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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Love this Op Ed you all wrote. It, IMO, needs to be pinned to the front page continually for reference due to the studies cited but also for the fact of the matter opinion which could be used to argue with those who just want to punish others for the sake of punishing the beyond what is necessary.
More thought.
How can we get that article to every person in the house and senat of FL
It is so powerful and hits the nail right on the head!
How this isn’t a human rights violation, I will never understand. It seems rights are for everyone, except of course, those on the registry. Someone tell me exactly when the constitution and the bill of rights were modified?
The shock I experienced to hear that this woman thinks she has the right to track this person’s movements 24 hours a day! Wow. We’ve really turned a corner.
Forget that the person owns a home that he/she can’t even sleep in anymore!
Forget that the person has to sleep in a gas station – every single night!
Forget that the person has (probably long ago) paid the just punishment for whatever crime they committed.
Forget all that. Apparently that person and their situation doesn’t matter to Amanda LaRue, whom that person has done nothing to whatsoever except to exist too close to her.
How can we as Americans think this is just? Like I said, we’ve turned a corner when we have no regard for people anymore and think our opinions and preferences should be forced on everyone else.
Very good post.
Unfortunately it’s true. PFR retro here. Being hungry and living week to week is not enough punishment to satisfy the anxiety and anger of the general public.
We have all been dealt with in a court of law. Now we face a jury on the outside of court. Some of us long after completion and removal from list.
Living Under a bridge or next to a train track? I’ve seen this first hand. People are complaining yet have no idea of the actual plight or history. People are waking up to this fact. Is it a real threat or imagined? Is there something more to this situation?
The moral compass that directs the soul toward justice has ossified into utter darkness of ignorance.
Only a few will agree with us. Those are people who don’t use emotions as facts.
Mr President please repeal SORNA. Spend the money somewhere else sir. Repeal the abomination of SORNA. You can restore justice. I beg you sir.
That was a great post!