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Strong editorial against residency restrictions

By Douglas Berman

This morning’s New York Times brings this editorial weighing in against sex offender residency restrictions.  Here are some highlights:

Of all the places that sexual predators could end up after prison, the worst is out of sight, away from the scrutiny and treatment that could prevent them from committing new crimes.  But communities around the country are taking that risk, with zoning laws that banish pedophiles to the literal edges of society.

There is a powerful and wholly understandable impulse behind laws that forbid sex offenders to live within certain distances of schools, day care centers and other places that children gather.  Scores of states and municipalities have created such buffer zones, then continued adding layer upon layer to the enforcement blanket….

The unintended consequence is that offenders have been dispersed to rural nowhere zones, where they are much harder to track….  Many offenders respond by going underground. In Iowa, the number of registered sex offenders who went missing soared after the state passed a law forbidding offenders to live within 2,000 feet of a school or day care center.  The county prosecutors’ association has urged that the law be repealed, for the simple reasons that it drives offenders out of sight, requires “the huge draining of scant law enforcement resources” and doesn’t provide the protection intended….

The problem with residency restrictions is that they fulfill an emotional need but not a rational one.  It’s in everyone’s interest for registered sex offenders to lead stable lives, near the watchful eyes of family and law enforcement and regular psychiatric treatment.  Exile by zoning threatens to create just the opposite phenomenon — a subpopulation of unhinged nomads off their meds with no fixed address and no one keeping tabs on them.  This may satisfy many a town’s thirst for retributive justice, but as a sensible law enforcement policy designed to make children safer, it smacks of thoughtlessness and failure.

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