The final straw was when another family applied to move in and James couldn't bring himself to dig up an excuse to turn them down and keep the place running. The relapses and the overall hassle had gotten to him. After two years in charge, James sold the park. Later, it happened again, with another resident. But then the police demanded a key to the man's trailer, saying they had a warrant. He came home one time after being stopped by police, bragging to the rest of the park about how he'd escaped a DUI: "I demanded a blood test, and they let me go!" When police called the park about the resident sometime later, James figured the guy's drinking had finally landed him a violation. One of James' residents, a child molester, was pretty much always drunk. The theory is that when you make a sex offender a pariah and make their life suck in general, they're more likely to reoffend because they have nothing to lose. Public notification through mailers or the internet - which leads to stuff like landlords discriminating and vigilante car chases - appears to increase recidivism. But state sex offender registries, along with the associated restrictions, don't appear to lower the chances at all. The basic requirement that offenders check in with police does reduce their chance of reoffending, says the data. The guy then drove back to his trailer and didn't leave for a month. After he fled one store to get away from the people hounding him, his tormentors tailed him by car, yelling curses until he lost them by steering into a random side street. James recalls one resident who received regular verbal abuse from others in town. Trailer parks like James' see nightly vandalism, with everything from spray-painted messages to sacks of dead rats stuck in a clothes dryer. Yet the public keeps taking it upon themselves to go after released sex offenders, which rarely results in anything good. Everything afterward is in theory put in place to make them live in normal society without assaulting anybody. The offenders already got the full punishment that we decided they deserved when they went to jail. If registries were a punishment, they would be unconstitutional (and when they're judged to be punitive, courts keep striking them down). The Supreme Court actually ruled on this. That's where people like James come in.īut here's what you have to remember: Restrictions on sex offenders aren't designed to be a punishment. And as much as some people might relish the thought of people like this having no roof over their heads, the whole point of the registry is to keep tabs on them, so thousands of transient roaming sex offenders should be the absolute last thing anyone wants. So what then? Do they simply go homeless? Yeah, that happens, and on a large scale. "They can claim 'poor credit,'" says James, "'not good references,' 'we already rented it,' or another excuse." Out of options, maybe they could flee the urban center altogether for some distant county (states have been accused of making rural areas a dumping ground for sex offenders), but unless there's a job waiting for them elsewhere, they aren't leaving. It's not legal to discriminate that way, but it's easy to vet potential tenants by looking at your state registry and then rejecting anyone whose name is there. Offenders look to the few areas they're allowed to choose, and when landlords realize sex offenders are eyeing them, they generally respond by releasing the hounds. The laws leave a bunch of parents sleeping easier. Those laws are in theory reserved for those supposedly most likely to reoffend, including violent sex offenders and child molesters, while a bunch of caveats and sub-clauses spare people who aren't as much of a threat to society, like 18-year-olds who dated 16-year-olds. Most of you probably don't disagree with states banning people on sex offender registries from living anywhere children hang out (and if you do, you probably don't say so in public). 5 Laws Against Sex Offenders Have Created An Unexpected, Stupid Problem We talked to James, who owned a trailer park that became known as a haven for the people society would prefer not to deal with at all. In many cities, laws keep registered sex offenders from living anywhere near where children gather, which means there are only tiny areas where they can live. In real life, neighborhoods like that do exist, because of a problem society has no goddamned idea how to solve. "Sex Offender Trailer Park" sounds like either a great horror movie, a middling rock band, or a horrible sitcom.
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