14 DAY TRIAL // Hard days for rapists...
Now, in 18 US states, if a convicted sexual offender is found at the psychiatric assessment as prone to relapse, he could be locked up indefinitely in a secure mental facility.
Thousands of rapists who have already served their jail terms are kept incarcerated in mental institutions, but there is a huge controversy about the assessment methods that put them there.
Others criticize the fact that this costs more than a quarter of a billion dollars yearly to implement and is ineffective in decreasing levels of sexual.
Many countries, like UK, Australia and Canada, adopted harsher sentencing for sex offenders, particularly those who abuse children.
By May 2006, 3646 individuals were being held in the US under these laws.
2627 had been committed as dangerous sexual predators, while the other 1019 were waiting for their evaluations to be completed.
Few can expect to be released any time soon.
Just 427 of 3493 offenders detained since 1990 had been released by 2004.
The US Supreme Court has ruled that civil commitment can be applied only to convicted sex criminals who presented a mental disorder that makes them likely to commit further sexually violent acts.
The problem is that many sex offenders do not easily fit any of the categories defined by the American Psychiatric Association in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
The DSM lists a range of conditions as paraphilias: intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges or behaviors that recur over a period of at least six months.
Sexual sadism and pedophilia are regarded as paraphilias, yet only a minority of rapists has sadistic fantasies, and even child abusers are not always pedophiles.
Critics of civil commitment say that some offenders are being characterized into diagnoses that do not apply, to satisfy the Supreme Court's requirement to allow them to be detained.
Psychiatrists stress that being a sexual offender does not necessarily make you mentally ill.
Michael First, a psychiatrist at Columbia University in New York, signals that diagnoses made for the purpose of civil commitment proceedings often confuse persistent criminal behavior with mental illness.
Of 2082 diagnoses recorded in May 2006, 1135 detainees had been marked down as pedophiles, while 692 were evaluated as belonging to the catch-all category of "paraphilia (not otherwise specified)".
Eric Janus of the William Mitchell College of Law, Minnesota, says that diagnoses can be manipulated.
Just 25 % of those committed in 1993 were diagnosed with a paraphilia, but by 1996, the figure for newly committed men was more than 90 % and by 2001 the number reached 97 %, including many who were not given this diagnosis when they were first detained.
Jill Levenson, who studies criminal justice policy at Lynn University, Florida, compared the diagnoses made by different professional psychiatric evaluators for nearly 300 offenders.
She found that in 85 % of cases, two evaluators coincided on if or not an offender was a pedophile, but in case of paraphilia, the level of agreement dropped to 68 %.
"No one is quite sure what counts as a mental disorder," Janus argues.
In this case, how can courts deliver sentences based on psychiatric diagnoses?
The second major flaw in the system relates to the methods used to assess the likelihood that a particular individual will reoffend if released.
Here, evaluators rely heavily on actuarial risk assessments.
This is like calculating a person's car insurance premiums given the crime rate in their neighborhood, the extent of their driving experience, and so on.
The assessment is based on elements like the extent of their prior offending, the sex of their victims, and whether these victims were strangers or not, but this involves statistics.
However, the findings are simple enough: the tools are better than expert clinicians at predicting whether a sexual offender will reoffend.
"The assessment tool most commonly used in US civil commitment proceedings, the best that risk-assessment tools can achieve is to identify a high-risk group - encompassing between 10 and 15 % of all sex offenders - who have about a 60 % chance of being reconvicted within 15 years of release." said Karl Hanson of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Canada in Ottawa.
This means that 40 % of those kept locked up would not have been reconvicted within 15 years had they been released instead.
"In practice, civil commitment proceedings are even less likely to accurately predict reoffending," said Raymond Knight, a psychologist at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.
In the hearings, risk assessments are typically biased by other factors considered relevant by professional evaluators, like individual's psychiatric profile.
"Clinicians are very bad at weighting new information and adding it to an actuarial assessment," said Knight.
The reconviction rates may underestimate offending, as many sex crimes go unreported or their perpetrators aren't discovered; it's clear that many of those retained under civil commitment would not reoffend if released.
"Are assessment tools accurate enough to take away people's liberty prospectively? My answer would be no," Janus concludes.
"These laws have been developed with more concern for public protection than civil liberties," says Cynthia Calkins Mercado, a clinical psychologist at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice in New York.
A research monitoring 270,000 prisoners (rapists made 4 %) released in 1994 across 15 US states found that after three years, sex offenders were on average about four times as likely to be involved in a subsequent sex offence as those previously jailed for other crimes.
But of those subsequently arrested for sexual offences, 87 % had been previously jailed for some other type of crime.
Moreover, statistics show that 79 % of the sex crimes (including with children) are made by people who have never been convicted of any crime.
People dislike the fact that sex offenders are widespread throughout society, that's why the public and media demonize convicted offenders, and in response, politicians devise laws like civil commitment.
"It's a way of articulating society's condemnation of sexual violence without doing anything fundamental about it," said Janus.