Homeless Sex Offenders at Greater Risk to Reoffend

This article out of Vermont contained some very insightful quotes that I wanted to share here, concerning homeless sex offenders. They echo our position and the position that numerous studies have supported over the last several years; that homeless sex offenders are at greater risk of reoffense and that residency restrictions significantly contribute to that increased risk.

The quotes are as important as the people who are saying them; one being a forensic psychologist who worked for the Vermont Department of Corrections for decades.

Homeless or transient ex-convicts congregating together in a certain area of town can still be harmful to a person’s recovery or ability to move past prison life, said Tom Powell, forensic psychologist who worked for the Corrections department for decades.

“Most of these guys don’t reoffend again,” Powell said. “Everybody in the public… they assume all sex offenders are massive recidivists. In fact, the numbers are quite low.”

Once someone is branded a sex offender, though, Powell says there is a chance they will be on the fringe of society, whether or not they have a home.

 

Rita Markley, executive director on the Committee for Temporary Shelter, said the biggest issue for her with respect to ex-offenders like Baker, and Richard Laws, who was sentenced for the violent rape of a woman Central Vermont and was released in April – was losing track of their locations.

“It’s in no one’s interest to have people who are sex offenders completing their terms in prison and then released without any sort of housing option,” she said.

“If they’re wandering around homeless, and don’t have a program or a fixed address, it’s impossible to monitor how they’re doing. And it sets up, to me, an ever greater risk because they’re sort of dropped off from any connection to people who might be able to flag if anything is wrong.”

She said when sex offenders don’t have a place to call home, the public is at greater risk.

“On the one hand, people don’t want sex offenders to be anywhere near them, but on the other hand, it’s a much greater risk to have them out there on the streets, wandering around,” Markley said.