“The probe was revealed when an attorney with the Justice Department’s special litigation office recently interviewed a sex offender confined at the Central New York Psychiatric Center in Oneida County.
“Under New York’s decade-old Sex Offender Management and Treatment Act, convicted sex offenders can be kept in secure psychiatric hospitals indefinitely after their prison terms expire. If an offender is found to have a mental abnormality that makes the person likely to commit another sex crime, the state can — after a court hearing — order the offender committed as a patient in a secure psychiatric hospital. (There are currently no women in civil confinement.)”