Exactly!!! Are people beginning to catch on to the absurdity of sex offender residency restrictions?
Amanda LaRue, a “concerned parent” from Owasso, Oklahoma, spoke to News Channel 8 about a transient registered sex offender near her home. “He loads his car up every night, goes to the gas station, sleeps, and is back home,” LaRue said. “That’s how he’s skirting this law, of being a transient, and not having a permanent address. It’s because his overnights are being spent somewhere else,” she added. But as Tulsa County Assistant District Attorney Madison Shockley pointed out, that’s not violating the laws.
Sex offender residency restrictions, prevent people from living within 1000, 2500, or some other arbitrary distance from places like schools, parks and day cares. During the day, people head off to work, see their family, go where they need to go, but they just can’t live in most places. Here in Florida, that’s generally construed as where they are between 10PM and 6AM. When the Florida Action Committee was working to help the encampment of 100+ people living under the Julia Tuttle Causeway and then along the railroad tracks in Miami, there were dozens of people who woke up under the bridge, went home to shower, went to work, went back home to have dinner with their families and by 10PM the law required them to show up under the bridge again. And lawmakers thought this was somehow making the communities safe!
The irony is glaring. Schools are closed at night. Children aren’t in parks after dark. And beyond that, there are already separate laws prohibiting registrants from being in those places. So what purpose do residency restrictions actually serve other than pushing people into homelessness and making reintegration impossible?
Contrary to Ms. LaRue’s assertion, what the man she’s so concerned about is doing is not “skirting the law”. It’s what he’s required by law to do. Nevertheless, the article we pull the quote from doesn’t seem to get that. News Channel 8 uses the phrases “skirt the law”, “exploit similar legal gray areas”, and suggests “the existing laws leave too much room for abuse”, but nobody is abusing, skirting or exploiting anything! This is exactly what people on the registry are required to do in order to comply with the law!!!
And perhaps the biggest lunacy of all is that sex offender residency restrictions have been repeatedly shown to be ineffective and, in fact, contrary to public safety! (Scroll down if you want the research on it). They don’t reduce re offense. They don’t protect children. In fact, they increase risk by stripping away stability, jobs, housing, and community connections – the very things that prevent re-offending in the first place. This is exactly what the Florida Action Committee has been telling lawmakers for years, but they’ve been too concerned about political popularity and losing the donations from a certain lobbyist to care about public safety. So if Ms. LaRue is truly a concerned parent, maybe the concern should be that the law itself is making your children less safe?
Residency restrictions are bad policy, bad public safety, and bad for everyone. Communities deserve laws grounded in facts, not fear.
Don Hummer, Jill S. Levenson, & Richard Tewksbury, Does Residential Proximity Matter? A Geographic Analysis of Sex Offense Recidivism, 35 Crim. Just. & Behav. 484 (2008). (Found that none of the sexual recidivism cases examined would have been prevented by residency restrictions.); Minn. Dep’t of Corr., Residential Proximity & Sex Offense Recidivism in Minnesota (2007). (Statewide analysis concluded residency restrictions would have, at best, a marginal impact on sexual recidivism.); Beth M. Huebner, Kyle J. Kras & Lindsay Pleggenkuhle, The Effect and Implications of Sex Offender Residence Restrictions: Evidence from a Two-State Evaluation, 13 Criminology & Pub. Pol’y 139 (2014). (Multi-state evaluation found no deterrent effect and documented housing instability and collateral consequences.); Matt R. Nobles, Jill S. Levenson & Tanya Youstin, Effectiveness of Residence Restrictions in Preventing Sex Offense Recidivism, 58 Crime & Delinq. 491 (2012).; (Study of Jacksonville, FL’s ordinance expansion from 1,000 to 2,500 feet showed no reduction in sex crimes or recidivism.); Kelly M. Socia, The Efficacy of County-Level Sex Offender Residence Restrictions in New York, 58 Crime & Delinq. 571 (2012). (County-level restrictions had no observable effect on sex crime rates or recidivism.); Kristen M. Zgoba, Jill S. Levenson, Andrew McKee, Elizabeth Mitchell & Tracie M. Dwyer, Examining the Impact of Sex Offender Residence Restrictions on Housing Availability, 20 Crim. Just. Pol’y Rev. 91 (2009). (Found restrictions sharply reduced available housing without any demonstrated public-safety benefits.); Jill S. Levenson & Leo P. Cotter, The Impact of Sex Offender Residence Restrictions: Evidence from Florida, 49 Int’l J. Offender Therapy & Comp. Criminology 168 (2005). (Registrants reported forced transience, job loss, and instability caused by restrictions, without perceived safety gains.); Jill S. Levenson & Andrea L. Hern, Sex Offender Residence Restrictions: Unintended Consequences and Community Reentry, 21 Crim. Just. Stud. 153 (2008).; (Survey found restrictions undermine stability, and even registrants and community members doubted their effectiveness.); Joanna L. Savage, Sex Offender Residence Restrictions and Sex Crimes Against Children: A State-Level Analysis, 57 J. Crim. Just. 46 (2018). (Found no evidence that residency restrictions reduce child sexual abuse or recidivism rates.); Songman Kang, The Consequences of Sex Offender Residency Restrictions: Evidence from North Carolina, 39 J. Pol’y Modeling 370 (2017). (Restrictions increased property crimes committed by registrants, an unintended criminogenic effect.); Minn. Dep’t of Corr., Research in Brief: Residency Restrictions (2020). (Summarized research base and concluded residency restrictions are politically popular but ineffective in reducing recidivism.); Grant Duwe, Residency Restrictions and Sex Offender Recidivism: Implications for Public Safety, 2 Geography & Pub. Safety 6 (2009). (Review concluded residency restrictions are unlikely to prevent sexual recidivism and may impede successful reentry.)
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Maybe we are looking at this the wrong way. This only affects those people. But what if we broaden, under public safey, we impose our regulations on ALL felons. Think about that percentage to report annually. Think about Powerful people, DUI, Check fraud, drugdealers all forced to be homeless and tear their families apart. Maybe then there would be an out cry to rid the registy. In till it effects a majority of people this won’t go away. Just a thought.
Thank goodness we live in a system where nobody is ever falsely convicted.
But seriously, mindsets like this are why we need the 8th Amendment. A disturbingly large chunk of the citizenry believes whatever punishment the government metes out is fine and never questions it, unless they think it’s too soft. All the facts and evidence in the world mean nothing to them, as long as they have their security theater.
And finally, this article is about someone who is following the law, and people still whine. The SO is not the problem here.
Copy paste from Reddit:
Edited 2d ago
I find focusing on low rates of recidivism to be largely a waste of time. This is an area of policy fueled almost entirely by the availability heuristic: when someone who is an SO commits a subsequent offense, it is always newsworthy and blasted out, and even though recidivism is generally low (because the law is simultaneously premised on risk of recidivism but at the same time indifferent to the reality of a person’s risk), it’s what occupies people’s minds. Even if only 5-10% of people on the registry reoffend, in terms of raw numbers, that’s still a lot of people and more than enough to confirm people’s biases based on media coverage. The media isn’t going to report on the majority of people who have lived successfully in their communities for years and decades and raised families and paid taxes, for example, who are the vast majority of the million or so people on them.
My thinking is that these kinds of discussions have include reasons why, irrespective of rates of recidivism, registries are bad policy (e.g., they don’t work to reduce recidivism, we have evidence-based models of reentry that do work to reduce recidivism but don’t use them, and that even if registries were effective, given that almost all sexual violence is attributed to people without past convictions known to the victim, their reach is necessarily limited and that there are better uses of resources to prevent sexual violence).
However, the problem is that after a decade plus of engaging in these kinds of discussions, I’m also not sure that people generally are interested in preventing sexual violence, and I’m not sure that’s the actual purpose of registries in America (even if that’s their stated aim). I think they serve powerful sociological functions in American culture that perpetuate the problems they purport to solve, but those are things no amount of data is going to be an effective answer to.
Have a good day Florida!
In my lawsuit here in Illinois, the district court judge opined that laws cannot produce absurd results. And the fact that I can be at my house all day while a home daycare is open yet I must leave at night when the home daycare is not in operation, produces an absurd result.
Some of you may remember, my case went to IL Supreme Court. It was remanded for my as-applied challenge. This is the main point that I have planned on bringing to the attention of the court.
Just remember, we can’t elicit change unless people all over the country keep bringing challenges. Look at the Montana Supreme Court decision a few years back. In that decision, they said registration is widely accepted as punishment.
I’m a former college football player, a disabled veteran and former coach. I don’t give up easily. I may get knocked down but I WILL figure out a way to beat someone. Never give up hope!
God bless you all.
Martin
Martin, regardless of your circumstances, thank you for serving our country. Shame for any of us to be on the registry but very frustrating when a veteran is on the registry, homeless or unable to get benefits.
Yea, sorry but am I reading this right, the individual wanted the registrant to be punished for following the law? So, the legislatures lawfare system of perpetual punishment isn’t enough, now they want criminal convictions for Not Breaking The Law?
The Absurdity of Sex Offender Residency Restrictions
The article highlights a critical issue with sex offender residency restrictions, exposing a system that is not only ineffective but also counterproductive to public safety. Amanda LaRue’s frustration with a transient sex offender in Owasso, Oklahoma, reflects a broader public misunderstanding: the belief that strict compliance with these laws somehow equates to “skirting” them. The reality, as the article and Assistant District Attorney Madison Shockley clarify, is that the individual is doing exactly what the law demands—maintaining a transient status to avoid violating arbitrary residency restrictions. Yet, this compliance fuels outrage among those who championed these laws in the first place. The irony is palpable: people are angry that sex offenders are following the rules, revealing a deeper flaw in the legislation itself. These laws, meant to protect communities, are instead destabilizing them by pushing registrants into homelessness, undermining rehabilitation, and creating a cycle of punishment that serves no one—not the public, not the registrants, and certainly not the cause of justice.
The Ineffectiveness of Residency Restrictions
Residency restrictions, which prohibit registered sex offenders from living within a certain distance (e.g., 1,000 or 2,500 feet) of schools, parks, or daycares, are rooted in fear rather than evidence. As the article notes, multiple studies—spanning over a decade—demonstrate that these laws do not reduce recidivism or protect children. For instance, Hummer, Levenson, and Tewksbury (2008) found that none of the sexual recidivism cases they examined would have been prevented by residency restrictions. Similarly, the Minnesota Department of Corrections (2007) concluded that these laws have, at best, a marginal impact on sexual recidivism. Other studies, like Nobles, Levenson, and Youstin (2012), showed no reduction in sex crimes after Jacksonville, Florida, expanded its restriction zone from 1,000 to 2,500 feet. These findings are consistent across jurisdictions, from New York (Socia, 2012) to North Carolina (Kang, 2017), where restrictions not only failed to deter sex crimes but also increased other criminal behaviors, such as property crimes, due to the instability they create. The logic behind these laws assumes that proximity to certain locations inherently increases the risk of reoffending. However, as the article points out, schools and parks are typically empty at night when these restrictions are enforced (e.g., Florida’s 10 PM to 6 AM rule). Moreover, separate laws already prohibit registrants from loitering in these areas during operational hours, rendering residency restrictions redundant. The result is a policy that punishes presence rather than behavior, forcing individuals into transient lifestyles or, as seen in Miami’s Julia Tuttle Causeway encampment, into homelessness. This instability—marked by job loss, severed family ties, and lack of housing—directly contradicts the factors known to reduce recidivism: stable employment, social support, and community integration.
The Public’s Misguided Anger
The public’s reaction, as exemplified by Ms. LaRue, underscores a troubling paradox: the very laws designed to assuage community fears are now fueling frustration when they are followed. LaRue’s complaint that the sex offender “skirt[s] the law” by sleeping at a gas station and returning home during the day reveals a misunderstanding of what compliance entails. The individual is not exploiting a loophole; he is adhering to the letter of the law, which requires him to maintain a transient status to avoid living within restricted zones. This compliance, however, is perceived as a betrayal of the law’s intent, leading to calls for stricter measures or punishment for following the rules. News Channel 8’s framing—using terms like “exploit” and “abuse”—further muddies the waters and is entirely deceptive to the public, perpetuating the myth that registrants are inherently manipulative rather than navigating an impossible system. This anger reflects a deeper issue: the public expects these laws to deliver a silver bullet of absolute safety, a promise they were never capable of fulfilling. The research cited in the article, such as Levenson and Cotter (2005) and Levenson and Hern (2008), shows that residency restrictions create unintended consequences—transience, job loss, and social isolation—without any measurable public safety benefits. Even community members and registrants themselves, as noted in Levenson and Hern’s survey, doubt the effectiveness of these laws. Yet, the public’s frustration is misdirected at those complying with the law rather than at the lawmakers who continue to uphold these flawed policies for political gain, as the article suggests.
The Burden on Communities and Law Enforcement
The enforcement of residency restrictions places an undue burden on communities and law enforcement, who are tasked with monitoring registrants to ensure compliance with rules that serve no proven purpose. In Florida, for example, law enforcement must track where registrants are between 10 PM and 6 AM, a resource-intensive endeavor that diverts attention from more effective crime-prevention strategies. The Miami encampment, where over 100 registrants were forced to live under a bridge or along railroad tracks, is a stark example of this absurdity. These individuals were not hiding or evading the law; they were complying with it, yet their compliance created a public safety nightmare—concentrated populations of destabilized individuals with nowhere else to go. Law enforcement officers, already stretched thin, must spend countless hours verifying addresses, investigating transient statuses, and responding to community complaints like LaRue’s. This creates a vicious cycle: resources are wasted on monitoring compliant behavior, while the underlying issues—such as the lack of housing options or support for reintegration—are ignored. The article’s reference to the Florida Action Committee’s advocacy highlights how lawmakers have prioritized political popularity over evidence-based policy, leaving communities and law enforcement to deal with the fallout.
A Call for Evidence-Based Reform
If Ms. LaRue and others like her are truly concerned about public safety, the focus should shift from vilifying compliant registrants to demanding legislative reform. The research is clear: residency restrictions do not work. They do not reduce recidivism (Duwe, 2009), they do not protect children (Savage, 2018), and they may even increase crime by destabilizing registrants (Kang, 2017). Instead of punishing individuals for following the law, communities should advocate for policies that promote stability and rehabilitation. This includes access to affordable housing, employment opportunities, and community-based support programs—factors that have been shown to reduce reoffending. The current system is a lose-lose proposition. Registrants are pushed to the margins, unable to reintegrate, while communities are left with a false sense of security and a strained law enforcement system. The outrage directed at individuals like the one in Owasso should be redirected toward lawmakers who continue to ignore the evidence. As the article suggests, communities deserve laws grounded in facts, not fear. It’s long past time to dismantle residency restrictions and replace them with policies that actually enhance public safety.
Conclusion
The absurdity of sex offender residency restrictions lies not in how registrants navigate them but in the laws themselves. By punishing compliance and creating instability, these laws fail everyone—communities, law enforcement, and registrants alike. The public’s anger, as voiced by Ms. LaRue, is understandable but misplaced. Instead of targeting those who follow the rules, we should demand accountability from a system that perpetuates ineffective, fear-driven policies. The research is unequivocal: residency restrictions do not make us safer. It’s time for a reckoning—one that prioritizes evidence over emotion and rehabilitation over retribution.
Personal Note
Let’s give our politicians a resounding and thunderous round of applause for their legislative masterminding, those sly foxes who’ve woven sex offender residency restrictions into a sadistic tapestry of eternal punishment, all cloaked in the laughable lie of “public safety.” It takes a special breed of audacity to ignore the avalanche of evidence—Hummer, Levenson, and Tewksbury (2008), Minnesota DOC (2020), Nobles et al. (2012)—proving these laws don’t reduce recidivism or protect anyone, while Levenson and Cotter (2005) and Kang (2017) show they destabilize lives and *increase* crime. Yet, our ever-vigilant incompetent lawmakers, keep these laws to force registrants into homelessness, fully knowing they’re as effective as used toilet paper. IMO, this isn’t really bumbling idiocy; it’s a deliberate perpetual desert of traps forged against people who have been law abiding, in a cruel, unending cycle of collateral consequences, dressed up as forced compliance. Why fix what lets you pander to fear and pocket lobbyist cash? Bravo, legislature, for crafting a forever systemic cruel and unusual punishment while winking at the public with a smug, “Mission accomplished.”
Good commentary – might want to send this to the news outlet.
I have long said, but only recently published it more since the EO was printed about homelessness, etc, that legislatures and Congress legislate homelessness, unemployment, etc when it comes to those impacted by their laws. They may not realize it when they are considering the laws they are discussing in committee and on the respective floors before voting. Whether they know it or not, the alleged un-intentional punishing nature of it is never in question, though should be. There is enough data and info nowadays for those elected and appointed officials to know better when this topic comes up for PFRs. Political cred is addictive and powerful, especially when needed prior to re-election or election times. So much so, they cannot be seem to be bothered to realistically review this entire situation at any time, sadly.
Follow the law and don’t commit a sex offending act then there’s no worries. Or, be a sex offender and end up crying the blues here.
Mr. Anderson
Doesn’t always happen like you think. Be that as it may Doesn’t change the fact that the registry is a punishment beyond what the courts adjudicate.