Leadership needed on sex offender residency

8-5-2014 Wisconsin:

On its website, the state Department of Corrections states its key goal is to promote public safety by reducing recidivism and helping offenders succeed in communities. Yet it has undermined public safety by consenting through inaction to a patchwork of sex offender residency restrictions.

Sex offender residency restrictions are a management strategy to control where certain offenders cannot live. While restrictions are enacted with the intention of protecting the public from sex offenders, many communities and researchers find that restrictions may cause more harm than good and may be connected to recidivism. Indeed, the DOC, Milwaukee Police Department and Milwaukee County district attorney all have testified of the negative unintended consequences of sex offender residency restrictions, principally homelessness. Why?

Restrictions can leave no place for sex offenders to live legally within an area or can push them far from treatment resources. In Wisconsin, if no legal housing is found, offenders are released on their own recognizance; essentially they're homeless. But they do live somewhere — law enforcement and citizens just won't know where.

It's one thing to know sex offenders live nearby. It's another to have them nearby, perhaps next door, but not know they're there. An old Irish saying goes, "better the devil you know than the devil you don't." No one, including myself, wants to live next to a sex offender. Certainly, everyone agrees that some restrictions should exist for offenders who pose high risks to children. It isn't rational, for instance, to place a man convicted of sexually assaulting a young girl next to a school for disabled and special needs students, as just happened in De Pere.

The Milwaukee Common Council recently passed sex offender residency restrictions, which I voted against considering testimony of unintended consequences. The mayor signed the ordinance, noting inaction and negligence by state government and particularly by the DOC. Wisconsin places offenders by county. Since nearly all municipalities surrounding the city have restrictions, the result has been placement of offenders where no restrictions exist.

Since 2007, 14 of 19 Milwaukee County municipalities adopted ordinances that effectively prohibit the most dangerous sex offenders from residing in their borders. This created a patchwork of laws that had the effect, even if unintentional, of disproportionately concentrating sex offenders (presumably the most dangerous) in Milwaukee regardless of whether offenders' crimes were committed in the city.

I, along with my colleagues on the council, the mayor's office, MPD, city attorney's office and DA repeatedly pleaded with Gov. Scott Walker and the DOC to develop a statewide solution that applies fair and equitable standards across the state uniformly. Our pleas for a comprehensive solution reinforcing the public safety of all were met with rhetoric and apathy. Indeed, institutional indifference toward city interests seems to be the conventional way of doing business for some with the state.

As a parent, I appreciate the intention behind my colleagues' efforts — sex offender concentration has been exacerbated because the DOC uses Milwaukee as the default location for placement. This is done despite offering multiple opportunities for concrete action to the state. Most recently, the city asked DOC Secretary Edward Wall, as head of the agency with legal standing, to request that state Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen pursue legal action against municipalities with sex offender residency restrictions. Wall declined, curiously alluding to "home rule," a legal principle undermined by the governor. Meanwhile, Walker is silent.

The neglect by Walker and the DOC is deplorable. We need a comprehensive solution; the state must lead in this effort. This failure in leadership and institutional obligation to the public is wrong and can only be characterized as a conscious decision to compromise public safety. ..Source.. by Michael J. Murphy is president of the Milwaukee Common Council.