miamiherald.com : Playground forces sex offenders to leave St. Francis in Fort Lauderdale - The opening of a nearby playground brings the ouster of convicted sexual offenders from a nearby treatment center.
About 20 sex offenders helped keep St. Francis open by paying the $190 weekly fee required of each, though the center still fell into deep debt. In turn, St. Francis helped keep the men from their demons with constant supervision and therapy and spiritual guidance.
``It changed my whole view of life that somebody cared,'' says Dwight Rennie Dennis, 47, a registered sexual predator and St. Francis resident who has spent much of his adult life in and out of Florida prisons. ``This place made me understand that I can be somebody, that I can do better.''
That all changed in January, though, when a playground opened about two blocks away in Florence C. Hardy Park, triggering state and county residency restriction laws for sex offenders. In all of Miami-Dade and Broward, ordinances forbid convicted sex offenders from living within 2,500 feet of schools and places where children gather.
The Department of Corrections, which supervises sex offenders on probation, ordered the men to leave St. Francis, says Chris Mancini, a Fort Lauderdale attorney who filed an injunction on behalf of eight residents who wanted to remain.
As the Oct. 21 deadline approaches, Navarro worries he and the other residents may end up like the colony of sex offenders living under the Julia Tuttle Causeway in Miami-Dade, where a multitude of residency restrictions for sex offenders have left them with few other places to live.
The irony of evicting the St. Francis residents, said Jill Levenson, a licensed clinical social worker and chair of the Department of Human Services at Lynn University in Boca Raton, is that the center was probably the best environment for them.
``The programming was probably ideal for this kind of person,'' she says. ``He's got a structured, safe, supervised environment to live in, with therapeutic programming that focuses on preventing future crimes, resisting temptations, changing your thinking, living in a law-abiding fashion, and being part of a therapeutic community where those pro-social behaviors are supported.
``That is exactly the kind of environment we know helps prevent recitivism.''
