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Friday, April 09, 2010
Law - "Sex offender housing restrictions may lead to more crimes"
From the Chicago Tribune today, a story by Megan Twohey - some quotes:
A Tribune review has found that the state's sex offender housing laws, enacted over the past decade with the goal of protecting the public, may be having the opposite effect.Thousands of sex offenders have remained in prison for parole and then been returned to the streets without oversight or treatment. These offenders are less likely to register their addresses than those serving tightly monitored paroles in the community. They also are more likely to reoffend, sometimes repeating the same sex crimes, the review found. * * *
Sex offender housing restrictions have long been criticized by civil liberties advocates, who argue that it's unjust to banish any segment of society, and by criminal justice experts, who say it's more productive and cost-effective for most offenders to undergo parole supervision and treatment in the community.
Now some victims' advocates and members of law enforcement are echoing the calls for reform.
"There's a growing awareness that these housing restrictions make politicians feel good, but don't protect victims or prevent crime," said Kaethe Morris Hoffer, a legal director at the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation.
The restrictions were prompted by several high-profile attacks on children in the 1990s, among them the abduction, rape and murder of 7-year-old Megan Kanka of New Jersey by a convicted sex offender who was the family's neighbor.
The first wave of laws required that convicted offenders register their addresses or face arrest. They were followed by actual prohibitions on where offenders could reside.
In 2000, Illinois passed a law that prohibited child sex offenders from residing within 500 feet of schools, parks and day care centers. Some municipalities went further, setting the distance at 1,000 feet or more.
Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan's office pushed for a 2004 law that, among other things, allowed parole officers to prevent all sex offenders, not just those who targeted children, from living in such areas.
One year later, lawmakers from Chicago championed legislation that made it illegal for more than one sex offender to live in the same apartment complex unless it was a transitional housing facility that met strict state licensing requirements, such as 24-hour-a-day security. They were upset that offenders from across the state were landing in high concentrations on the city's South and West sides after prison. * * *
Since then, the number of transitional housing beds for sex offenders in Illinois has dropped from more than 200 to 26. Today, there is only one halfway house licensed by the state. The facility, in East St. Louis, has a waiting list of more than 1,300 inmates.
The Illinois Department of Corrections has stopped releasing offenders for parole who do not have an acceptable place to live.
There are as many as 1,800 of these refusals to release each year, according to the department. In many cases, inmates have been walked to the prison door on the day of their scheduled release, only to be turned around and reprocessed all over again.
"We won't release them if they don't have a place to live," said Alyssa Williams-Schafer, the department's coordinator of sex offender services.
This turnaround policy has come under fire from civil rights advocates, including a team of Chicago attorneys who filed a federal lawsuit against the Department of Corrections alleging that the offenders' constitutional rights to due process and equal protection are violated when they are forced to remain behind bars because they can't afford a place to live.
Other critics question the one-size-fits-all application of housing restrictions, seeing a significant difference in the small percentage of sex offenders who target strangers, for example, and the so-called "Romeo and Juliet" cases, in which older boyfriends are convicted of criminal sexual abuse for having consensual sex with their younger girlfriends.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on April 9, 2010 01:32 PM
Posted to Courts in general