The police photograph is chilling. In grainy black and white tones, it shows 13-year-old Martin Andrews sitting in a makeshift box, his leg chained. The look in his eyes is one of fear, fatigue and disbelief. He had just been rescued from a nightmare.

"I was abducted by a sexually violent predator by the name of Richard Ausley, who had been twice convicted for sexually assaulting young boys, and he had taken me for eight days," Andrews recalled of his ordeal 37 years ago this month. "I was left to die."

As a survivor of a sex crime, Andrews is one face of an issue the Supreme Court will revisit Tuesday: civil commitment, which allows the government to keep sex offenders in custody even after they have served their sentences. Twenty states have such laws, including Virginia, where Andrews was held captive and repeatedly assaulted.

CNN normally doesn't name victims of sex crimes, but Andrews, now a victims' advocate, agreed to tell his story.

On the other side of the debate is the first sex offender released from Virginia's civil commitment program, and one of just a handful nationwide.

"I served my time for what I did, and I didn't feel like I should be incarcerated again," said this man, who asked that his identity not be revealed for fear of retribution. "It was a scary thing to know that you could be committed to a mental institution for the rest of your life."

The man said mandatory therapy helped him, but he thinks that could have been initiated while he was in prison.

There is widespread disagreement on whether civil commitment is a Catch-22. In discussions of the effects of sex crimes, nothing is simple or dispassionate.

The practice of confinement in mental hospitals or treatment centers for those with severe mental illness has been around the United States since its founding. Around the turn of the 20th century, many laws dealing with sexual psychopaths were passed. Over the decades, the laws were repealed or rarely applied.

Then, in 1990, Washington state became the first to pass an innovative civil commitment law specifically for violent sex offenders. California, Wisconsin and New York, among others, later followed. Such "predator laws" focused on risk assessment and prevention of re-offending. It is a concept that the general public may not be aware exists.

The Supreme Court has upheld the use of such laws when the individual goal is rehabilitation, not further "punishment." But it has another, broader purpose.

"The primary goal is incapacitation, that is, protecting society from people who are predicted to be dangerous in the future," said Eric Janus, author of "Failure to Protect" and dean at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota. "The second goal is to provide treatment to these individuals."

Critics of these programs say behavioral rehabilitation centers amount to prisons, are often overcrowded and understaffed, and rarely meet the stated goal of treating the "worst of the worst" offenders to the point they can rejoin society.

"The evidence is showing that it's only becoming a detainment center for people they do not went on the streets," said Derek Logue, a convicted pedophile who was released and now advocates for offender rights through his Web site, oncefallen.com. "They have no hope of getting out, and the odds are stacked against you."

According to Justice Department statistics, 20 states use civil confinement, involving about 4,000 rapists, pedophiles and other sex offenders nationwide. Estimates are that these programs cost taxpayers more than $700 million a year, almost $150,000 per individual. That is about four times more than confining them in prison.

Virginia passed its civil commitment law in 1999 but had never fully funded it. Andrews found out from a reporter in 2002 that his attacker was just weeks away from being released after 29 years behind bars. Once a victim, now an empowered advocate, Andrews realized he had to act.

"I didn't know about other sex offenders. I didn't know about the extent of the problem. I only knew one, but I knew that one needed to be dealt with," Andrews, 50, said from his northern Virginia home, where he works as a program manger for a defense contractor. State officials, he said, "all told me there was nothing to be done; he was going to be set free; that was it."

But Andrews mobilized, lobbying lawmakers to quickly fund the program, despite a budget shortfall. It worked, and the state has become a national model, using a tool called "Static 99" that assesses which offenders qualify for civil commitment.

Andrews' attacker remained behind bars but was killed by a fellow inmate before ever going into the treatment program.

The catalyst for the state's change were once-dormant memories for Andrews, who now knew that he had to tell his story.

As a teenager in Portsmouth in 1973, Andrews was walking to the store in snowy weather when a van pulled up and the man inside asked the boy whether he wanted to earn some extra money moving furniture. Andrews agreed but instead was taken to a rural area and a metal box dug into the side of a hill.

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