Raymond Younis sex offender registry photo

Syracuse, NY - Raymond Younis had a way of reaching young boys.

The divorced father befriended single mothers and shuttled their sons, ages 6 to 13, to and from school in the village of Phoenix. He babysat them and listened to their problems.

But Younis wasn't the father figure he appeared to be. Three times in 1984, he handcuffed a 10-year-old boy in his bedroom, stripped him naked and took photographs. For that, Younis spent two years in jail.

A decade later, Younis struck again. When authorities raided his apartment in 1997, they found videos of up to 30 young boys in various stages of undress and a stolen .38-caliber gun he used to threaten victims.

The laundromat worker attracted infamy as one of the most prolific sex offenders in Central New York history. He did his time in state prison, but state officials did not want him to go free another time.

So they turned to a little-known New York state weapon called "civil confinement," an indefinite legal purgatory that has elements of bonus prison time and mandatory mental health care.

Raymond Younis at time of arrest

"If a dog repeatedly attacks people, we put it down," Oswego County District Attorney Gregory Oakes said in June. "Unfortunately, we don't have that option with Mr. Younis, so civil confinement is the next best option."

This much is sure: Civil confinement can make the worst sex offenders go away - possibly forever. And while debate continues over whether the government should take away their freedom indefinitely, there's no doubt it has ended the threat of hundreds of dangerous sex offenders from preying on the public again.

» Search sex offenders confined after prison

Confined sex offenders include a rapist who targeted sleeping children, a karate instructor who sodomized young boys and a man with AIDS who caused a mini-epidemic by raping young girls.

Central New York Psychiatric Center, in Marcy, Oneida County, where civil confinement sex offenders are held.

They could be Younis's neighbors if he is confined in this costly system, which operates mostly in secret.

All of the sex offenders sent into civil confinement have done their time, but they're not free. They don't know when they're getting out. And no one can tell them.

They were sent there by a group of people they don't know. Once a year, they get a shot at freedom, but they probably won't be freed. Only 18 percent have been released since 2007.

Younis begins his journey into civil confinement with a confidential jury trial. If he's confined, he'll virtually fall off the face of the Earth. His record will be private. He will be afforded none of the public disclosure given a mass murderer.

He'll go to a mental hospital, where he's supposed to pour out his deepest, darkest secrets. He'll be treated like a patient with invasive measurements: sexual arousals monitored, books screened and journals scoured.

The process that New York uses to determine which sex offenders should be confined.

The unique system ensnares fewer than 1 percent of the state's 37,000 sex offenders, those for whom prison and the sex registry aren't enough. There are 286 men - and no women - confined in this one-of-a-kind corner of the criminal justice system.

Related: Inside a closed courtroom: What happens in a sex offender civil proceeding

This confinement is constitutional, so long as the state attempts to help the offenders control their perverse urges. But there's no scientific proof that the treatment works for most of them.

These men are no longer considered prison inmates, but hospital patients in need of treatment. They are housed in two places: the Central New York Psychiatric Center, a secure mental health hospital in Marcy, and the St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center in Ogdensburg.

It costs about $200,000 a year for each offender. That's based on the program's 2013 cost of about $56 million, according to a 2013 state audit.



Rushing to an answer

The program's motivation -- to remove dangerous sex offenders from the street -- was clear from the start in 2005.

That year, a Downstate woman was stabbed to death in a mall parking structure by recently paroled sex offender Phillip Grant. Westchester County officials clamored for a sex offender confinement law.

Then-Gov. George Pataki had been a vocal proponent of such a law since 1998, the governor said in an interview with Fox News host Bill O'Reilly. But he blamed state Assembly leaders at the time for not bringing it to a vote.

Opponents were making "the same old argument," Pataki told another Fox News host, Glenn Beck, in 2007. "There are those who would rather have 50 sexual predators out on the street than one who they believe might have been wrongfully confined," Pataki said.

After the White Plains stabbing, Pataki ordered the state's Office of Mental Health to find a way, without the legislature's approval, to confine sex offenders.

A mental health official testified that the office had only days to come up with the criteria for confinement, according to a U.S. Court of Appeals history of the law. A department e-mail expressed concern that doctors were not experienced in determining which sex offenders posed the greatest risk.

One doctor noted that she was now being asked to predict the future, something not done before under the mental health law. Other doctors were uncomfortable using a technique that predicts what crimes an offender might commit, the court noted.

In the end, Pataki's initiative was found to be unconstitutional. By then, however, the state legislature had taken up the cause, passing the civil confinement statute in effect today. The current law stresses the need for treatment to allow the indefinite confinement.

Former New York Gov. George Pataki, left, arrives for a Federal Court appearance, in New York, in 2013. Pataki testified about how more than 100 sex offenders came to be involuntarily institutionalized when they finished prison sentences. His testimony came in a civil trial in Manhattan federal court after six convicted sex offenders sued Pataki and the state.

A group of sex offenders sued Pataki in 2013 for the botched confinement program, but a jury only awarded them $1.

Critics say the rush to confine sex offenders has created a realm of questionable science used to make society feel safer.

An American Psychiatric Association task force condemned indefinite confinement of sex offenders as early as 1998, saying its opposition was needed "to preserve the moral authority of the profession."

"We were concerned that psychiatry was being used to preventively detain a class of people for whom confinement rather than treatment was the real goal," said Dr. Paul Appelbaum, the task force's leader, after their report was released. "This struck many people as a misuse of psychiatry."

If treatment was the primary goal, the APA argued, couldn't sex offenders get their intensive help while still in prison?

But a Syracuse judge - one of three statewide with the power to release confined sex offenders -- is impressed with the program's balance of protecting society while treating offenders.

Onondaga County County Court Judge Joseph Fahey, who oversees annual reviews for confined sex offenders.

"For the past couple hundred years in New York, we have been convicting and imprisoning people for sex offenses. They've served their sentences and gone out and re-offended," said Onondaga County Court Judge Joseph Fahey. "Now, you have a winnowing of people who are determined to be suffering from mental abnormalities."

Coming this week:

» Serial Oswego County sex offender attacks civil confinement law

» What controversial treatment does NY use for confined sex offenders?

» Syracuse judge says pedophiles he's seen were victims of their own crime