August 2006:
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Banishment: to expel from or relegate to a country or place by authoritative decree...to compel to depart. Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. Second Edition
Banishment was a form of legal punishment in Ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy and England. Colonial America received its share of banished English thieves and other offenders, as did Australia. During the American Revolution, the colonies banished English loyalists. More recently, the former Soviet Union restricted inmate’s rights upon release from the Gulag to 101 kilometers from large urban centers, resulting in a number of rural settlements.
Today some communities in the United States banish sex offenders from living in their midst, resulting in a difficult dilemma: where can these offenders live, and where can they best be supervised and receive treatment, if available? This report describes local ordinances and state statutes restricting where a sex offender may reside, discusses what research has found so far about the success of these restrictions, considers the impact that these restrictions are having on criminal justice management practices and sex offender treatment regimens, and examines constitutional implications. According to California Penal Code § 288 (a) (b):
A sex offender is any person who willfully and lewdly commits any lewd or lascivious act, upon or with the body, or any part or member thereof, of a child who is under the age of 14 years, with the intent of arousing, appealing to, or gratifying the lust, passions, or sexual desires of that person or the child. A sex offender is any person who commits an act by use of force, violence, duress, menace, or fear of immediate and unlawful bodily injury on the victim or another person.1
Each year there are 60,000 to 70,000 arrests on charges of child sexual assault, according to the U.S. Justice Department, of which only about 115 are abductions by strangers. In addition, there are 15,000 to 20,000 arrests on charges of forcible rape. Most rape victims know their assailants: seven in ten female rape or sexual assault victims state the offender was an intimate, other relative, a friend or an acquaintance.2
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EFFECTIVENESS OF LOCAL SEX OFFENDER RESIDENCY RESTRICTIONS
There have been no careful evaluations of local residency restrictions, in part because they are so recent. There have been some evaluations of state laws, which we discussed earlier.82 A number of experts in the field have expressed opinions, which we quote below.
According to John Gruber, executive director of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (ATSA), the organization is generally opposed to residency restrictions: “What you’re doing is pushing people more underground, pushing them away from treatment and pushing them away from monitoring,” he said. “You’re really not improving the safety, but you’re giving people a false sense of safety.”83
Jill S. Levenson, author of a study on sex offender zoning laws, contends that local restrictions could force some sex offenders to move away from the sources of stability such as family in their lives, perhaps putting them at greater risk of committing more crimes: “When you push offenders out of the more populated areas, they can lose access to jobs and treatment, and it makes them harder to track.”
Ernie Allen, the president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, is of the opinion that sex offender residency restrictions can create a false sense of security because people will believe that sex offenders will just go away. Also, they may move sex offenders from one community to the next, setting off a competitive spiral of ever-tougher “not in my backyard” ordinances.84
According to John Furlong, a Trenton, New Jersey lawyer and coeditor of A Megan’s Law Sourcebook, sex offender ordinances overlook the chief victimizers of children: relatives and acquaintances.85 Each year there are 60,000 to 70,000 arrests on charges of child sexual assault, according to the U.S. Justice Department, of which about 115 abductions by strangers. About seven in ten female rape or sexual assault victims state that the offender was an intimate, other relative, a friend or acquaintance.86
According to Ronald K. Chen, a Rutgers University Law School dean and authority on Megan’s Law, each town is trying to make sex offender residency someone else’s problem. More often than not, said Chen, “the exclusion is so comprehensive that if it doesn’t prevent offenders from having any meaningful existence in the town, it comes pretty close.”87
Local residency restrictions may drive some of the estimated 500,000 registered sex offenders in the country underground: “What they’re probably going to do is move into a community and not register,” said Carolyn Atwell-Davis, legislative director for the nonprofit National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. There are an estimated 100,000 offenders nationally who have failed to comply with registration requirements and remain undetected: “It’s better to know where these “lost offenders” are than where they aren’t.”88
Seattle police detective Bob Shilling, a nationally recognized expert on sex offenders, is of the opinion that sex-offender-free zones chase offenders “from one jurisdiction to another.” “It creates a lot more homeless sex offenders, which makes it a lot harder for us to keep track of them,” Shilling said. “They do not work. In fact, it exacerbates the problem.”89
Linn County, Iowa, Sheriff Don Zeller reports that his county had 435 sex offenders registered in 2002, when the state residency restriction law first went into effect. Of those, 114 moved, 74 were charged with violating the ordinance, and others just disappeared; “We went from knowing where about 90 percent of them were. We’re lucky if we know where 50 to 55 percent of them are now...the law created an atmosphere that these individuals can’t find a place to live.”90 ..more.. by Marcus Nieto, Senior Research Specialist -and- Professor David Jung, Public Law Research Institute, Hastings Law School
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