"Congress barred prison inmates from receiving Pell Grants in 1994, but said nothing about residents of civil-commitment centers, which were emerging at the time," The Chronicle of Higher Education reports. "The centers, which house rapists and child molesters who have served their prison sentences but are deemed a continued threat to society, inhabit a kind of legal middle ground, with a status somewhere between those of prisons and treatment facilities. It is unclear how many offenders are receiving Pell Grants. That's because the grants flow directly to students, bypassing center administrators."