When you are a registered sex offender in America, you lose the right to choose where you want to live. By law. Your backstory doesnt matter. Nor does the nature of your crime or your excuse. You are exiled from society, and only a few places will welcome you. Like this place in South Florida. The City of Refuge. Jay Kirk reports on life in an American community—yes, that’s definitely the right word—like no other

I suppose in this case I am the offender. I got things confused and showed up a day early, but my hosts were more than forgiving. They’ve got their own little colony out in the cane fields. Down here in Pahokee, Florida. They call it City of Refuge.

As everybody now knows, sex offenders have a rough time of it after they get out of prison. Because of the registry. Because the state says they can’t live within a thousand feet of a school or a playground or a bus stop. Because they can’t live anywhere children assemble, etc. So they end up living out of their cars, under highway overpasses, or in the woods, like fearful animals, like homeless lepers. You could say they’re lucky to be here, even if it is four miles from anything resembling a town, not much of a resemblance at that, and the “city” (really more of a village) being just a lonely former barracks built by U.S. Sugar for migrant workers in the ’60s. Sixty-one concrete bungalows on twenty-four acres, with 120 resident offenders at any given time, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of acres of sweet, sugary nothing. A couple of dozen older Jamaicans still live here, too, but the sex offenders arrived six and a half years ago when Pat Powers, an offender himself, came and claimed the place in the name of Jesus Christ. They live in this exile, of course, because there is nothing lower than their kind.

Considering how welcoming they are, however, I’m inclined to resist the urge to assume the worst—and anyway, I don’t particularly want to know the specifics of any of their crimes. Society has already exacted its debt, is my thinking.

I arrived on a Sunday and found my new friends just finishing up a game of touch football. Everyone was all sweaty and out of breath and still laughing about how one of the guys, Glenn, had been running a fake reverse and collided with a clothesline pole.

I apologized profusely for showing up early and offered to find a motel for the night, but one of the guys, Ted, said it wasn’t a problem, not at all, we’re happy to have you, we’ll fix you up in our guest room. Then he introduced me to his wife, Rose. He did it very formal, like: Jay, I’d like you to meet my wife, Rose. Rose, who isn’t the only woman in the village but who is the only registered female sex offender. I apologized some more to Rose, who has faded green tattoos on her fleshy arms and the oblique demeanor of a log-truck dispatcher, but she shrugged and made a joke that I was welcome so long as I didn’t snore.

Since most of the guys were in shorts and flip-flops, it was easy to notice their ankle monitors, including one on a thuggish-looking kid with a shaved head and messed-up teeth who greets me, “Hey, Random Dude.”

Another guy, a fratty blond with a brohawk who’s spitting into a water bottle, turns out to be Glenn, the one who collided with the clothesline pole. He wants to tell me about his real home.

“I can’t live there,” he says. “I have a house in Palm Beach Gardens I can’t go to.” He shows me pictures on his phone. “A swimming pool. Jacuzzi. Banana trees.”

Glenn looks and sounds like Matt Damon except for some pretty heavy-duty scarification on the inside of his arm. He’s otherwise very clean-cut, bright, originally from L.A. He flips through more pictures. “I mean, that’s the master bedroom.”

The place is 5,700 square feet. Three and a half acres. His dad bought it. Glenn was going to live there rent-free when he got out, but the statute for the city of Palm Beach Gardens says sex offenders can’t live within 2,500 feet of anywhere minors might conceivably convene. They confuse the hell out of you, he says, since the distance varies. The state of Florida says 1,000 feet, but other municipalities, even within the same county, have different statutes. So it’s 2,000 feet here, who knows what there. The sheriff, probation officers, nobody can keep it straight. You start to feel like they’re just making it up as they go along. That’s one thing that makes life at City of Refuge easier: You’re not within 2,500 feet of anything.

“But where are we supposed to go? How are we supposed to get a job?” Glenn pauses to spit in his water bottle. “I spoke to my probation officer this morning. I had a job lined up, I was going to work in the fast-food industry just to make ends meet. But because there was gonna be minors working with me, I couldn’t.”

He said the reason he’d gone to prison was the same for a bunch of the younger guys here: the statutory boyfriend-girlfriend thing. It wasn’t that they were all child molesters. They’d had 15- or 16-year-old girlfriends when they themselves were 18 or 19. Yes, the laws are that draconian. And yes, it’s shitty that they can end up doing fifteen years in prison and then get put on the registry as sex offenders for the rest of their lives. Also shitty that there doesn’t seem to be much distinction in the eyes of the law between their crimes and the crimes committed by the least equivocal and unmitigated of sexual predators, a number of whom I will get to meet over the following days.

That is, a sex offender is a sex offender, and you’re branded for decades or even life. In the eyes of society, as sex offenders, they are all equally guilty. All treated with equal abhorrence. If it weren’t for City of Refuge, they’d be out there on their own. Here is exile that is also asylum from the larger, unforgiving world. Here is, weirdly enough, real community. And when I say community, I don’t mean that bourgeois civic vagueness you always hear the co-op crowd chattering about. I mean the kind of community that would protect you from vigilantes intent on dragging you out of bed in the middle of the night to take turns kicking your teeth down your throat.

I wake the next morning to the rustle of cane outside my window and the smell of bacon frying. I lie here awhile, ensconced like a spoiled cherub in piles of gold and red throw pillows and a downy gold bedspread, looking out the window at a pitiless geometry of cane fields. They grid out as far as the eye can measure. In the distance is an enormous plume of black smoke above an orange plinth of flame. I have no idea what it means.

In the living room, the whole house is as fragrant as an ice cream shop on a warm summer day. Rose is still in her nightie on the couch where I left her last night, playing a game on her cell phone with a mini stylus, feet on the glass coffee table between a vase of white roses and a burning vanilla candle.

When she pours me a mug of coffee, I comment on the huge letters eat hanging on the kitchen wall. Rose smiles and says the sign was a Christmas present from a neighbor. Then she waits a beat and says how, when he gave it to her, she went, Am I supposed to put that in the kitchen or in the bedroom? Another beat. She goes: I’d prefer the bedroom.

That’s when a freshly showered Ted enters, chuckling in his smoky, affable way, to join me at the table. “It’s very much just a regular community here,” he says. There are several married couples and a few with kids. They’ve even got one stay-at-home dad who’s a registered predator. A really sweet guy named Andy.

Ted and Rose themselves got married three years ago, in September, just after Ted was re-released for a probation violation. They met in the village. Rose says how her probation officer, Officer Cox, wouldn’t let her go on a honeymoon. That’s because Rose had a 10 P.M. curfew then. Officer Cox is like that, a real hacksaw. She’ll hit you with a parole violation for a hangnail. Like, for instance, Rose has got a big soft spot for Winnie the Pooh, as I’ve already gleaned from the couple’s video collection. But one day Officer Cox shows up unannounced, barges in, and wags her finger at all the Winnie the Pooh dolls and the pictures of Rose’s children, who, per terms and conditions of probation, Rose was barred from seeing, and she goes: I want all this shit out of here or you’re gettin’ violated. Just like that. All this shit.

Over breakfast, Ted tells me that if I want, I can sit in on an intake call, which is a conference call they’re having with a possible new resident. The man’s getting released from prison in a month, and he’ll need somewhere to live. Ted says they’ve got the vacancy now because of Earl, the current black eye on the village. Earl just got sent back to prison for twenty-three years for trying to contact his victim on Facebook. Big mistake. Ted tells me how he and Pat had gone to Earl’s hearings. Then he tells me that when Earl’s victim testified, it made Ted remember that he had created a victim, too, and by the way he looks me in the eye, I can truly sense that some kinds of regret must have a longer half-life than others: “Earl was delusional. He thought his victim really liked him. So Earl never saw the pain he caused. That’s just a reminder to me of the very real pain that we’ve caused people. If there’s any one thing that prevents me from ever re-offending…”

He falls silent, holding his breakfast sandwich mid-air, a pained wonder testing his eyes.

“I never, ever want to bring harm to another person. Believe me. Going to Earl’s hearing—” he sets down his drippy sandwich as if suddenly repulsed—”it was more disgust with knowing that I caused a similar pain. That’s where my disgust was, not with Earl. It was with myself.”

When it’s time for the intake meeting, Ted gives Rose a peck on the cheek and we walk over to Pat’s, two houses down, where, on the porch, Pat’s dog naps in the shadow of a ratty bench press.

“Good morning!”

“Good morning!”

The men are gathered around the kitchen table: Pat and their intake manager, Jerry, and Chad, a younger guy with peroxide bangs who’s rubbing his shoulders and moaning a bit from their football game yesterday.