Fearmongering About Homeless Sex Offenders Ignores the Real Culprit—Bad Laws
The recent City Journal article warning about homeless sex offenders refuses to confront an Inconvenient truth. The very laws sold to the public as “safety measures” are what created this crisis in the first place.
The high percentage of homeless people on sex offender registries isn’t a mystery. It’s not because they’re uniquely dangerous or morally defective, as the article tries to imply. It’s because cities and states have systematically made it illegal for them to live almost anywhere. Residency restriction laws banning registrants from living within 1,000, 1,500, even 2,500 feet of schools, parks, and bus stops effectively wall them out of every affordable neighborhood.
Its these laws that push people onto the streets. The infamous Julia Tuttle Causeway encampment in Miami-Dade County wasn’t some fluke. It was the predictable result of bad policy.
The article blames homelessness on mental illness, substance abuse, and an alleged innate criminality among sex offenders. This is a convenient story for politicians and pundits who built their careers stoking public fear—but it’s a lie.
The simple, uncomfortable fact is that when you legally exclude people from housing and deny them shelter beds, they end up homeless. It’s basic cause and effect.
And let’s be clear: the solutions proposed in the article—tougher parole restrictions, more civil commitment, bans on street camping—would only double down on the failure. How exactly is someone supposed to present a housing plan when every door has been slammed shut by law?
If the City Journal really cared about reducing crime, the best thing it could do is to encourage politicians to ensure people have access to stable housing and support, not force them into tents and underpasses where isolation and desperation grow.
This is not a complicated problem. Politicians created it. Every study points to the same thing: housing instability and public registries make communities less safe, not more. But dismantling this failed system requires politicians and media outlets to admit that the punitive laws they championed for decades have backfired. Instead, we get fearmongering articles like this one, designed to stir panic and justify even harsher crackdowns.
It’s time for the public to see through the scare tactics. Homelessness among registrants isn’t proof that we’ve been too soft—it’s proof that we’ve been reckless, shortsighted, and cruel in ways that harm everyone. The path forward isn’t more punishment. It’s housing, stability, and evidence-based policy that actually works.
Until we face that reality, we’ll keep recycling the same hysteria while the real crisis grows
FAC is asking our members to post your comments on the actual article and write to the editor. We call on our sister organizations to encourage their members to do the same and invite the experts in the field of sex offender management to submit Op-Eds and letters to the editor. Enough with the fear mongering! It’s time to hold politicians accountable for the mess they made!!!
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The disproportionate response by municipalities is an exercise in thuggery and intimidation. If there’s a lesson in bad behavior to be taught, it’s about abuse of power, unfairness and ideological extremism.
I hold extreme disdain for thugs regardless of whether they lurk in back alleys or in insulated positions of power. Whether they wear a tie, a badge, or a robe.
It’s been over a year since my forced retroactive listing. I was removed in 2007 in another State.
I would have to say this has been the hardest year of many hard years of the registry. This year has been hard on my family. My marriage. Financial.
Lack of due process is devastating. Laws are made to prevent people from applying to see a judge yet we are subject to forced judgment from politicians. Most illogical. Most unqualified people making decisions.
So, everything would be hunky dory if there were legal to to rape or molest a child?
Windi, please stay away from kids if that’s what you think.
Windi , they (predetors) will always feel Vitimized I have creepy, disgusting child molester living in our neighborhood, he is married, still observing young school girls. I wish he goes somewhere.
Mirza, you come across as someone that is harboring a dark secret.
Help is available for you. Let go of your shame.
How?
I’m reffering to someone in my hood.
I’m just wondering why everything in my life sucks so bad. How can it be God? I sit here typing on my tiny phone composing a thoughtful and heartfelt comment regarding homelessness and try to post. Get a message that says error: prove you are human. But nowhere, no how, will it allow me to do that. Gets deleted. I can’t take it anymore. I am that fragile right now. Screw this, screw face, just drop dead.
Dear FAC. Someone please fix your site. I just spent an hour composing a thoughtful commentary only to be denied posting by your site demanding that I prove I am human. It refused to allow me to verify. Beautiful. To hell with it. Exhausting and debilitating.
The Cicero Institute is a right-leaning “institute.” So I’m not surprised to see the usual nonsense spewed in that article.
The only useful thing in the report is the stats on homeless Registrants. I’ve known for a long time homeless rates are extremely high for Persons Forced to Register, but it helps that even a slanted rag like the Cicero Institute has to admit there’s a homeless crisis among Registered Persons.
Here is my response to Devon Kurtz about his article:
Hello, Devon,
I am sending you this email as a review of what you have written about sex offenders and homelessness.
I am in doubt as to whether you will actually read this and with any consideration, but there is hope.
I would like to point out and expound upon some of the things you wrote in your article.
I quote:
‘Most Americans understand the link between homelessness and crime. But activists and academics reject the connection, insisting that the homeless pose no elevated crime threat. A new report from the Cicero Institute complicates their argument, revealing that a large share of the nation’s homeless population is composed of registered sex offenders.’ unquote.
Here, you are placing in the minds of your readers that the large share of the homeless population are dangerous because they are registered sex offenders and you also use the Cicero Institute study as a so-called ‘counter argument’ against the activists and academics that say homeless pose no elevated crime threat, when in fact there is nothing in the Cicero Institute article that says that they are an elevated threat, and therefore your statement is misleading.
I quote your article:
‘Prosecution and registration for indecent exposure, the category within which public urination is classified, is comparatively rare as an isolated offense without a criminal sexual motivation. ‘unquote.
The link you provide takes people to a site is S.C. that mentions nothing of public urination, indecent exposure, etc. unless you pay for it and most people will not do that.
Here is a quote from the ‘Criminal Legal News’ about the 38.5% of people on the registry in Florida.
‘Of those 38.5 percent, some might be on the list for urinating in public (indecent exposure) or for simply being a teenager who had sex with another teenager.’
Therefore, once again, your statement is not only misleading, but false.
I quote you again:
‘Sociologists often claim that sex offenders are not especially dangerous. That claim is also misleading—and even less relevant when it comes to homeless sex offenders, who have a heightened risk of recidivism’
Here, you are attempting to undermine sociology and sociologists themselves without any facts, but once again you are referencing another web site that leads to a paywall which even reading what was available said registrants had only 5% of a new sex crime recidivism rate, which could never be called a heightened risk of recidivism, even among homeless. The 8% re-offenses are related crimes like ‘failure to register’,’ loitering too close to a park’ failure to disclose personal information, etc. and these are NOT actual sex crimes. Once again, your article is misleading and statistically false.
I quote your article again:
It’s true that, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, sex offenders have the second-lowest recidivism rate by offense type, after murderers. But there are strong reasons to be skeptical of these figures: incidents of sexual violence are grossly underreported.
Here, you are attempting to undermine the ‘Department of Justice’ itself, an entity that keeps track of current recidivism rates of former offenders, who, if anyone would know that actual recidivism rate, it would be them., and you do this by using the underreported sexual crimes, which many are underreported, but you fail to state the fact that nearly ALL underreported sex crimes are done by those NOT on the registry! The obligation to register is an after-the-fact obligation! No one reports to a Sheriff or to the Police before they commit a sex crime and then asks to be placed on the registry and then commits the act, no-one. 95% or greater of all sex crimes are committed by those NOT on the registry, or have you not been watching the news that the huge and vast majority of those caught and convicted of sex crimes are doctors, gym coaches, teachers, day-care workers, clergy, and now even law enforcement! It is very rare to see anyone on the registry on the news who has re-committed a sex crime, and you might say ‘Well, that is because they haven’t been caught yet’ which that kind of thinking is an argument from utter silence! Arguments from silence like that are ‘all judges take a bribe, they just haven’t been caught! ‘, all cops break and abuse the law, they just haven’t been caught, ‘all politicians are corrupt, they just haven’t been caught, ‘everyone who works at the IRS steals money, they just haven’t been caught, all journalists twist the story to make ratings, they just haven’t been caught,’, etc.
These and more are ALL arguments from silence!
I hope I have not wasted my time writing this and that you will seriously consider what I have wrote to you.
The real problem here is that our legislators are writing useless laws that seemingly fool the public that they are doing something to prevent sexual crimes, when, in fact,
there is NO evidence whatsoever that the sex offender registry prevents crime or protects anyone, but actually creates crime.
It is also a proven fact that there has been no decrease in sexual offenses since the registry was created.
Our legislators are creating homelessness problems and then whining and fear mongering about the very problem they themselves created.
You, in your article, are also contributing to the problem by using fear mongering and using misleading tactics to make a story.
My hope is that you will cease this style of writing, because ‘Jouranlists’ obligation is to first tell the truth.’
Wow!! Awesome rebuttal, hopefully he reads this 👍
This is beautiful. I hope you post it on the comments to the article. Even if the author doesn’t read your letter his readers will. This is advocacy!!! Good job.
Thank you, FAC-3. I didn’t see anywhere to post this in comments, so if you would, that would be great!
Also, thank you for your advocacy on behalt of all registrants.
There is an old saying: ‘The truth is often not what people want to hear, but absolutely what they need to hear.”
May God Himsellf give all of you at FAC wisdom to fight this battle against the unConstitutional laws and misplaced fears surrounding and impeding those of us on the registry. Amen
Maybe just send it to their main contact email address or the email address of the editors who will read it and pass it along? They may not like the comment based upon their political slant as a rag, but they need to know the opposition is alive and well to what they write. The data they present needs to be used in the fight back for more open housing doors wherever and however that may be. It is easier to fight the enemy when you their thinking and tactics such as this written drivel they publish…especially bulletin board materials as his thinking.