Sex-offender laws may spur re-offenses

There's a registered sex offender in my area. Our family became aware of this when the neighborhood children, in a makeshift phone tree, began calling one another shortly after the man's profile showed up on the Utah Department of Corrections Web site.

I checked out the registry myself. It gave me chills that our child had attended a sleepover party at a house on the same street as the convicted sex offender resides. I think of that man when I shutter our house for the night or when our children are a few minutes late from an outing.

It's one thing to talk about sex offenders and the sex offender registry in an abstract way. I've written a number of editorials for this newspaper about the registry, concerns about the accuracy of such registries nationwide and how community members are to respond to learning that there is a sex offender in their midst.

It's another thing to learn there's a sex offender in my midst.

The other day, en route to the grocery store, I drove by the sex offender's house. As a mother, I wanted to know precisely where he was. I haven't been back since.

There's a fine line, I suppose, between checking up on the neighborhood sex offender and harassing him. State law expressly prohibits members of the public from using information from the registry to harass or threaten sex offenders or members of their families. For the record, I used public information to locate the registered sex offender in my neighborhood, drove by his house on a public street and had no personal contact with him.

I like the fact that he knows the community knows that he lives among us. Literally hundreds of eyes are on him. It makes me uncomfortable, but we have to accept the fact that when people get out of jail or prison, most return to their hometowns.

Unless you happen to be a sex offender in Miami-Dade County in Florida, which has some of the strongest restrictions against convicted sex offenders nationwide. There, convicted sex offenders are prohibited from living within 2,500 feet of schools, parks and other places where children might gather.

That has left some convicted sex offenders with nowhere to go. Miami-Dade's solution? Convicted felons are being "housed" under a bridge that forms one part of the Julia Tuttle Causeway. There's no running water, no electricity or protection from the elements. A state probation officer visits the bridge once a day to ensure convicts are complying with requirements that they occupy a "residence" from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.

The truly strange thing is, this arrangement is a vast improvement from an encampment of sex offenders in a lot in downtown Miami. The lot had to be abandoned because it bordered a center for sexually abused children.