Gov. Lawton Chiles signed into law the Jimmy Ryce Act in 1996. Claudine and Don Ryce were on hand. Photo by Charles Trainor Jr.

The day Douglas Gray was set to leave prison, authorities slapped shackles on him and shipped him to a secure treatment center in a desolate corner of Florida -- where the state's worst sexual offenders are held even after serving their time.

	Gray

Behind the tall fences and razor wire of the Florida Civil Commitment Center, the 40-year-old child rapist was supposed to learn how to curb his deviant urges. He was supposed to accept responsibility for his crimes. He was supposed to develop empathy for his victims.

But none of that happened.

There were no polygraph tests to gauge his honesty. No examinations to mark his arousal patterns.

Instead, he spent one year eating, sleeping and waiting -- until he was released in June 2002 without a single hour of therapy to help him tame the impulses that turned him into a sexual monster.

Free and back on the prowl, Gray didn't last long on the outside.

Fifteen months after his release, he wooed a 14-year-old Broward County girl over a telephone chat line, had sex with the child -- and when she told him she didn't want to see him anymore, he beat her and forced her to perform oral sex on him.

''They should have kept that man in there for treatment,'' the girl's mother told The Miami Herald. "If you just let them out, they're going to do the same thing. My daughter hasn't been the same since.''

Gray is among hundreds of sexual offenders who fell through the cracks of an obscure state program created in 1998 to protect the public from men who prey on the weak and the vulnerable.

Each year, state psychologists screen thousands of sexual offenders before they're released from prison to look for signs of mental disorders that make them likely to commit new sex crimes.

Rather than set them free, the law allows a drastic measure to ensure they won't ever cross the line again: Keep them locked inside a treatment center until they delve into the depths of their minds and overcome their sicknesses.

They are allowed to leave only if psychologists say they no longer pose a threat to the community, and a court agrees.

Lawmakers coined it the Jimmy Ryce Act, in memory of the 9-year-old Miami-Dade County boy who was sexually assaulted, murdered and buried inside several large planters by a handyman in 1995.

But seven years after the law's passage, Florida's program for screening, confining and treating sexual offenders who pose the greatest threat to women and children is failing, a six-month investigation by The Miami Herald found.

Woefully underfunded and barely regulated, the Jimmy Ryce Act stands as an example of how lawmakers are quick to react to heinous crimes like the Ryce murder but often fail to stay the course once the stories fade from the spotlight.