Restrictions on sex offenders lack sense, common and otherwise

6-22-2011 Illinois:

I wish I could tell ___ not to worry, that common sense will surely prevail in the sad, scary story of his son.

But I would be lying. His son is a sex offender, and when it comes to sex offenders, hysteria and superstition trump common sense every time.

In December 2008, ___ (pictured), then 27, had sex with two 16-year-old girl in a Downers Grove motel room. The girls were willing participants, and ___, who suffers from Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, has the judgment and social skills of a 10-year-old.

But the girls were legally underage, and authorities contended ___ knew right from wrong when he had sex with them. So he ended up pleading guilty but mentally ill to aggravated criminal sexual abuse and received a five-year prison sentence.

Flash ahead to today: ___ is scheduled to be paroled from Taylorville Correctional Center on July 23. His parents, Walt, 60, and Kathy, 58, want him to move back into their Elmhurst home where they can supervise his transition to freedom.

Unfortunately, there is a part-time preschool program operating in a church around the corner from the ___ residence. It's roughly 400 feet from lot line to lot line, and the rigid, one-size-fits-all legal restrictions in Illinois prohibit sex offenders from living within 500 feet of schools, parks, day-care centers and other places where children gather.

Nothing in the record suggests ___ is a pedophile with a deviant interest in the 2- to 5-year-old clientele of a preschool or that he has any predatory tendencies.

But even if he were a pedophile, the vast weight of research on residential restrictions — now in roughly 30 states and expanding, in places, to quarter-mile buffer zones — suggests this geographic limitation would do nothing to protect children.

"There was no significant relationship between reoffending and proximity to schools or day cares," concluded an academic study of such restrictions published last year in Criminal Justice and Behavior, the journal of The American Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology. "The belief that keeping sex offenders far from schools and other child-friendly locations will protect children from sexual abuse appears to be a well-intentioned but flawed premise."

That premise will keep ___ locked up past his parole date. The Illinois Department of Corrections refuses to allow sex offenders without legal places to live to enter supervised release (parole) programs, and a DOC spokeswoman said roughly 1,000 such inmates a year are "violated at the door," as the expression goes, and reincarcerated until their full sentences are up.

Some of you, I know, are saying, "So what? Sex offenders are the lowest of the low and the longer they're locked up, the better."

The flaw in this thinking is that it ultimately short-circuits the safeguards — such as mandatory therapy, electronic monitoring and tight supervision — that help offenders successfully re-enter society. When ___'s sentence is up in July 2012, for instance, he'll walk free even if he has nowhere to live.

"One of the unintended consequence of these draconian residency-restrictions is that they increase homelessness and transience among ex-offenders," said Lynn University psychology professor Jill S. Levenson, one of the authors of the article in Criminal Justice and Behavior. "And those," she said, "are known risk factors for the resumption of criminal behavior."

Last year, my colleagues Megan Twohey and Joe Mahr chronicled in this newspaper a series of horror stories of sex criminals who served their parole periods behind bars, then reoffended after vanishing unsupervised into the community. Nearly 1 in 3 was not up to date with the state's sex-offender registry.

Walt and Kathy ___ are unemployed and say they can't move or afford a separate dwelling for ___, their only child.

The compassionate and sensible solution would be for state officials to consider the circumstances here — including substantial expert opinion that it would be best for ___ and for society for him to live at home — and issue a waiver.

But there is no provision in the law for such consideration or the issuance of such a waiver, according to the Department of Corrections. And given the invertebrate skittishness with which our lawmakers approach the issue of sex crimes, there's little chance we'll ever add such a provision or relax the restrictions and introduce common sense when it comes to nonviolent offenders.

All I can tell Walt ___ is, if I were him, I'd worry, too. And good luck. ..Source.. by ERIC ZORN