FAC Weekly Update 2025-11-10-HB45 will not Protect Children

Weekly update for November 10, 2025. This is recording number 338.

Dear Members and Advocates,

On July 27, 1981, Adam Walsh was abducted from a Sears store in Hollywood, Florida. On June 21, 2013, Cherish Perrywinkle was kidnapped from a Walmart in Jacksonville, Florida. Both of these tragedies are every parent’s worst nightmare and both became the emotional catalysts for laws that create sweeping restrictions against people required to register as sex offenders.

If these crimes are happening at Florida stores, a law that prohibits registrants from living within 1,000 feet of department or grocery stores would sound logical, right? Reasonable, even. Who could possibly vote against a “child protection” law like that? But let’s look at this from a slightly less emotional and more mathematical perspective. There are more than 900,000 people currently on the registry nationwide. Everyone needs to eat. Everyone needs household essentials. That means registrants make roughly 45 million trips to these stores each year without abducting or molesting anyone. If the registry were truly a predictor of future crime, that number would look a lot different. I’ve left Costco with more rotisserie chickens than I can count — but never with anyone else’s kid. As a parent, I understand the instinct to say “yes” to anything that promises to keep children safe. But as someone who’s lived under these laws for over two decades, I know that emotion-driven policy is not effective policy.

Last week in Ohio, Representatives Mark Hiner and Sean Brennan introduced House Bill 514, which would make it illegal for anyone convicted of a sexual offense to maintain a “Little Free Library” on their property (those “take a book, leave a book” boxes that encourage reading and community sharing). Apparently, one registrant had one on their lawn, so the legislature decided the entire registry population should be banned. The same bill would also prohibit registrants from requesting public records containing photos or videos from public swimming pools — even though, as Safety Service Director Tanner Salyers admitted, city leaders aren’t aware of any incidents where this has been requested, but they want to be proactive to “prevent future problems”. Logical, right? Common sense? Clearly someone seems to think so if they are proposing laws to ban it.

Which brings us to what’s currently going on closer to home, Florida Rep. Plakon is pushing HB 45, which would add public swimming pools and bathing areas to the list of places that registrants can’t live within 1,000 feet of. The justification? A story from Seminole County about a registrant who happened to live near a pool — and because there was no law to prevent it, apparently, one must be written.

Florida has 8,426 miles of shoreline along the Atlantic and the Gulf coasts, more than 7,700 lakes that are 10 acres or larger (including Lake Okeechobee, which itself is about 448,000 acres), over 30,000 other lakes and ponds, and hundreds of thousands of swimming pools. Approximately 80% of the habitable land mass of Florida would be a banishment zone for registrants and thousands of families would potentially have to relocate (or would be prevented from moving from their current homes – for life)! The proposed expansion of banishment zones under HB 45 will amplify the already significant problem of homeless registrants exponentially. But is there any evidence that proximity to a swimming pool or a lake, or a “Little Free Library” correlates with sexual reoffending? Of course not. But laws like these don’t need data to pass. They just need a good story and an ambitious politician eager to show they’re “protecting the children.”

Rep. Plakon’s bill is a horrible bill. It is unsupported by any research showing it would be effective in preventing sexual recidivism, it is unsupported by any facts demonstrating the need for it, and it would needlessly destabilize the lives of thousands of registrants and families long after they have served their sentences. Worse, there is a wealth of empirical evidence showing that even in their current form, Florida’s sex offender residency restrictions are ineffective. Actually, they are counterproductive! The collateral consequences of SORRs make the public less safe by undermining stability, housing, employment, and family connections — the very factors that research consistently identifies as protective against reoffending. When people are forced into homelessness or pushed into rural isolation zones far from jobs, treatment, or transportation, they become harder to monitor and support. Law enforcement officers have said as much for years — that enforcing arbitrary residency restrictions consumes enormous resources while doing nothing to improve safety. It’s not FAC saying this. OPPAGA (the research arm of the Florida Legislature) and even the FDLE agree that SORRs lead to homelessness and there’s a huge body of academic research out there supporting our position.

This needs to stop! Today it’s swimming pools. Tomorrow, maybe it’s bathtubs. Each new restriction is sold as “common sense,” but the cumulative result is a sprawling web of ineffective draconian laws that punish, isolate and impoverish hundreds of thousands of people and make our communities less safe for nothing.

Last week, FAC members travelled to Tallahassee to speak out against the bill before the House Criminal Justice Subcommittee. In a couple of weeks many will be returning to the Capital to speak before another subcommittee and we will keep making the trip until this bill is defeated. One Representative at the meeting noted that she received over 60 emails from constituents opposing the bill. This is great! This is FAC in action! This is what all advocates across the country need to be doing now! So stop reading this Weekly Update and take action. Let’s keep sending emails and keep on calling. Here’s a link to our Call to Action. It’s your responsibility to help make a difference, so LET’S GO!

Sincerely,

The Florida Action Committee