MiamiHerald.com : Banishment Hurts City
Cautionary Tale
Miami-Dade communities, in a mad rush to outdo one another with sex-offender laws, eliminated all residency alternatives but that festering address in the middle of Biscayne Bay.
Most of the considerable new coverage touched on the bizarre notion that public policy has actually mandated homelessness. Or the stories offer up South Florida's experience as a cautionary tale. ''Celebrated sex offender laws doing more harm than good,'' warned the headline in the National Cities Weekly, in a report that offered Miami as Exhibit One.
The great irony here is that South Florida contrived its own nasty image makeover for no good reason. The Florida Department of Corrections, not exactly a touchy-feely outfit, has warned that forcing sex offenders to live in homeless camps impedes DOC supervision.
Social scientists who've studied the effect of Draconian residency laws are even more blunt. ''It defies logic,'' said Jill Levenson, chairman of he Lynn University Department of Human Services. ''We all agree that the public needs to be protected against people who've engaged in these crimes,'' she said. "But the question is whether these strategies accomplish that.''
They don't. In December, Levenson along with a criminologist and a geography professor, completed a detailed analysis of sexual offender recidivism. They concluded: ''Proximity to schools and day-care centers . . . explains virtually none of the variation in sexual recidivism. Sex offenders who lived within closer proximity to schools and day-care centers did not re-offend more frequently than those who lived farther away.'' (A copy of the Levenson study will be available at MiamiHerald.com on my blog, The Grimm Truth.)
Instead, Levenson warned, we've fixed it so they have ''nowhere to live, few opportunities for employment, unable to get support from their families.'' She warned that we've forced these outcasts into a category that represents a heightened threat to public safety.
"They have nothing to lose.''
