Broken Public Policy: Sex Offenders

Where Do Sexually Based Offenders Live?

There was a story on NPR about sexually based offenders being dropped off to live under a Miami overpass last week. The worst part of this story was the scale of the homeless village with 67 offenders gathered in the same place, and the Sheriff's office condemning one single woman to live among this chaos. How is that humane, legal or ethical to place one woman among the 67 men who have issues with violence and a demonstrated inability to control themselves? This medieval approach to public policy is disgusting.

In Ohio, we do not have the 2,500 foot rule that they have in Miami. An offender is not allowed to live within 2,500 feet of where children gather in Miami. We do have a 1,000 foot rule in Ohio a notification of neighbors, and now registration of where an offender works. There are three tiers of notification including a life time registration in Ohio. Many of these individuals become homeless, because they are driven from their homes or are told that they may not return to their families. There are varying degrees of problems throughout the state with regard to public policy around sexually based offenders.

• In Cleveland, we have only one facility that allows homeless sexually based offenders to live. This means that there are well over one hundred offenders registered in the same place. This would not be a problem if the state provided trained case workers to monitor and provide counseling to these individuals. This does not happen, and so while over 100 offenders list one shelter as their residence, many do not actually live at this shelter. Where are they? No one really knows.
  
• In Cincinnati, the shelters are all too close to schools or day care centers. So, most of the men sleep outside with no monitoring and no hope of going inside. There was a lawsuit by one sexually based offender who had pneumonia and was released by the hospital without a place to live. He argued that this public policy was a death sentence. He struck a deal with the prosecutor to live at the drop in center while he recovered, but then would be back on the streets.
  
• In Dayton, there are no shelters for sexually based offenders.
  
• In Columbus, there are no shelters for sexually based offenders because they have all signed a "good neighbor policy." This should be called the "don't ask, don't tell, and don't even think about where these guys are living policy." The good neighbor policy says that every shelter will screen for offenders and refuse entry to all of them. So where do they live? Mostly they are unsupervised outside in camps near the riverbank.

This is how we are trying to protect our children in America? Placing offenders outside to make them angry and more likely to revert to their horrible ways is not a sustainable policy. Every year there are more and more offenders on the street, and soon there will be an army of permanently homeless people in our country. Our politicians, in an effort to win short term political gain, have actually made all of us less safe. The heart of the matter is that the majority of sexually based offenders are not strangers preying on children or women, but are relatives or friends who build a trusting relationship and then attack. We can set up all the notification in the world, but we are not building a safer society? Wouldn't monitoring and counseling make the community safer instead placing offenders in tents near the riverbeds of our major cities? Have these laws worked? Are these guys who wander our streets at night staying out of trouble? Someone needs to step forward and have some courage to buck the current law and order hard line, and bring public safety into this debate. Yes, we may have to spend money on these men who have committed the worst crimes in our society, but it is better than the alternative.

Brian
Posts reflect the opinion of those who sign the entry.