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 Additionally, some of the laws have been repealed or modified, but for “serious sex offenders,” they remain fixed.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 Mark . . . On May 31, 2024, the parties filed their opening summary judgment briefs in Antrim v. Carr, 19-cv-396 (Eastern District of Wisconsin), in which plaintiffs challenge the constitutionality of Wisconsin’s statutory scheme requiring that certain individuals convicted of sexual offenses be forced to wear a GPS monitoring device for life, even after they are off of any criminal supervision. Attached below are each side’s opening summary judgment briefs. Response briefs in the case are due July 5, 2024. NARSOL is intimately connected to the litigation, having subsidized the full costs of the plaintiffs’ two expert witnesses — Kate Weisburd, a law professor at George Washington University School of Law, and Kelly Socia, Professor in the School of Criminology and Justice Studies and a Fellow for the Center for Public Opinion at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

The post NARSOL cases in Illinois and Wisconsin moving forward first appeared on NARSOL.

By Sandy . . . It is a given that if one is convicted of a crime, some sort of punishment will follow. Why? It has been thus from the beginning of time. The hope is that the punishment will evoke a repulsion toward the criminal act and the unpleasantness that resulted from it and cause a turning away from it. If the lesson is learned as intended, society benefits.

This is a good thing. Less criminality, increased safety are very worthwhile goals in any society.

But what, then, what if the lesson is not learned? What if the miscreant, rather than turning away from the crime, turns back to it and reoffends? Then harsher punishment is meted out. Obviously, more is needed in this specific case to enable the offender’s realization that continued criminality will result in stronger and more stringent punishment. He had a chance, and he did not seize that opportunity. He must now suffer more severe consequences.

This is the purpose of first-time offenders being dealt with more leniently than repeat offenders. It is logical. It is effective. For the vast majority of those who have committed crimes of a sexual nature, it works; it works better than it does for those who commit every other category of crime with the exception of murder.  On average, virtually all valid follow-up studies show that upward of 95% of first-time offenders did not receive a second conviction for another sexual offense.

Why then, why, would the Wisconsin legislature pass law that renders useless this process? A bill has just been signed by the governor of that state that applies the consequences of a repeat offense when only one conviction has occurred.

It is not uncommon practice for the state to prosecute separate charges flowing from one incident as one, thus resulting in one conviction. For example, someone is found to have three illegal images on his computer; he is charged with three counts of possession of illegal pornography, and they are tried together: one case, one conviction, one sentence, and a required sex offender registration period of 15 years.

Under this new law, he is now guilty of three offenses; he is a repeat offender and is given the enhanced requirement of lifetime sex offender registration and lifetime GPS monitoring.

What is missing in this grand new scheme? There was no time between offenses, no time to consider whether he wished to cease or continue his criminal behavior. He is suddenly a repeat offender when he never had the opportunity to choose not to be one.

As egregious as this sounds, it is not the most so. This legislative action, formalized and codified by the governor, is retroactive. It reaches back and grabs by the throat all those who had two or more charges tried as one case. These are individuals who did learn the lesson, who made the right choice, who have not reoffended and are now living law-abiding lives. These are people with families, with jobs, with careers, people who were counting down the years and months and days until their obligation to register would be finished. These are also people who have completed their 15 years of required registration and been released from the obligation. These are, for the most part, productive, contributing members of society.

Now they will be part of the financial strain this new law places on Wisconsin. Now instead of being individuals who messed up, got punished, learned their lesson, and came out of the end of the tunnel into the daylight, they will be forever registrants, forever burdened with the additional expenses, limitations, and restrictions that sex offender registration entails. Wisconsin will see the burden on the taxpayers increase more and more as years go by, not only that dictated by increased registry and GPS monitoring but that required to defend legal action against them.

And the saddest thing of all? Wisconsin citizens will not see a corresponding rise is public safety along with the rise in financial burden. They will not see any rise in public safety at all. Those who have been retroactively made lifetime registrants will continue as they have been, and those going forward will do so as they would have, with the few who haven’t learned the lesson getting reconvicted and the many who have learned it struggling to make a life under the shadow of a punitive, crippling “civil regulatory scheme” that, in 25 plus years of existence, has no evidence—none—to show that it is effective in lowering recidivism, protecting children, or improving safety.

The post Wisconsin, what are you doing? first appeared on NARSOL.

NARSOL’s legal team . . . NARSOL is publicly releasing for the first time copies of two expert reports filed last week in Antrim v. Carr, 19-cv-396 (Eastern District of Wisconsin). The case challenges Wisconsin’s statutory scheme requiring that certain individuals convicted of sexual offenses be forced to wear a GPS monitoring device for life, even after they are off of any criminal supervision. The plaintiff’s attorneys are Mark Weinberg and Adele Nicholas. NARSOL is subsidizing the costs of the case by paying for Plaintiff’s two expert reports, as well as any supplemental reports in the case.

The plaintiff alleges the scheme violates the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution. The case  has been certified as a class action, and the class currently consists of 514 persons subject to lifetime GPS monitoring because they have been convicted of a sexual offense on two or more separate occasions.

The two experts in the case are Kate Weisburd and Kelly Socia.

Ms. Weisburd is a law professor at George Washington University School of Law and one of the leading scholars concerning the impact that surveillance technology has on individuals in the criminal justice system. She is the author of a seminal law review article in the area, Punitive Surveillance, 108 Va. L. Rev. 148, (2022). Her report forcefully details the ways in which GPS technology negatively impacts the lives of individuals forced to wear the devices.

Dr. Socia is Professor in the School of Criminology and Justice Studies and a Fellow for the Center for Public Opinion at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. He is one of the leading experts on the impact of residency restrictions imposed on individuals who have been convicted of sexual offenses. Dr. Socia has approximately 50 peer-reviewed publications in journals such as Justice Quarterly; Criminology & Public Policy; Crime & Delinquency; Sex Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment; and Psychology, Public Policy, and Law.

Dr. Socia’s expert report makes three conclusions: (1) Wisconsin’s policy of automatically placing individuals on lifetime GPS monitoring based solely on whether they have been convicted of sexual offenses on more than one occasion is unreasonable, ineffective and wasteful; (2) There is little support for the use of post-incarceration GPS tracking as a means of reducing sexual recidivism; and (3) Mandating GPS tracking for 20 years or longer, especially when the policy is applied without incorporating any risk assessment–neither static nor dynamic–represents an immense waste of resources with no discernable public safety benefits.

NARSOL thanks both of these scholars for their expertise and their work in producing these reports. We are excited about this case and will provide updates as they occur.

The post Wisconsin’s lifetime GPS monitoring challenged first appeared on NARSOL.