"Yet not one of the more than 700 sex offenders who have been civilly committed in Minnesota over the past two decades has actually gone home."

"And only a few men have been provisionally discharged to live outside of state facilities under strict supervision."

“You knew you were going to die here,” said Craig Bolte, a sex offender who has been held here nine years and who says he would rather be sent to prison, where “there is still hope.”

But now Minnesota’s civil commitment program — which detains more people per capita than any other state — is facing an overhaul. Earlier this year, a federal judge found it unconstitutional, calling it “a punitive system that segregates and indefinitely detains a class of potentially dangerous individuals without the safeguards of the criminal justice system.”