Back in 2006 the California electorate fairly overwhelmingly voted for Prop 83, also known as "Jessica's Law." If you've forgotten what that is, you can return to my review of it here. The major additions of this proposition to our state law concerning sex offenders were (1) the ability to hold offenders after their normal sentence is up, (2) a GPS tracking system, and (3) an increase in the required stand-off distance between where a registered sex offender can live and park and schools. Since its passage, the law has been challenged repeatedly, largely on the basis of the possibly unconstitutional nature of the indefinite hold following completion of the assigned sentence. For more on those challenges and the law's current status, I'll direct you to this post on the California Criminal Defense Attorney Blog.
I ended up opposing Prop 83 based on the lack of a good analysis of the effectiveness of the GPS tracking proposal and, perhaps more importantly, the inherent problems involved in increasing the parks and schools stand-off distance to 2,000 feet (from 1,300 feet). The concern, even at the time, is that this amounted to California's urban and suburban areas effectively making registered sex offenders into a rural problem, since the only places you can find that are 2,000 feet away from schools and parks are in our farm counties.
Now, in this article the BBC reports on the consequences of a similar law in Miami. There, the stand-off distance is 2,500 feet, and this has led to a peculiar consequence:
The area under the Julia Tuttle Causeway in downtown Miami has in recent years become the unlikely home for a growing community of about 70 convicted sex offenders.
They have ended up living in a makeshift tent city under one of the causeway's bridges because of a local law which prohibits those who have sexually abused minors from living within 2,500 ft (760m) of anywhere where children congregate, such as schools, libraries and parks.
After the local laws were enacted, Florida's correctional authorities found there was virtually nowhere else for these people to live and began dropping them off at the bridge.
Some of them have even been issued driving licences with the bridge listed as their home address.
Naturally, there are concerns about this from a humanitarian perspective vis-a-vis the former offenders themselves. That said, pragmatically speaking this is a concern even if you don't care at all about their well-being. Consider the words of Dr. Pedro Green, interviewed in the BBC article:
"What we're doing is we're saying 'let's take the people that we most despise, that did some of the most egregious things in society and let them all get together and not supervise them and let them wander around the community'," he tells me with a clear sense of frustration in his voice.
This is the urban equivalent of California's problem. If you are saying that these individuals are too dangerous to be allowed within residential areas, then how comfortable can you be at unleashing them into our state's heartland, where police are not readily at hand but there are, nonetheless, a lot of kids (which may, perhaps, surprise voters who don't regularly make it through our farm counties).
This is the problematic consequence of half-assed, feel-good law design. In making a former offender "somebody else's problem" you make them your problem, whether it's by putting them into one angry, like-minded, disenfranchised mass, as in Miami, or shunting them into the vast stretches of the rural heartland, as we are now obligated to do in California. If we, hopefully for evidence-based reasons, are concerned that former sex offenders will consistently revisit their crimes, then we must address that problem, rather than hoping that if they are not in your community, they won't get your kids, which is ultimately both ignorant and selfish.