AUSTIN - As criminals go, these few hundred men officially are labeled the worst of the worst, offenders whose past sexual crimes have branded them as such pariahs that the state has decided to keep them confined in jails and halfway houses and run-down boarding homes across Texas at taxpayer expense, even though they long ago completed their prison sentences.

They were the unknown, until a month ago when the little-known agency that supervises them - the Office of Violent Sex Offender Management - relocated more than two dozen into the Acres Homes neighborhood in north Houston, without any advance public notice, causing controversy and alarm.

A few days later, disclosure of the agency's plan to build a center in rural Liberty County to house perhaps more than 100 offenders there brought immediate local opposition.

But legal experts, former employees and legislators now suggest that the biggest controversy may involve the program itself: Why outpatient treatment supposedly intended to transition offenders out of confinement once they complete rehabilitation programs, never has.

Not one. Not in 15 years.

"The only way out appears to be to die," said Nicolas Hughes, a Harris County assistant public defender who has represented several offenders in the program. "That's not how it's supposed to work. In that regard, it's clearly not constitutional. These people are just being kept locked up."

Proponents of civil commitment programs for sex offenders insist it is legal, pointing to a string of court decisions upholding its strict rules.

While none of the civilly committed offenders ever have been discharged, Allison Taylor, the program's executive director, has said repeatedly that none of the offenders in the program ever have been charged with committing another sexually violent act. "That, to me, is success," she told the Houston Chronicle in 2012.

Taylor, who did not respond to calls for comment, recently has taken official leave, as has program manager Deborah Morgan. Their subordinates now are managing day-to-day operations.

Lauren Carollo, a rape victim and advocate from Fort Bend County who has championed the law for years, believes civil commitment of violent sex offenders is a lawful and prudent means of protecting public safety, despite the legal issues.

"The people complaining are the violent sex criminals and, as far as I'm concerned, they gave up that right when they committed their crime," she said.

Her sentiments echo those of other victims in what, as a part of the current controversy, is a growing debate about the legality of the program.

Program set up in 1991

State Sen. John Whitmire, a Houston Democrat who is chairman of the Criminal Justice Committee, concedes that he has questions about how the program is being run - and whether it's even needed anymore, considering that prison sentences for sexual predators have been increased in the past decade.

"I think there are some serious questions here concerning constitutionality and other issues that we need to examine, not to mention how I believe this program has been out of control administratively for some time," he said. "There's no doubt the current system is not working."

As part of a national trend a decade and a half ago, Texas' civil commitment program was created by the Legislature in 1999 as a way to protect Texans from serial sex predators who were coming out of prison after too-short sentences, without any supervision. As state Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, the architect of the law, explained at the time: "This will better protect the children of Texas and the people of Texas." Whitmire was a co-sponsor.

By last month, about 325 offenders were in the program, roughly half of whom lived in county jails, halfway houses and other semi-secure facilities and the rest who were back in prison for violating the program rules.

To be civilly committed, they must have been convicted of at least two sex crimes. Many now confined have sexually assaulted children and the elderly. Records and interviews by the Houston Chronicle indicate many also are mentally ill or disabled, even blind, men who are supposed to receive treatment so they can eventually graduate and live in the community again with supervision.

In 2003, lawmakers added a provision to the law requiring that offenders who were civilly committed have a "behavioral abnormality" that would cause continuing danger to the public. Deciding which offenders had "behavorial abnormalities" - not a medical condition, but a legal definition - was subject to interpretation by therapists hired by the office managing violent sex offenders.

"It's a subjective determination, in my view, and that's where the legal issues start," Scott Pawgan, a Conroe attorney who has represented several civil-commitment offenders, told a reporter after he pursued an appeal last year. "This process has been sterilized by the state to the point where it favors getting people into this system and keeping them there forever."

Under state law, each of the offenders in the program is supposed to be re-evaluated every two years to determine whether they still have the behavioral abnormality. They also are supposed to participate in a treatment program.

Agency reports show that from 1999 to 2012, no one appears to have graduated. Eight died.

Texas is among 20 states, plus the District of Columbia, that have civil commitment programs to keep sex offenders who are likely to commit new crimes off the streets after they serve their prison time - a concept that the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld as legal, since involuntary confinement is not criminal punishment, but instead is a civil process, and therefore not considered double jeopardy.

"As they've been implemented, it seems plausible to infer that the non-punitive intent that the laws were upheld under has not actually been carried out in practice," said Eric Janus, president and dean of the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, who has studied the constitutionality of civil commitment for sex offenders for nearly 20 years.

The civil commitment statutes in many states including Texas, he said, have not been limited the way they were intended to be to prevent them from becoming programs with no way out.

Challenges elsewhere

So far, the high court has not closely examined that issue, although officials in several other states have been forced to review how their programs are structured, after decisions by lower federal courts that challenged whether treatment was being provided or whether offenders were just being warehoused.

Example: In Minnesota, a federal judge recently questioned the legality of the state's civil commitment program that has included nearly 700 offenders since it began in 1993. The case could mark the first time a court has broadly examined the procedures and practices implemented in any civil commitment program.

Texas is the only state that says its program is based on an outpatient model, even though offenders are kept under round-the-clock supervision and clustered in lockup-style centers such as jails and halfway houses. Offenders' daily lives are closely structured and their movements are restricted. Each offender is required to wear a satellite-monitoring device on their ankle that tracks their every movement, and any time they leave their assigned center they must be escorted.

Janus said Texas' ability to charge the civil-commitment offenders with a third-degree felony for violating the rules "has always struck me as a highly problematic and a highly distinctive part of the Texas law. An agency report states that from 1999 to 2012, 44 percent of the offenders have gone back to prison for rules violations.

"What they've done in a sense is create a private criminal law code for these people, that they've criminalized behavior that for anybody else is not a crime, that it (Texas) seems to mix and match the civil and criminal (laws) in a very problematic way," he said.

The American Psychiatric Association has disputed the use of a "behavioral abnormality" to determine future behavior.

Dr. Paul Appelbaum, chair of the American Psychiatric Associations's committee on judicial action and a member of the council on psychiatry and law, said it appears that statutes relying on that term are intended to allow indefinite confinement of people who have committed criminal acts outside of the correctional system.

"So it's fair to say, that many psychiatrists, including me, see these statutes essentially as a way of dumping a population of offenders into the mental health system for the purpose of holding them indefinitely, rather than accepting that this is a correctional problem that needs to be addressed within criminal justice system," he said.

In the years since the program was established, the Legislature has tweaked the law several times to toughen the program rules. Through all that, the constitutional questions have lingered.

Prior to 2004, many of the offenders were allowed to live at home. But starting then, records show, state officials began moving them back into supervised confinement, filling beds in halfway houses and local jails that were intended for other prisoners.

In 2007, the Legislature increased funding, allowing up to 50 additional offenders to be civilly committed each year.

By 2011, the Legislature made the agency an independent entity, a move that is now being questioned by legislative leaders amid the controversy and investigations.

Appelbaum said he was under the impression that Texas had been remarkably progressive in believing that offenders could be treated in the community.

"It sounds like that is not the case," he said. "They've simply come up with an alternative scheme for what is pretty much de facto in-patient commitment."

Offenders not coddled

Critics and offenders complain that the programs offer little in the way of rehabilitation, even a way to successfully complete the treatment program. In negotiating a contract for the proposed Liberty County center, Taylor removed basketball courts, garden areas, a skill training and other amenities from the site plans to cut costs.

Supporters counter that the program never was designed to coddle offenders, and that Texas is safer because the offenders have no freedom. But statistics provided by the agency show that even while the offenders were allowed to live in the community with supervision as they were years ago, there were no new crimes.

"When these men were allowed to live out in the community, there were no cases of anyone re-offending," said Nancy Bunin, a Houston attorney who once worked for the State Counsel of Offenders, a division of the prison system that provides legal representation for prisoners. "The conditions they require these men to live in are inhumane."

She and other attorneys question why the rules of the program appear to be designed so no one ever graduates. "The most unfair part is there is no meaningful review of them once they've been civilly committed," said Bunin, who represents an offender who has been in the program for more than a decade and has been prevented from completing treatment programs so he can graduate. "My concern is that the regulating agency is so biased against these guys they don't give them a fair evaluation."

Echoing much that same concern is Al Wilson, 63, a former parole officer who, starting in 2009, worked for 18 months as a case manager in the program. He believes he was fired after questioning the fairness of enforcement - and came to the conclusion that the rules were designed to send the offenders back to prison, not allow them to successfully complete their treatment.

As a case manager, Wilson supervised 10 offenders, interviewed them once a week, created their schedules for treatment and watched over them anytime they were allowed outside the facility for medical appointments or visits to the law library. But he watched as offender after offender was cited for minor infractions and sent back to jail or prison.

"If you want to keep them in prison, then by God just say that, be up front about it and just leave them there," he said. "But don't have this ruse."

Wilson recalled one instance where offender Israel Escobar's ankle monitor had accidentally come off while he was playing basketball at the facility. Escobar followed proper procedure and immediately informed program officials of the problem.

Still, Wilson said he was told by a supervisor that a violation was warranted. Court records show Escobar was arrested and charged with violating the program and was sent to Harris County Jail.

"I didn't think it was right," Wilson said. "In this particular case, it was really no fault of his own except that he was out there playing basketball. But they said he shouldn't have been playing basketball. I thought that was excessive."

'No choice, no hope'

Wilson also challenged other decisions. He considers the program a failure, because no one has ever graduated from it.

"If you read the law, the intent is to provide treatment to get these guys to lead productive lives," he said.

Former state Rep. Allen Place, D-Gatesville, an attorney who has represented offenders, told a reporter last year as a legislative committee was considering changes to the law that the program seemed to be designed to hold sex offenders indefinitely.

"Once you get this tag on you, you can't go back up the ladder and get it off," he said. "Most of these people have no money, no choice, no hope. ... I don't know that anyone fully embraced the concept as it is being operated now."