By Florida Action Committee… NARSOL Florida State Affiliate the Florida Action Committee (FAC) is outraged by the recent actions of the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office, which has forcibly displaced individuals attempting to rebuild their lives after serving their sentences. By clearing out a trailer park he described as a “cesspool of sex offenders” and calling its residents “perverts,” the sheriff’s office has not only dehumanized these individuals but also undermined their efforts to reintegrate into society as law-abiding, productive citizens.

“These people are not clustered in the trailer park because they want to be there,” said the president of FAC. Residence restrictions leave them nowhere else to go. Municipalities pass these misguided ordinances and then complain about the unintended consequences they created themselves.”

Stable housing is a cornerstone of successful rehabilitation. For many of these individuals, the trailer park provided a rare opportunity to establish a home, maintain employment, and access support systems. He might not care about these individuals, but the Sheriff should care about the safety of the community. By displacing them, the sheriff’s office has created a crisis of homelessness and instability, increasing the likelihood of recidivism and endangering public safety. “How can we expect individuals to rehabilitate when they are denied the basic dignity of a place to live and are subjected to public shaming?” asked FAC’s President.

The use of derogatory language like “perverts” is not only unprofessional but also counterproductive. Such rhetoric perpetuates stigma and fear, making it even harder for individuals to find acceptance and support in their communities. Rehabilitation requires a level of compassion, not condemnation. It requires opportunities, not obstacles. The sheriff’s actions demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of what it takes to create safer communities.

The FAC calls on the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office to reconsider its approach. Instead of displacing and demonizing individuals, we urge law enforcement to work collaboratively with community organizations, social services, and policymakers to develop solutions that prioritize both public safety and rehabilitation. Stable housing, access to social services, and employment opportunities are not privileges—they are necessities for reducing recidivism and fostering safer communities.

The Florida Action Committee stands ready to work with all stakeholders to ensure that individuals seeking to rebuild their lives are given the support they need to succeed. Public safety and rehabilitation are not mutually exclusive—they are two sides of the same coin.

The post Florida Action Committee Condemns Sheriff’s Office for Evicting Registrants as “Perverts” first appeared on NARSOL.

By Sandy . . . “I am just one person,” he wrote. “I have been trying to find a place to live for ten months and it’s nigh impossible. . . I’m paroled to Milwaukee, a place I’m not legally allowed to live. If something doesn’t change, I will be homeless soon. The laws are making me homeless.”

He was arrested in China in 2016, underwent a trial of sorts, was convicted on a child pornography charge, and served half of a three-year sentence in prison there before the FBI took custody of the case and brought him to Wisconsin for a trial here in 2018. He

was convicted for distribution of child pornography and was sentenced to eight years. He served seven years in New Mexico, six months at Oxford FCI in Oxford, Wisconsin, and March of 2024 was placed under community supervision at Parson’s halfway house in Milwaukee for a year.

Every step of the way, he was humiliated, threatened, and mistreated.

He will be on parole for seven years. He is registered on Wisconsin’s sex offender registry until 2047. He was raised and grew up in Washington State and has no  connection to Wisconsin except it was part of the internet hub used in the distribution charge.

I asked him why he wasn’t legally allowed to live in Milwaukee, and for the first time I learned about Wisconsin’s allowance of original domicile laws. These laws, at the most basic level, prohibit someone on the registry from living somewhere unless they lived there at the time of their conviction.  A significant number of Wisconsin’s cities have original domicile laws, effectively banishing registrants from any of those cities unless they were convicted there or grew up there. Between residency restrictions and original domicile ordinances, a registrant on parole can find virtually no place to live in Milwaukee nor its surrounding cities.

The interplay between  state and municipal original domicile laws and residency restriction ordanances is convoluted and almost impossible to follow; even finding citations is difficult. Additionally, some of the laws have been repealed or modified, but for “serious sex offenders,” they remain fixed. In most states, any CP conviction is labeled as serious.

The bottom line is that Christopher has to have an apartment by the time he leaves the halfway house, March 5. He has gotten a job in Milwaukee, but he can’t stay in Milwaukee due to the restrictions. He is looking outside of the city in hopes of finding a place withough original domicile laws where he can legally live that is close enough to commute to his job. If he doesn’t find something by that deadline, he will be homeless. Even if he finds something, it must be approved by a DOC supervisor, which is another layer of hoops to jump through.

Christopher isn’t the only one. We contacted Robert, NARSOL’s Wisconsin state representative, about

the situation. His response validated everything Christopher had said:

We’re having a massive problem here in Milwaukee.  There is no state-widestandard for registrant housing; each municipality sets its own rules.  State law requires someone being released from incarceration return to the county they’re convicted in, even if they have no connections in that county.  When a registrant finds a place that would accept them, their agent has to accept it as being within the rules—as they interpret them.  I’ve talked with people who had found a place, but the agent wouldn’t approve it and wanted them to go to a different town.  The result is that many registrants right now are homeless.  Even if they stay at a motel, they can only stay there nine days then have to move for at least one day, or they’re “establishing domicile.” I believe the Department of Community Corrections is just as frustrated as we are.

Everyone involved feels frustrated, but that doesn’t even begin to describe Christopher’s feelings.

Most of the people and police departments I contact don’t know what to tell me. I have to fulfill all these requirements, and yet the state has made it impossible for me. I’ve served my sentence; I’ve taken responsibility; I want to be in compliance. Only by good luck or the grace of God could anyone actually in my shoes make it back into society under these conditions. They have boxed me in and left no way out. I am contemplating what I might have to do to stay off the streets and return to prison where at least I’d have a bed and food. My case manager doesn’t even know what to do to help me—can’t offer any advice or tips on how to fix this problem. They are dooming me from the starting gate.

Those who commit these offenses must be held accountable. Christopher has been. He is still paying, now, after incarceration. He will pay by living many more years on the sex offender registry. He will pay until he dies with the scorn and contempt he receives, and many will say rightly so. But should that payment include difficulty even having hope for access to the things that evidence-based data shows inhibits reoffense and best assures a healthy lifestyle—housing, occupation, and family and community connections?

And most of all, should that payment be something that decreases public safety—homelessness—and does so due to the laws that he must abide by?

This piece is based on a series of email interviews with a registrant on parole in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin. Every attempt has been made to verify information as accurate.

The post “The laws are making me homeless” first appeared on NARSOL.

By Sandy . . . When Johnny Brown was 18, he committed a felony which resulted in a sentence of five years’ imprisonment and five years’ parole.

Johnny served out his full sentence of incarceration, and his release date was January 30, 2015. Three months prior, he was told that he needed to submit the address to which he would be paroled. The state of New York places restrictions on parole housing for some convictions. Johnny wanted to go home, and his parents were eager to have him home. Unfortunately, home was not approved; it ticked the box for one of New York’s “no-nos.” It was 989 feet from a school, and New York’s exclusion zone around schools is 1,000 feet. Johnny’s conviction fell into the exclusion category.

Johnny had a cousin and several friends who offered Johnny housing, and one by one they were shot down. January 30 came, and Johnny was out of options. Since the family could not afford separate housing for Johnny, even if anything acceptable could be found, he would be released to homelessness.

Except. For Johnny’s category of crime, homelessness on parole is not allowed. It needs to be a specific, approved address.

Not to worry, said the New York prison system; we’ve got it covered. We have residential treatment facilities for this very purpose. Envisioning a half-way house, Johnny and his family were relieved.

Johnny was not moved to a residential treatment facility. He was moved to a different prison. He still lived in a cell, this one in general population. He was still locked up, with virtually every move dictated 24 hours a day. The requirements for a “residential treatment facility,” such as education, treatment, and work, were barely discernible. “Work” was inside the prison, not out.

He was still behind bars against his will, and there he would remain until the end of his parole period – which has been extended twice because of disciplinary action due to his violating certain prison rules, which in turn, at the whim of officials, violated the terms of his parole conditions and added time. His release date is now January 30, 2024.

Since he will then be required to register on the sex offender registry, his housing once more will need to be approved. The homes of family members and friends are still off limit. Any other affordable housing is virtually non-existent. At this point, the chances are he will become homeless.

In the first section of a lengthy piece written by journalist Chris Gelardi, Johnny Brown, with some variance in details, is Jory Smith, whose story Gelardi posted October 17, 2023, at New York in Focus as part of a piece titled, “They Were Supposed to Be Free. Why Are They Locked up?”

In the same piece, he—Johnny–is Chris Gordon, another man with a sex crime conviction who has become so ill and incapacitated in prison that, with the absence of appropriate care and medical attention, he may not live to see the end of his time as a “parolee” and his actual release from prison, a release that will provide him nowhere to go but the streets. With conservative-driven policies becoming more prevalent, even shelters and care-homes are frequently off-limits.

Johnny Brown is the thousands of men who, for the past two-plus decades, have been kept in New York prisons past their latest official release date and up to the expiration of their end-of-parole date.

Mr. Gelardi concludes the first section of his excellent piece with these words from Jory:

“ ‘I’m under the impression that your readers won’t care,’ he wrote in a message to New York Focus and The Nation. ‘The general public and the courts want sex offenders off the streets at all costs, including violating the law and Constitution.’ “

To this, the journalist adds only, “It’s common for people to end up homeless after prison, and the legal authority that officials cite to keep him incarcerated is broad—’opening the doors’ for the state to indefinitely detain more and more people.”

Mr. Gerladi does leave us with a small gleam of hope. Traditionally extremely conservative, the New York Court system has historically given the DOC and equally conservative “tough-on-crime” lawmakers its full support and those expressing concern over the disregard for constitutional issues none. A sea-change is in the making, with criticism of these decisions coming from liberal Judge Rowan Wilson and from Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor at the refusal of the Court to hear a case dealing with the issue. She predicted that a similar case will come before the Court fairly soon, and hopefully it will at least receive a fair hearing.

Judge Rowan Wilson has recently been sworn in as Chief Justice of New York’s Court of Appeals.

The sun is a long way from bright and shining, but a glimmer of light is discernable through the clouds.

The post A travesty in New York–is help on the way? first appeared on NARSOL.

By Kelsey Turner . . . Cross, director of Oregon City-based nonprofit organization Free on the Outside, which provides housing and recovery for formerly incarcerated individuals, knows what strings to pull to get people housed. While working in Hillsboro west of Portland, he successfully sheltered people of all criminal backgrounds.

But those he turns away often have one thing in common: Their names are on Oregon’s Sex Offender Registry.

“I got housing for guys that committed murder — easy, no problem,” said Cross, 63. “Robbery, drug dealing, identity theft, almost anything, I could find 10 beds a day. I had a hard time finding one bed a week for someone with a sex offense.”

Recent proposals in Oregon and Washington aim to increase community notification when offenders move to an area. In Oregon, a bill introduced this year would have expanded the state’s public registry to include lower-level offenders. In Washington, proposed legislation would have required public notification and meetings before the state could make plans to house high-risk offenders in a community.  . . .

Nearly 5% of the people on Oregon’s Sex Offender Registry — about 1,500 — are homeless, according to Oregon State Police data. In Multnomah County, the rate is more than double, at 11%. Across the state border in Clark County, people on the registry experience homelessness at about 25 times the rate of the general population, according to an InvestigateWest analysis of county homelessness data. . . .

“This sort of ostracism and lack of opportunity winds up increasing the likelihood of somebody turning to crime,” said University of Michigan Law School Professor J.J. Prescott, who researches public safety effects of sex offender laws.

Read the rest of this excellent piece here at INVESTIGATEWEST.

The post Sex offender registry can result in homelessness first appeared on NARSOL.