Theodore A. Sypnier, the 100- year-old pedophile looking to be placed on unsupervised release in the community, does not require civil confinement, the state’s top mental health official told lawmakers last week.

Speaking publicly for the first time on Sypnier’s situation, Mental Health Commissioner Michael F. Hogan cited the high cost of incarcerating sex offenders through civil confinement once they complete their prison sentences.

Hogan said Sypnier, who is back in jail pending a parole-violation hearing regarding refusal to comply with sex-offender treatment, does not meet the criteria for civil confinement.

“And so you’re saying your staff did, in this particular case, evaluate this individual and determine he did not suffer from a mental abnormality and was not a clear and present threat to the community, and you declined to refer him to the attorney general for the civil-confinement prosecution?” Assemblyman James P. Hayes, R-Amherst, asked Hogan at an Albany budget hearing.

“That’s correct,” Hogan said. “If he comes up again, we’ll look at him and we’ll plod along.”

Hogan suggested that the high costs of locking up such individuals is considered in evaluating whether the person is likely to reoffend and should be a candidate for civil confinement.

“Our threshold is that if the risk of reoffense is in the range of one-third, then we go forward to the attorney general,” Hogan said.

“What that really means is that to put one of these individuals in a prison costs us about $200,000 a year, and as long as we keep the threshold at about one-third, we’re spending $600,000 a year to have three guys confined, one of whom would have reoffended and two of whom would not have. So we try to do this conservatively,” Hogan said.

That did not sit well with Hayes, who contends that incarceration costs are, on average, $32,000 annually.

A 58-year-old daughter of Sypnier, who says she was raped by him as a girl, described Hogan’s financial considerations as unforgivable.

“The fact that he is putting money ahead of children’s safety is typical of the mind-set and stonewalling my family has encountered for decades,” she said. “I wonder if parents realize their children’s safety is compared to the figure of $200,000. I’m enraged.”

The daughter said that it was particularly difficult to conceive of Hogan’s speaking this way in light of a registered letter she sent him about three weeks ago in which she provided personal details of the attacks she cited against her and other children by her father.

Hayes, in questioning Hogan’s reasoning, said he was outraged by the commissioner’s “one-third judgment call” in rating the level of danger posed by a sex offender.

Hogan, however, argued that his office has done an exceptional job in screening individuals for civil confinement since the law was adopted in 2007 and, because of that scrutiny, has avoided lawsuits challenging the law.

“So far, we’ve screened and not referred over 2,000 of these individuals, and the rearrest record is one-half of 1 percent of them having been charged with any reoffense that was greater than a misdemeanor,” the commissioner said. “When you’re dealing with future behavior, that’s a pretty good track record.”

Hayes said he was unimpressed.

“If ever there was a case for civil confinement, it’s Theodore Sypnier, who has a 60-year history of raping young children. The release of unrepentant and unreformed predators calls for scrutiny of the entire civil-confinement process,” he said.

At present, legislation has been proposed by members of the Western New York delegation to include other state agencies, in addition to the Office of Mental Health, in deciding whether an individual should be considered for court proceedings regarding civil confinement.