As expected, laws meant to restrict where sex offenders live are having an unintended consequence: increased homelessness. Sentencing Law & Policy has more. From the Washington Post:
Strict new laws aimed at keeping track of sex offenders after they leave prison appear to be having the opposite effect, encouraging homelessness in a population believed more likely to re-offend if cast into the streets without structure or family support, say prosecutors, police, parole officials and experts on managing sex offenders.
The issue is starkest in California, where the number of sex crime parolees registering as transient has jumped more than 800 percent since Proposition 83 was passed in November 2006. The "Jessica's Law" initiative imposed strict residency rules and called for all offenders to wear Global Positioning System bracelets for the rest of their lives.
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Named for a 9-year-old Florida girl raped and murdered by a convicted sex offender, the provision passed by a wide margin that reflected the powerful public emotion that experts and law enforcement officials say in this instance trumped sound policy.
"The public definitely was sold a bill of goods on this one," said Detective Diane Webb, supervisor of the Los Angeles Police Department unit that tracks 5,000 sex offenders in Los Angeles County. "Unfortunately, it bodes well for politicians to support it because the public does have this false sense of security that this is somehow protecting them when it's not."
Locating legal housing for offenders has become so difficult in urban California that when parole officers find an apartment building beyond the exclusion zones, they often pile in as many offenders as the landlord will accept. When neighbors notice, the cluster spurs protests that prompt lawmakers to pass even tighter exclusion zones as Proposition 83 allows.
In Long Beach, the City Council this year passed a bill expanding such zones to areas near child-care centers and beaches after residents learned of 19 offenders living in a small apartment building. The provision made it nearly impossible to house a sex crime parolee in the city of 500,000.
Nearby Carson followed suit after parole officers placed 30 offenders in a hotel in a light industrial area. Pomona included areas near railroad stations and bus stops.
"If you want to game the system, you use your redevelopment agency to buy up vacant lots and turn them into 'pocket parks,' " Carson City Attorney William Wynder told a gathering of officials from affected communities in the fall. The idea: Design the equivalent of San Francisco, where the dense geography of schools and parks rendered the entire city an exclusion zone.
"It is almost geo-spatially impossible to house a sex offender in San Francisco," said Suzanne Brown-McBride, who chairs the California Sex Offender Management Board. The board, created by the legislature, this month issued a report lamenting the unintended consequences of Jessica's Law.
"Common sense leads to the conclusion that a community cannot be safer when sex offenders are homeless," the report said.
The issue is starkest in California, where the number of sex crime parolees registering as transient has jumped more than 800 percent since Proposition 83 was passed in November 2006. The "Jessica's Law" initiative imposed strict residency rules and called for all offenders to wear Global Positioning System bracelets for the rest of their lives.
ad_icon
Named for a 9-year-old Florida girl raped and murdered by a convicted sex offender, the provision passed by a wide margin that reflected the powerful public emotion that experts and law enforcement officials say in this instance trumped sound policy.
"The public definitely was sold a bill of goods on this one," said Detective Diane Webb, supervisor of the Los Angeles Police Department unit that tracks 5,000 sex offenders in Los Angeles County. "Unfortunately, it bodes well for politicians to support it because the public does have this false sense of security that this is somehow protecting them when it's not."
Locating legal housing for offenders has become so difficult in urban California that when parole officers find an apartment building beyond the exclusion zones, they often pile in as many offenders as the landlord will accept. When neighbors notice, the cluster spurs protests that prompt lawmakers to pass even tighter exclusion zones as Proposition 83 allows.
In Long Beach, the City Council this year passed a bill expanding such zones to areas near child-care centers and beaches after residents learned of 19 offenders living in a small apartment building. The provision made it nearly impossible to house a sex crime parolee in the city of 500,000.
Nearby Carson followed suit after parole officers placed 30 offenders in a hotel in a light industrial area. Pomona included areas near railroad stations and bus stops.
"If you want to game the system, you use your redevelopment agency to buy up vacant lots and turn them into 'pocket parks,' " Carson City Attorney William Wynder told a gathering of officials from affected communities in the fall. The idea: Design the equivalent of San Francisco, where the dense geography of schools and parks rendered the entire city an exclusion zone.
"It is almost geo-spatially impossible to house a sex offender in San Francisco," said Suzanne Brown-McBride, who chairs the California Sex Offender Management Board. The board, created by the legislature, this month issued a report lamenting the unintended consequences of Jessica's Law.
"Common sense leads to the conclusion that a community cannot be safer when sex offenders are homeless," the report said.
I have been a Registered Sex Offender for a very long time. Registration, and especially ALL of the illegal tag-along laws that it has enabled, has never and will never keep me from committing any type of crime. Further, if I did decide to commit a crime, none of it would help law enforcement in any way. I know all this for a fact.
The only thing that Registration has accomplished is to piss me off to a level that I can't explain and very effectively turn me into someone who cares much, much less about the United States or any communities within it. A long time ago, prior to Registration, I was very patriotic and felt every citizen had a duty to serve the United States and local communities. I was a good, giving citizen. Now I don't care much and I don't feel I owe anyone anything. Now the United States and various internal governments owe me and the debt grows every day.
These laws are unacceptable. I don't care if 300 million people say they are, they are not. And as long as they exist I will be retaliating against them and doing anything and everything that I think people who support these laws would like for me not to do (as long as it is legal). Of course, that includes being around hundreds of children all the time in many different situations. I don't even particularly care for children, but I feel I now have a moral imperative to be around them.
Every time I see people discussing how Residency Restrictions (i.e. Banishment) might be counter-productive they are always talking about how it makes more Registrants homeless and "harder to track". I think they are missing the mark. I am not homeless and can't imagine I ever will be, but I guarantee you that I am not being tracked. Because, and only because, of Registration and the rest, I am making CERTAIN that I am not being tracked or monitored to even the slightest degree (no matter how trivial).
It has taken me a long time to get to where I am now and I hate that I can't just ignore these laws and be a contributing citizen. But, I'm not going to sit around and just let these criminal politicians and the scumbags who support them do anything they like. What they have done is immoral, anti-factual, and completely un-American (e.g. applying more and more retroactive punishments to people with ZERO proof (less than zero, really) that it is needed or will do anything productive). It is unacceptable and now, unlike their fabricated, hysterical lies about me being a problem as a "sex offender", now they have a REAL problem on their hands. A problem that actually exists and will have a real impact.
Posted by: disillusion1998 | January 16, 2009 at 12:13 PM