. and trained to be a janitor but when he was released his rehabilitation didn’t take. In 1989 as he was convicted of pulling a knife on a woman in an attempted rape.

In 1994 he was convicted of a brutal knife point rape that sent him to prison of a 12 year stretch that ended in 2006. Clearly too dangerous to be released he was civilly committed until such a time as he was deemed safe. Unfortunately, a loophole in the law makes Sturtz, and hundreds of high risk sex offenders who have been committed to treatment centers, eligible for government financial aid for college courses as they are no longer technically prisoners:

MADISON, Wis. – James Sturtz is not your ordinary college student struggling to pay tuition.

The 48-year-old rapist is one of Iowa’s most dangerous sex offenders, locked up in a state-run treatment center for fear he will attack again if released. Yet he has received thousands of dollars in federal aid to take college courses through the mail.

Across the nation, dozens of sexual predators have been taking higher education classes at taxpayer expense while confined by the courts to treatment centers. Critics say they are exploiting a loophole to receive Pell Grants, the nation’s premier financial aid program for low-income students.

Prison inmates are ineligible for Pell Grants under a 1994 law. Students convicted of certain drug offenses are also ineligible. But sexual predators qualify once they are transferred from prison to treatment centers.

“This is the most insane waste of taxpayer money that I have seen in my eight years in Congress,” said Rep. Ric Keller, R-Fla., who is pushing to stop the practice. “It is a national embarrassment that we are wasting taxpayer dollars for pedophiles and rapists to take college courses while hardworking young people from lower-class families are flipping hamburgers to pay for college.”

Moreover, some institutions report that sex offenders are putting the financial aid to questionable uses by buying such things as clothes, a DVD player and music CDs — sometimes, after they have dropped out of school. Pell Grants can legally be put toward expenses that are education-related. But the unused portion of a grant is supposed to be repaid when someone withdraws from school.

Why would anyone support such asinine hairbrainery? What’s the theory behind allowing sex offenders to use limited resources that are being diverted from the truly deserving?

Some say taking away the financial aid for correspondence courses would be a mistake. They say education could help sex offenders build stable lives and reduce their chances of committing another crime if they are ever released.

Education didn’t stop Sturtz from committing two more rapes after achieving a G.E.D. and job training. Education is not a panacea for criminality and rapists don’t attack people because they can’t find jobs. That’s a lesson lost on many proponents of rehabilitation programs.

Most are scamming the system and using the Pell Grants as an ATM machine:

In Iowa, 14 offenders in the Cherokee Mental Health Institute have received Pell Grants in recent years, said administrator Jason Smith. He said nine of them dropped courses after receiving money.

Some patients used their money to buy a DVD player, a television, a radio, music CDs and movies, Smith said. Because of vague guidelines, staff members could not determine whether those were inappropriate expenditures, he said.

In California, a number of predators living at the Coalinga State Hospital receive Pell Grants, said Department of Mental Health spokeswoman Nancy Kincaid. But she said the hospital has no way of tracking who gets them or how much money they receive.

Representatives of other states, including Kansas and Minnesota, said they could not recall sex offenders signing up for Pell Grants. Other states said they had no idea whether that was the case.

“They don’t really tell us what they are doing. They have a lot of liberties they want to exercise without our oversight,” said Dr. Henry Richards, superintendent of the Special Commitment Center in Washington state, where some patients take correspondence courses.

Keller introduced his bill to ban the practice after a newspaper reported in 2003 that 54 offenders at one Florida center got $200,000 in Pell Grants in one year.

In other words, hundreds of thousands of dollars are being flushed down the toilet by people who’d rape you as soon as look at you. And there is no upside, these people are not being rehabilitated by mail order college courses. But that’s a view some Democrats in Congress and liberal activists think is too “mean spirited”

Some Democratic members of Congress and others say it would be counterproductive to put up a barrier to education for sex offenders who are trying to rehabilitate themselves.

“These are people who we want to prepare to go into the communities. They need to have access to educational programs,” Richards said. “I think the numbers of committed persons aren’t so large they would significantly preclude other citizens from taking advantage of educational support. To preclude them seems mean-spirited to me.”

Meanwhile Sturtz above has dropped the majority of his courses and used his leftover grant money to buy clothes. His victims pay for their own.