FL- For sexual predators, it's a camp of isolation

4-8-2008 Florida:

The bridge overhead is so close there isn't room for a man to stand.

All the neighbors are felons and everyone lives in Wal-Mart tents, except the oldest man, who is 82. He lives in a shack.

There's no running water, no sewer system and one gasoline-powered generator.

This camp of sex offenders beneath the Julia Tuttle Causeway made news in February, when the Department of Corrections probation officers arrived and began passing out notices that said the men -- who are largely barred by local ordinances from living anywhere else in Miami-Dade County -- might be charged with trespassing if they stayed beneath the bridge.

The notices appeared to foretell a full-scale eviction. But two months later, the Florida Department of Transportation, which manages the land, is not pursuing any charges. Many of the men still haven't moved and say they won't, if it means leaving the county.

And while no one -- least of all the men who live under the bridge -- would mistake this camp for a home, there are signs of permanence: a weight bench, a pair of composting toilets, a television.

The view of the downtown Miami skyline is fabulous, if you can look past the pile of rusted empties. The air smells of old beer and dust and the roast chicken from dinner. Electric lanterns glow through tent walls. A TV is tuned to the news. Salsa blares on a radio until early, early morning, and when it stops there is only the rushing wharf of cars clicking over the seams of the interstate overhead.

That never, ever stops.

Curfew for most of the men is 10 p.m. If the electronic tracking device each wears shows he's not back by then, he can get sent back to prison.

So the men drift back at dusk, hitching rides with girlfriends or walking the highway shoulder from the mainland.

On this night, the old man -- el viejo, the others call him -- shuffled down the steep concrete embankment, gripping the wire mesh fence for balance. He is Manuel Perea, sentenced to 10 years probation for groping three children in the neighborhood where he used to live. He did not want to talk about this, and besides, he is deaf.

Patrick Wiese started the generator. Wiese -- first profiled in a 2007 Miami New Times story -- is 46, served 18 months for molesting his 9-year-old step-daughter, something he did at least three times but says he sincerely regrets.

It costs a couple hundred dollars to fuel the generator each week, Wiese said, and the men pool their money. It powers the three fluorescent lights hanging from the bridge overhead, the television he watches at night, everyone's cell phone chargers. More importantly, it powers the chargers for the tracking devices. Another way a man can get sent back to prison is by letting his device run down.

No place else to live

There are 2,050 registered sex offenders and predators in Miami-Dade County and another 1,252 in Broward, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's website. (The ''predator'' category includes felons whose crimes -- usually related to kidnapping, rape, sexual battery or child prostitution -- are deemed more serious than the lewd and lascivious behavior with which many offenders are charged.)

Two hundred forty-five are said to have ''absconded,'' meaning FDLE cannot locate them.

And, over the last year, at least 32 have called the camp under the Julia Tuttle Causeway their ''permanent residence,'' in FDLE parlance.

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Several of the men say they were told to come here by their probation officers. Court records for one man back that up, though Gretl K. Plessinger, spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections, wrote in an e-mail to The Miami Herald that ``it has never been a policy of the Department to tell offenders where to live.''

Others came because they were unable to find anywhere else to legally live in Miami-Dade.

Most of the county has been off-limits since 2005. That's when the rape and murder of Florida third-grader Jessica Lunsford prompted many municipalities to bar sex offenders whose victims are minors from moving within 2,500 feet (almost half a mile) of a school, daycare center, park or playground, extending the 1,000-foot zone already in existence in state statute.

Miami Beach was one of the first to pass the ban. One hundred twenty-five more Florida municipalities passed similar laws, including, by the end of the year, at least 21 in Miami-Dade, as well as Unincorporated Miami-Dade itself.

The resulting patchwork of overlapping no-go zones excludes most of the county except for parts of Pinecrest, Medley and unincorporated land to the far west. Pinecrest is too pricey for most of the men under the bridge, and housing is scarce in Medley and out west.

Residency restrictions in Broward are having a similar effect. Earlier this year, three sex offenders were kicked out of locations in Fort Lauderdale, Cooper City and Southwest Ranches.

Bills now under consideration in the state Legislature would repeal municipal residential restrictions while extending the statewide residential exclusion zone to 1,500 feet and strengthening penalties against certain offenders for loitering or prowling within 600 feet of children's gathering places. The bills would also make it legal to rearrest an offender for not securing an acceptable address before leaving prison.

It's not easy to find places besides their own family homes that will accept sex offenders, even if it were legal to do so.

''I looked at halfway houses, drug treatment centers, religious places,'' Wiese said. ``They don't allow us in there.''

Many of Miami-Dade's registered sex offenders were already living in the county before the 2005 ordinances, which are not retroactive. But now, anytime a sex offender moves inside the county, or moves in from outside, or is released from prison into the county, he will likely find himself legislated out of a home.

He will likely have two options: Leave the area or move under the bridge.

The Department of Corrections is hoping more of the men will find homes, but Plessinger says many under the bridge already have stopped looking, which doesn't bode well.

''It's very difficult to successfully adapt into society when you are homeless,'' she wrote in an e-mail. ``Homeless offenders are more likely to abscond from supervision. If we do not know where they are, we cannot supervise them. Homeless offenders are more likely to commit a crime.''

Persuading the lawmakers

It's not clear that residency restrictions make children safer; they may even have the opposite effect, says Jill Levenson, the author of a study on sexual offenders and a professor of human services at Lynn University, in Boca Raton. ``There does not appear to be a relationship between proximity and recidivism. . . . Laws that interfere with the ability to maintain housing stability are unlikely to be in the best interest of public safety because housing instability is a risk factor for criminal recidivism.''

It's not even clear that released sex offenders present a greater risk to communities than other released felons. According to a 2003 Bureau of Justice Statistics study, 5 percent of sex offenders were rearrested on another sex crime charge within three years of release; but they were less likely to be rearrested than other felons, and less likely to be rearrested for a felony.

''There is a small proportion of sex offenders who are highly compulsive and dangerous and likely to reoffend,'' Levenson says. ``The majority do not fall into that category.''

Levenson argues for a more nuanced approach to risk assessment than the current offender/predator classification system. The system in place in New York state, for instance, classes offenders by risk of re-offense as well as by the nature of their offenses.

``A better strategy for public safety would involve . . . tailoring restrictions to be pertinent to offense patterns.''

The Florida Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has taken an interest in the case of the men under the bridge.

''They need to be in a safe, sane environment where they're at the lowest risk of having additional problems and re-offending in the future,'' said Jeanne Baker, president of the Florida ACLU. They have ``all of those same rights that you or I have.''

But that's a difficult argument to make to the politicians who write the laws or the citizens who elect them.

Sex offenders excite a special revulsion in the public imagination, particularly when the victims are children.

Polls suggest most people are in favor of measures more punitive than the ones already in place.

''I don't really care where they live,'' North Miami Mayor Joe Celestin said in 2005, when his city was considering a municipal ordinance. ``At this point I don't care if they live out of civilization.''

Getting out from under the bridge

Wiese had just returned to the camp after getting off work. He makes sandwiches for $6.75 an hour. He's amply qualified, as he was training to be a chef at Cordon Bleu, in Miramar, before he was arrested.

For a sex offender, everything about a job -- from getting hired to talking with coworkers -- is fraught with danger. Failure to inform an employer of one's sex offender status is a felony, and a lot of bosses won't hire a sex offender.

''I told him straight out,'' Wiese said. ``I'd already been trying to get jobs and I'm aware what happens. I know what people are going to say to me.''

Most of the time he doesn't say anything to anybody besides the requisite pleasantries. In his experience, anything more ``ends up hurting me or hurting them.''

Sooner or later he'd get out from under the bridge, he said. He wouldn't be making sandwiches for the rest of his life. He'd go back to school. He'd win back some of the life he'd lost, maybe the love of the woman whose child he abused.

That part, at least, didn't seem likely -- ''I want no contact whatsoever with him,'' she once said -- but he had hope. ''I'm a wishful, hopeful person,'' he said. ..more.. by NICHOLAS SPANGLER, nspangler@MiamiHerald.com