FL- CRUEL AND UNUSUAL: HOUSE ARREST WITHOUT A HOUSE

Hopefully they will not charge him for his choice to spend time in the jail...

7-1-2009 Florida:

Today's travesty comes in the form of one ____, courtesy of the Florida Legislature.

Mr. ____ was released from Florida State Prison on June 23rd, after serving roughly seven years on a sex offense. His sentence also includes two years of house arrest with a GPS monitor, and a decade or two of probation.

If you follow the news you know the problems sex offenders face finding places to live. There are so many restrictions, and so few shelters that take sex offenders, that they often end up living on the streets. That's what happened to Mr. ____, whose family lives in New York.

More often than not, sex offenders without family don't make it in the community, and not because they commit new crimes. The reality is they end up quitting, because they can't take it anymore. They have nowhere to live, they can't find work, and the inevitable downward spiral follows. They ultimately cut the band and disappear, and then get shipped back to prison when they're caught.

The difference with Mr. ____ is that he's trying. He wants to become a productive member of society, but he realized he couldn't do it without a place to live while on house arrest.

Since he's been out, he also couldn't find a job. That meant he couldn't find anyplace to charge the GPS monitor, which, when it runs down, creates an instant violation. He was almost to the point where he couldn't afford the bus fare to see his probation officer, which, of course, would mean more violations. His probation officer, for his part, reportedly told him to "go live under a bridge."

Mr. ____ said no.

Instead, he called his lawyer, and set a hearing before Judge Gold today. He wanted to convert his two years of house arrest to jail time. The Judge, the State, and the in-court Probation Officer were flabbergasted, but no one could come up with a community based solution. His lawyer, Cheryl Koewing, had already searched all the half-way houses and shelters, but couldn't find anywhere that would take him. Reluctantly, all the parties agreed to modify his probation by deleting the house arrest component, and replacing it with six months in the Broward County Jail, after which he would be on sex offender probation. Mr. ____ went to jail earlier today.

Probation is checking to see if Mr. ____ can transfer his supervision to New York, so he can stay with his family instead of doing jail time. It's a long shot, since New York is famous for refusing these kinds of cases. Tracy Gold, of BSO's Department of Community Control, is also trying to find a shelter somewhere in the county that will take him, but it's another long shot.

While it's true that nobody wants to live next door to a sex offender, it's also true that the pendulum has swung so far to the right that the laws don't make any sense anymore. It's a classic, insurmountable Catch-22, as Judge Gold remarked. In the meantime, the papers will continue to run stories about the failure of Florida's sex offender laws, and people like Mr. ____ will continue to be cut down at the taxpayers' expense until something changes in Tallahassee. ..Source.. by Jaablaw's blog