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Donald Robinson's home, the sign reads (as best I can tell): "Please help save our women of the community"
Donald Robinson, who served 25 years in prison for two rapes, was released from prison and moved into a neighborhood on the San Francisco peninsula the day after Phillip Garrido was arrested and the 18-year-old imprisonment of Jaycee Lee Duggard was uncovered.
In addition to the 25 years in prison, Robinson spent the last 11 years as part of a state-sponsored, out-patient rehabilitation program. As part of his release, Robinson wears a tracking bracelet, has a curfew, is randomly tested for drug and alcohol use, needs permission to drive a car or walk through a neighborhood, and is forbidden to use the internet. Local police even distributed fliers to all the neighbors to alert them to Robinson’s presence in the neighborhood. (source)
The Protest
Despite all these state-sponsored interventions, the mayor of the community in which Robinson recently moved contacted everyone listed in the town’s phonebook and personally organized a protest outside of Robinson’s home to have him removed, which has now become daily picketing. As a result, the state pays two security guards $800/day to protect Robinson from threats and attacks.
Is There a Better Way?
The whole situation makes me wonder if there is not a better way to go about keeping people safe from violent sexual predators. With the Garrido case, we’ve seen the results of isolating sex offenders from society. The measures taken by the mayor and local citizens in this case—although with the goal of community safety—serve to further stigmatize the offender and breed resentment, frustration, and anger, the very emotions that Robinson has been working to overcome through the last 11 years of rehabilitative therapy. Emotions that led to his violent offenses in the first place.
I understand that residents do not want to live next door to a sex offender—especially a rapist. As one neighbor told the associated press: “The judge said that if Robinson weren’t here, he’d be homeless. We don’t want him to become homeless. We just don’t think he belongs among families.” But, if not here, where?
Building Safe Communities
To play devils’ advocate for a second, maybe living in a concerned and vigilant community is the best place for Robinson. In a community with an active neighborhood watch, a vigilant mindset, and a strong desire to keep their area free from crime, Robinson would have little chance to re-offend (especially considering the protective measures that have already been put into place).
Instead of spending all the time and energy to remove Robinson from the community, might it be better to put that time and energy to work educating the community and organizing a dedicated and informed neighborhood watch? Keeping Robinson in the neighborhood lets citizens have power over him. Moving Robinson to an isolated area lets him keep power over the community through fear and the ability to hide his actions from them.
Thoughts? Leave a comment—I actively welcome debate on this topic, and would like to work toward a better way to deal with sex offenders in our communities.
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Miami Sex offenders forced to live under a bridge
No doubt about it, sex offender laws are popular. It’s hard to find a citizen or politician who wants to relax laws that keep sex offenders away from schools, parks, and daycare centers. Drafting and selling these laws to the public is easy because, as a society, when we hear “sex offender” we immediately think of socially awkward, overweight, men with thick glasses, who slobber over child pornography in cave-like basement apartments and wait in the shadows around elementary schools. But the truth of the matter is much more complex.
Due to a myriad of varying state and regional crime classifications, there are many sex offenses that technically designate an individual as a sex offender who poses virtually no risk to society. A drunk college student who makes the mistake of urinating in public can be arrested for public lewdlness and labeled as a sex offender for the rest of his life. An 18-year-old girl can have sex with her 17-year-old boyfriend, be arrested for statutory rape and labeled a sex offender for the rest of her life.
This is not to say that these offenses are okay. Clearly committing these offenses is against the law, but does the 18-year-old girl deserve to show up on a sex offender map 15 years later, when she is a happily-married housewife? Should the college kid be arrested for living too close to a public park (violating a sex offender residency restriction law) for a dumb, youthful indiscretion?
The problem is that current laws do not differentiate between violent sex offenders and people who made stupid mistakes, and there is a growing backlash against such laws. Recently, Miami-Dade County’s sex offender residency restriction laws forced 100 sex offenders to live in a homeless shantytown under a bridge, creating a public health and safety hazard that ignited a media firestorm, garnering national attention. As well, Andrea Cassanova, mother of a woman killed by a sex offender in 2002, founded a non-profit organization to research and combat useless and harmful “headline legislation” surrounding sex offenders restriction laws. Even Lenore Skenazy, “free-range kids” advocate, recently told parents to “burn your sex offender map,” arguing that sex offender maps are useless.
In addition, today there is a story about North Carolina man who was arrested for going to church. The man is a sex offender because of an offense against a teenage girl, six years ago. Since the church runs a daycare center during the week, county deputies arrested the man for violating sex offender restriction laws for going to church. Also in North Carolina, another church graciously moved its daycare center off premises so that a single sex offender could attend services on Sundays.
Forcing sex offenders to live under a bridge or keeping them from seeking rehabilitation through faith-based worship and counseling are not solving any problems. In fact, the further restrictions imposed on sex offenders, the greater the possibility the offender will break parole, abscond, and create a new life in a new neighborhood without anyone knowing who they are or what they have done—which isn’t good for anyone. Sex offenders who have absconded are less likely to seek treatment, and community members will be completely unaware of their past crimes, opening themselves up to future attacks if the offender has a violent past.
Fortunately, Miami-Dade County has found a temporary solution to the homeless sex offender colony and is finding affordable housing in the county for these individuals. But legislators and citizens need more information on recidivism rates and sex offender classifications. As well, law makers need to approach these problems in a less reactionary way, looking for solutions that keep tabs on violent, dangerous sex offenders, and stop punishing individuals that pose no threat to society. At the same time, there needs to be more emphasis on rehabilitation and counseling, and less emphasis on pushing sex offenders to the fringes—increasing the chances that they will go underground, reoffend, and hurt more innocent people and children.
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The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) is leading the way in sex offender tracking by issuing 6,000 GPS tracking bracelets to paroled sex offenders across the state.
The tracking bracelets send GPS information to a central server every 10 minutes so that analysts can map movement and anchor points for sex offenders. The system will also alert parole officers if a sex offender’s GPS data shows a correlation between a sex offender’s location and the time and location of a recent crime.
Clearly this system cannot predict a sex offender’s movements or the likelihood that he or she will re-offend; however, with the knowledge that their movements are being tracked, sex offenders will be less likely to travel into restricted areas and less likely to re-offend. And in the event that they are involved in a crime, the tracking system will make it easier to catch and prosecute the offenders.
Source: http://www.corrections.com/news/article/22100
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Alexandra Zapp, 30, murdered in 2002
Alexandra Zapp, 30, was murdered in 2002 by a sex offender at a bus stop in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Now her parents are fighting for intelligent laws for violent offenders, not ineffective “headline legislation.”
Andrea Casanova and her husband have partnered with the RAND Corporation and the Ally Foundation, to create a non-profit institution that will focus on analyzing sexual and other violent offenders with an eye toward creating legislation that prevents recidivism.
The Casanovas feel that current legislation is usually based on knee-jerk reactions by politicians after a very public criminal case. This type of legislation is usually pushed through very quickly and garners a lot of headlines, but is usually ineffective at actually preventing crime. The Casanovas feel that this type of “headline legislation” does little actual good for the community and may harm it in some cases.
The new institute will analyze patterns of recidivism and psychological issues related to violent offenders. One of the problems of the current system, they say, is that offenders are released into the public based on the crimes they have committed in the past, not based on individual risk assessment models.
“We are just trying to figure out what really would work,’’ said Andrea Casanova. “I’m hoping it will reset all the standards for how we deal with sexual and violent offenders.’’
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Officers in the LaVista, Nebraska, Police Department are taking their duties very seriously. The officers in the Internet Crimes Against Children Unit are getting an education in pre-teen culture in order to more effectively pose as young girls in chatrooms and social networking sites in order to catch sexual predators.
They call their education “Hannah Montana School,” and they keep up-to-date on pre-teen pop-culture like the Jonas Brothers, Twilight, and all text-messaging lingo. Basically, these officers are learning to think and act like a pre-teen online so that they can appear more authentic in their investigations.
Officers in the unit have already made numerous arrests, including 6 in the last couple of weeks.
Source: http://www.omaha.com/article/20090727/NEWS01/707279966
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The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida sued Miami-Dade County this week over the sex offender residency restriction laws that are forcing sex offenders to live in a homeless shantytown under the Julia Tuttle Causeway. The suit claims that the county’s mandate that sex offenders live 2,500 ft. from any place that children congregate should be superseded by the state’s 1,000 ft. law, thus opening up areas of Miami where sex offenders could find proper housing.
The suit claims that the current restriction laws force sex offenders to live under the bridge, creating a public safety and health concern, and that faced with living under the bridge as a homeless person, many sex offenders have simply absconded and are living elsewhere illegally, causing more problems for themselves and the community.
Although there is little sympathy for sex offenders in the general public and many would like to see the sex offenders leave the county completely, most don’t realize that many of those sex offenders are legally obligated to stay in the county for parole and other concerns. If the county cannot provide an adequate, legal area for housing these individuals, they are in-effect either forcing them to break the law or live as vagabonds, creating greater public health and safety concerns.
Source: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/southflorida/story/1135191.html
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Stumble It!In the latest (and first) issue of Crime Mapping: A Journal of Research and Practice, authors Tasha Youstin and Matt Nobles examine the effect of sex offender residency restriction laws over time. Their findings are interesting. First, they assuage fears that such laws are causing sex offenders to move into large clusters, especially into clusters around populations with a high number of children. But, at the same time, they point out that sex offenders are being dispersed across a larger population. In addition, they point out that their findings indicate that large numbers of sex offenders are simply ignoring the residency laws and that current enforcement of those laws may need improvement.
Read the full article here.
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Dovetailing on a story I posted last week, Miami may soon to be forced to reevaluate its sex offender residency restrictions. Because the sex offender residency laws forbid sex offenders from living within 2,500 feet of schools, parks, and even bus stops and other locations, Miami has essentially made the entire city off limits to sex offenders. The result has been a growing homeless sex offender community living under the bridge that connects Miami to Miami Beach. Currently the community consists of about 70 individuals, but could certainly grow as more felons are released from prison or if sex offenders in the city are prosecuted for violating the residency laws.
Certainly any area of a city where 70 or more people are living without proper housing or waste facilities can become a public safety hazard, and seeing as the population could get worse, this problem is not going away soon.
Of course, nobody wants sex offenders living in their neighborhood, but cutting these people off from housing, transportation, and jobs could potentially cause an even bigger public safety hazard.
Source: http://sexoffenderresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/fl-close-camp.html
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No doubt, sex offenders are among the most hated a feared criminals in society, so creating laws that restrict sex offenders from living with a certain distance of schools, playgrounds, parks, day care centers, etc., have been extremely popular and garner broad support across the nation. However, in a report issued by the National Institute of Justice, such laws can have unintended consequences.
Namely, because schools, parks, and other exclusion areas are spread throughout a city or town, many of the exclusion zones overlap, in some cases, covering almost the entire city and most of the available housing. This can create real problems. When sex offenders can’t legally find a place to live, they might go underground or become homeless and lose access to employment and mental health services.
In fact, just recently, NPR ran a story that covered Miami, Florida’s sex offender restriction laws. The restriction laws cover virtually the entire city, leaving the area around one bridge available for sex offender habitation. As a result a large, homeless sex offender community has grown up around the bridge, which isn’t healthy for the sex offenders, the community, or law enforcement.
Certainly, no one wants a sex offender living next door, but as more research is done into sex offender residency restriction laws, it might be helpful to modify these laws for the benefit of the community.
What do you think? Leave a comment.
Source: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/topics/crime/rape-sexual-violence/sex-offenders/residency-mapping.htm
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The Texas Department of Public Safety recently updated their sex offender website. The new website allows users to search for sex offenders by name, zip code, address, and more. And citizens can sign up for free email alerts for changes in an offender’s record or if they move. The improved site also provides more details information on the offender’s history and offenses, including offenses committed out of state.
Source: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/6443145.html
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The Crime Map 