FL- State needs to fix the sex offender mess

5-28-2009 Florida:

Thoughtfulness comes too late.

The (sex offender) task force charged by the Broward County Commission with finding a way out of the conundrum created by sex offender residency restrictions has listened to experts, crunched numbers and discussed a dismaying array of unintended consequences.

By its second meeting on Tuesday, none of the task force members were defending the notion that draconian restrictions actually protected children from sex offenders.

They discussed better solutions than laws that forced registered sex offenders into homelessness; that left parole officers with no alternative but to send them to live under a highway bridge; that encouraged sex offenders to cluster in neighborhoods with less restrictive ordinances.

FAILURE OF LAWS

They talked about the documented failure of these laws in other states.

They talked about laws, instead, that would keep sex offenders from loitering around places where children congregate. They talked about re-zoning industrial areas to allow sex offender housing.

They talked about restrictions that fail to distinguish between less dangerous offenders and sexual predators.

They pushed beyond the emotional stuff and dug for what made sense.

It was the kind of thoughtful examination needed to sort out a complicated and volatile problem.

Except, it comes too late. Most of South Florida's cities (and Miami-Dade County) have already passed 2,500-foot restrictions around schools, parks, day care centers, even school bus stops. The County Commission holds sway over less than three square miles of unincorporated Broward.

''That's just a tiny portion of the county,'' lamented Lori Butts, a forensic psychologist on the task force. The task force was wrestling Tuesday with the perverse effect of leaving those unincorporated areas without jacked-up restrictions, creating a kind of refuge for sex offenders driven out of nearby cities.

Nor can the Broward County Commission (unlike the Miami-Dade Commission) pass a superseding ordinance, replacing the 2,500-foot restrictions passed by Broward cities with something sensible, said Task Force Chairwoman Jill Levenson, Lynn University's expert on sex crime policies.

OBVIOUS IRONY

An obvious irony hangs over the Broward sex offender task force, with members from law enforcement, corrections, academia, government and with a victim and a sex offender at the table. Best I can tell, it's the first in the state. Other cities and counties passed a frenzy of residency restrictions without bothering to examine the consequences.

You'd think Miami-Dade, with that festering homeless colony under the Julie Tuttle Causeway, would have appointed a sex offender task force months ago.

It's probably too late. It'll take a state law now to sort out this mess. Lori Butts said her group can't do much more than deliver a ``well thought out, well researched idea we'd like to see happen statewide.''

The state must either fix the mess, Butts said, or pay the tab to keep sex offenders in prison. Forcing potentially dangerous predators into homelessness, she said, ``is just crazy.''

Homeless sex offenders are beyond treatment, she warned. ``If they're living under a bridge, they can't get better. '' ..News Source.. by FRED GRIMM