BRIDGEWATER, Mass. — A notorious figure in the Boston Roman Catholic priest sex abuse scandal was released from prison Friday morning after completing a 12-year sentence for the rape of a boy in the 1980s.

Massachusetts prison officials say Paul Shanley, 86, was released from the Old Colony Correctional Center in Bridgewater on Friday. They did not provide an exact time.

The state’s sex offender registry lists Shanley as a Level 3 offender, meaning he is most likely to re-offend. The registry says Shanley will be living in an apartment in Ware, a town of about 10,000 residents about 65 miles (105 kilometers) west of Boston. State law prohibits people from using information in the registry to harass people.

Abuse victims say they’re concerned Shanley, who isn’t required to wear an electronic monitoring device, will not have enough supervision.

“Paul Shanley should be in a hospital being treated and not in the outside world where he can easily gain access to innocent children,” Mitchell Garabedian, a lawyer who represented dozens of men who said they were abused by Shanley.

Shanley’s lawyer says he’s served his time and is not dangerous.

Shanley was a “street priest” who ministered to alienated youth in the 1960s and ’70s. Decades later, dozens of men came forward and said Shanley had molested or raped them. He was defrocked by the Vatican and was convicted of raping a boy at a Newton parish.

A protest was planned outside the Bridgewater prison Friday.

 In this Feb. 7, 2005 file photo, defrocked priest Paul Shanley, a figure in the sex scandal that rocked the Boston Roman Catholic Archdiocese, stands prior to the reading of a verdict in his trial at Middlesex Superior Court in Cambridge, Mass. Shanley was convicted of raping and fondling a boy at his Roman Catholic church during the 1980s and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Shanley is due to be released Friday, July 28, 2017. (Mark Garfinkel/The Boston Herald via AP, Pool, File)