Sex Offenders & Housing Restrictions

Waukesha may follow in the wake of Delafield in further restricting where "sex offenders" can live. The proposed ordinance would:

The Department of Corrections and the landlord for the transitional housing must give the city notice 60 days in advance of the placements and give all property owners within 2,000 feet of the residence a 30-day notice, including information about time and place of the committee meeting. The ordinance also requires the corrections officials and landlord to attend the notification committee meeting to provide information.

Keep in mind Waukesha already has a sex offender registry of living within 750 feet from a school, park, playground, etc. since 2007; this would be extended to 2,000 feet.  Property owners who would be notified are also extended from 300 feet to 2,000 feet.

2,000 feet is pretty much an entire block length. 

• According to the school district, there are 16 elementary schools, four middle schools, three high schools, and five charter schools.  That's 23 sites.
• Bing lists approximately 20 parks (subtracting duplicates & offices)

If you extend that block in all directions from schools, parks, etc., that's a pretty good chunk of the city that can't be used. Add in the fact that transitional housing generally can't afford higher-priced housing, that doesn't leave much. The intent of legislation like this is to basically ordinance out any place a sex offender can live in the municipality.  In the long run, this is not ideal because sex offenders, unable to find a place or employment, will "go underground" and we won't know where they are. 

From Wikipedia:

Many believe that sex offender registration has become a self-defeating process. In the effort to register as many people as possible for sex-related crimes, the sex offender registry has grown exponentially with too many people for law enforcement to effectively manage. In many states, the sex offender lists even include people arrested for visiting prostitutes, underage teenagers who engaged in consensual sex with each other, and minors who emailed or texted nude photos of themselves to their friends.^[41]

I'm not very comfortable writing about this topic because I feel I don't know enough, but I do know that eager prosecutors have abused the purpose of the sex offense laws and by extension, the registries.  You have underage couples (usually just the boy) being convicted and put on the registry, possibly for life, you have prosecutors going after children and teenagers for sexting and sending pictures to each other.  Are those kind of people really the kind that you need to put on registries, restrict where they live, what kind of jobs they can have, etc.?  From what I read in the articles, neither the Waukesha nor the Delafield ordinances make distinctions between the types of sex crimes that the registries would cover.  Until municipalities figure out how to judiciously apply ordinances so that they impact the people they should, I'm generally not in favor of overly broad language.


Update: Typo in title corrected.  Note to self: Spell-check does not cover title box.