The sex offender zoning laws going into effect in various communities around the country are starting to have the entirely predictable, and ultimately counterproductive, effect (CNN):
The Florida Department of Corrections says there are fewer and fewer places in Miami-Dade County where sex offenders can live because the county has some of the strongest restrictions against this kind of criminal in the country.
Florida’s solution: house the convicted felons under a bridge that forms one part of the causeway.
The Julia Tuttle Causeway, which links Miami to Miami Beach, offers no running water, no electricity and little protection from nasty weather. It’s not an ideal solution, Department of Corrections Officials told CNN, but at least the state knows where the sex offenders are.
According to the article, all five of the men living under this bridge were convicted of sex offenses against children; obviously, there’s no sympathy for them — from Polimom or anyone else. But if the goal of sex offender registration is monitoring and community awareness, then driving people underground is unbelievable short-sighted.
“The tougher they’re making these laws unfortunately it’s scaring offenders and they’re saying, ‘You know what, the best thing for me to do is run,'” Morales said.
A Miami Herald investigation two years ago found that 1,800 sex offenders in Florida were unaccounted for after violating probation.
1,800 sex offenders unaccounted for? That’s danged scary — except that catch-all phrase tells Floridians absolutely nothing about whether those 1,800 offenders are dangerous to their children. Yet in the mind of the public, the term “sex offender” automatically evokes Jessica Lunsford or Shasta Groene — an association that conflates radically different levels of crimes and criminals. In our fevered imaginations, every sex offender is a pedophilic predator — and as the registries expand to include ever-more crimes, this confusion is going to get worse rather than better.
Lumping the 21-year-old who had sex with his 17-year-old girlfriend, or the 13-year-old who got hot and heavy with a 12-year-old, in with someone like Joseph Duncan is idiocy — yet it’s done regularly, all over the country. The Dallas Morning News has a series about the problems in Texas, for instance. Or see if you think all the offenders listed on the Seabrook, TX city page are dangerous to children; they must be, since they’re required to live 2,000 feet or more from children’s gathering-places. Or how about my own zipcode here in Katy, where26 sex offenders are listed ( enter the zip on the search by address form), and almost no details are available. Were the victims in their households, where the vast majority of crimes occur? Or were they strangers, and the offender lured them away from safety?
The distinctions matter enormously.
Unfortunately, even if authorities ever do manage to straighten out the sex offender laws and reclassify so that we’re only trying to keep up with the most dangerous group, there will still be problems.
Florida’s system for monitoring them needs to be fixed, says state Senator Dave Aronberg, who proposed a bill to increase electronic monitoring and create a uniform statewide limit that would keep them 1,500 feet away from places where children go.
‘We need to know where these people are at all times,” Aronberg said after CNN invited him to tour the bridge where the sex offenders live. “We need residency restrictions, but just don’t have this hodgepodge of every city having something different.”
Folks, if we have a class of criminal that is so dangerous that we need to know where they are at all times, then they should never be allowed back into society, because there’s absolutely no other way to know where someone is “at all times”.
Will electronic monitoring tell law enforcement whether children are simultaneously present at an offender’s location? No. Are cities and communities planning to erect barriers 1,500 / 2,000 / 2,500 feet around “places where children go” to keep offenders from entering the area? Of course not.
Laws that drive child predators underground are not just empty political grandstanding, they’re dangerous. There’s nothing scarier than a desperate individual who has no hope, and nothing left to lose.
Society is setting itself up for progressively worse problems. We’ve got to stop this lunacy.
It’s kinda sad, actually… society says that these people need to be prosecuted, ‘cuz that is the only way that they can be required to “get help” — then, it turns out that the “help” they receive is having their names/addresses publicised for every vigilante wannabe with a taste for blood, being put back in prison any time a “mandatory evacuation” is called (this is after they have served their sentence), and when they are ‘free’ being required to live in places which would incur judical outrage if, for example, the poor or battered women were required to live there by government edict.
You got that right. I wonder how many of ‘these people’ are sitting out there, a tragedy for some family in the making, because they don’t dare seek any type of help lest they get scooped up in the witchhunt?
And the saddest thing? Many abusers were themselves abused as children. So, if the Bill O’Reillys of the world take this lunacy to its logical conclusion, we can look forward to the day when the victims of child abuse will be treated as pariahs by the very society that failed them. TYC, anyone?
~EdT.
Ah, the inevitable result of flawed thinking. One of the reasons the Constitution is a succinct document is because our Founding Fathers understood that less is more, legally speaking.
Virtually every new law makes the legal morass the U.S. is in worse. Far better to have a few laws that we strictly enforce than to continually add to an already unwieldy mess.
Specifically in regard to sex offenses, the core issues are consent and a minimum age to give it. Seems pretty simple to define.
What complicates matters is a perceived need to regulate the question of age disparity. But is that crucial?
This is wrong from both humanitarian and community safety perspectives. I won’t get a lot of support saying that this is clearly cruel and unusual punishment as well as a violation of Ex Post Facto prohibitions. In general, the public doesn’t care, even if the offender has consensual sex or got caught watering the forestry. What the hysterical public should at least care about is the danger these laws pose to our safety and that of our children. A desperate offender for whom jail is a safer, more comfortable environment has nothing to lose. Although not all offenders are being forced under bridges, the increasing restrictions across the country continue to destabilize offenders, thus making offending (sexual or otherwise) more likely.
The public and politicians need to heed the research and implement prevention and management policies that actually work instead of just throwing more laws at this problem.