Finding a Home After Prison
An interesting story from Florida yesterday tells the story of Randy Young, who was convicted of a sex offense in 2003 and now helps other sex offenders find homes that meet Florida’s strict standards for sex offender residence. It’s so hard for sex offenders to find legal housing, Young has turned it as a business opportunity.
Maybe instead of creating a need for Young's niche business, which he calls Habitat for Sex Offenders, we should be rethinking the laws that restrict people with sex offense convictions to the fringes of society and suggest that we don't want them back.
Young says Florida’s law is so strict that sex offenders have just a few choices on where to live. The state law restricts sex offenders from living 1,000 feet from schools, parks, day care centers or any other place children may congregate. Some cities expand that zone even further.
These broad restrictions are a problem across the country -- where sex offenders end up homeless and are even rejected from shelters because the shelters accept children or are too close to schools. Shannon has covered homeless sex offenders in depth on the End Homelessness blog.
Even worse, the laws aren’t effective. They throw up barriers to reentry for sex offenders, one of the groups with the lowest recidivism rate. Even if someone is determined to abduct or harm a child, will they really be stopped because they happen to live 1,001 feet from a school?
Daytona Beach News-Journal reporter Julie Murphy talked with a few experts who made important and thoughtful points about the need for reform. We need to focus on preventing this abuse and then handling cases individually when the crimes do happen, they said.
Lynn University’s Jill Levenson, for example, said that even when sex offenders do find housing that follows the law, they can be exploited by high rents for cramped spaces. The laws also fail to distinguish between people with different issues.
"Blanket solutions dilute resources across the field," she said. "It should be case management rather than law. People need to learn more about what causes children to be victimized. Children are much more at risk by their own family members and close family friends."
Matt Kelley
is the Online Communications Manager at the Innocence Project and a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Follow him on Twitter @mattjkelley.
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