MIAMI, May 3 (UPI) — A growing colony of sex offenders says members are being forced to live as outcasts under a Miami causeway because of strict sexual predator laws.
In 2006, there were seven convicted rapists and child molesters who had registered with Miami-Dade County officials as living in tents and shacks under the Julia Tuttle Causeway connecting Miami Beach and the mainland. Now there are 65 men and one woman among the colony, The Miami Herald reported Sunday.
They say they’re forced to live there because of a county ordinance prohibiting sex offenders from living within 2,500 feet of where children congregate — leaving nowhere in the county to live except the airport, the Everglades or under the causeway, the newspaper said.
“People call this place a camp, like it’s pretty and fun,” Osvaldo Castillo, 29, who was convicted of molesting a 6-year-old boy, told the Herald. “It’s not fun at all. We are living like animals and trying to make the best of it.”
“Now, we gotta be our own city,” added Juan Carlos Martin, convicted of exposing himself to a 15-year-old girl. “Every attempt we’ve made to fight this has failed, so we have to make this work.”
I can think of better place to put them, but since we already have them all in one convenient location……well, I’m just sayin’.
Put ’em in with all the other sinners. Oh wait, that’s us. Never mind.
Sex offenders have a high probability of offending again. We should probably lock them up for life, minimum security maybe, but that won’t happen.
We should also make sure people aren’t wrongly convicted of “sex offender” crimes, like teens sending naked pictures to each other. The term should be reserved for adults who prey on children, not an 18 year old male who has consensual sex with his 16 year old girlfriend.
I gotta say I am torn on this one. On one hand most of these people are pretty scummy, and have done some pretty bad crimes (not up to murder levels, but still pretty bad).
On the other hand, I find it hard to keep punishing them if they have served their full time, and been released.
I mean if they are cleared physiologically by a shrink, I can’t think of a good reason for them to live where they want.
Draconian laws like this will only serve to make all such law unconstitutional eventually. Forcing someone to live under a bridge for one offense, such as getting oral sex from your 15 year old girlfriend, when you are 18, moves into the arena of cruel and unusual punishment. While most think of the sex offender as the low life predator, some prosecutors and state legislators label you a sex offender for anything ranging from pissing in public to consensual sex between 2 teenagers.
Exile them, there’s no cure for them so they’ll continue to be a threat to society. Maybe they’ll be welcome in France.
#2 wrote:
“Sex offenders have a high probability of offending again. We should probably lock them up for life, minimum security maybe, but that won’t happen.”
Well, Mr. Smart, are you going to pay for keeping them alive behind bars just so they do it again? If you are then I have nothing against it, but if you are suggesting that *ny* taxes should be wasted on it then you are wrong.
Strict 1-strike policy would solve it. Just hang them after 2nd offense.
quote:
“We should also make sure people aren’t wrongly convicted of “sex offender” crimes, like teens sending naked pictures to each other. The term should be reserved for adults who prey on children, not an 18 year old male who has consensual sex with his 16 year old girlfriend.”
Fully agreed.
Laws supposed to make sense and organize society, not artificially create offenders to fill private jail’s quota.
new kyboard here, apologies for typos. Can’t get used to it.
I meant of course
“…just so they DON’T do it again”
and
“…*MY* taxes” (instead of “*ny* taxes”)
Sex offenders should live in slums and terrorists should get water boarded. I don’t know what is wrong with this country anymore. There are just too many politically correct fish eating hippies!
Maybe Dexter will pay a visit or the people will just move to a more rural area.
#10
“Dexter solution”?
LOL
There are 26 of them under the bridge.
Too many for Dexter… and I bet at least few of them are not really “sex offenders” as we think.
#2 For the win.
amodedoma says “Maybe they’ll be welcome in France.”
… except that France doesn’t have nearly as high a problem with sexual predators — precisely because their minds aren’t warped by the peculiarly American blend of Puritanism and childish sexual obsessiveness. (The one naturally breeds the other.)
Why not just brand them with a scarlet letter? I honestly don’t see the difference…
#2: “Sex offenders have a high probability of offending again.”
Where are you getting your information?
I’ll go right on ahead and put my bias out there – I’m a criminal defense attorney, and I think our sex offender registry laws are idiotic, overbroad, vague, and accomplish none of their stated purpose.
But the fact is the very DoJ’s data suggests that sex offenders reoffend *less* than any other type of offender. This idea that sex offenders need to be lifetime paroled and constantly monitored lest they harm our children (gasp!) is built upon this “uncontroverted” assertion that sex offenders can never right themselves… and yet the data’s just not there. Every serious study I’ve ever read suggests that either the data is lacking or that sex offenders are *less* likely to reoffend than other offenders. And yet, it’s the only type of precrime that we prosecute in the United States.
Once I get home back to all of my student files I’ll link you the studies if you care to see them.
sex offenders recidivism rates
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/press/rsorp94pr.htm
Making them live under an overpass with no supervision, yeah that’s really protecting children and the general public. Making them outcasts probably makes recidivism even more likely, so yet another victim.
According to the link above the average sentence of a sex offender, who’s victims were children, was 7 years with many being released after only 3 years.
#6 The government is putting tax payer money to far more wasteful uses and at least keeping sex offenders in prison keeps them under supervision and away from your family. Besides the cost to you as a percentage of what you pay in taxes is likely fairly small.
Iv mentioned a solution to a friend to think about..
WHERE do you want a sex offender?
NEAR you or AWAY from you?
NEAR you:
You can watch them, and monitor, and MAKE FRIENDS. TALK to them and show them friendship..KNOW them and HELP them.
AWAY from you:
Hmmm! where is he..
In someones back yard?? In your HOME before you get back from work??
The idea is a neighborhood..that WORKS together.. NOT isolating them.
AND 90% of sex offenders are charged on misc. charges that range from Peeing over a fence/tree/… or your swim trunks fell off..to the REAL thing.
You make it a harsh CRIME, and watch how many CHILDREN survive, and how many crimes get solved.. rape and murder will cause MORE harm, then uncle DAVE sprinting to the bed room, because he FORGOT his clean clothes..
Sorry, no remorse from this victim. They should all be put to sleep. That way we know they won’t ruin someone Else’s life. So, their victims suffer a lifetime, maybe they should too.
Our convent is not far from there. I think I’ll take the girls by there and maybe we can moon them.
#17 said “peeing over a fence.” I knew a young man that could pee over a parked car – I’m sure now that he’s old he could barely make it to the door handle.
Hah, hah. Every society needs (several) groups to look down on. You think India or Japan is weird to have a caste system?
Course, in the Good Ol USA==a whole party was founded on it until it got power and showed itself for what it was.
When you “hate” a label, you are an idiot.
#2: So you’re saying we should keep twenty people in jail who are no threat to society and by rights should be released in order to keep the one who will re-offend away from “our children”?
Why don’t we just incarcerate the entire population? Then there’d be no crime at all…
From the Bureau of Justice Statistics (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov) about 2.43% of the population was in some kind of correctional supervision in 2007. That’s one out of every 41.11 people. 0.76% of the population was in jail or prison which is one out of 131.39 people. This number has been trending up. The corrections budget in 2006 was $68,747,203,000 (almost $69 billion) which was over $230.41 from every man, woman and child in the country at the time. This has also been going up.
Also from the same site: “Of the 272,111 persons released from prisons in 15 States in 1994, an estimated 67.5% were rearrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor within 3 years, 46.9% were reconvicted, and 25.4% resentenced to prison for a new crime.”
If you then consider the extended impact of incarcerating the offenders who are NOT a risk to society: the broken families and children deprived of parents, the lost tax income alone is around ten billion dollars. (Total tax revenue divided by total population times incarcerated population for 2007 is over ten billion dollars.)
The problem here isn’t the people working in corrections, but the way we incarcerate people. The current political benefit the politicians get from “getting tough on crime” is really hitting this country in the pocketbook and hitting it really hard. It doesn’t make us any safer. All it does is ruin more lives and generate more crime.
The “once a criminal always a criminal” approach is simple-minded in the extreme. It has been proven time and time again that a treatment style approach to crime where you work with offenders to make sure they have the emotional and job skills to make a legitimate living once they get out of prison will actually make a big difference in recidivism. The warehouse approach where you shove offenders into a hole just perpetuates crime.
With more than a quarter of the inmates released from prison ending up back in prison within three years it’s pretty telling which method we’ve been using. It’s also pretty obvious it isn’t working.
The guy who molested a 6 year-old should be thankful he’s still alive.
The way I see it, it that people who are violent sex criminals should just be castrated and then let back into society. I’m not saying this as some knee-jerk reactionary “that’ll teach ’em” mentality. It is proven that castrating a male will completely remove his sexual drive and any want for him to commit a serious sex crime. I see this as a way to give these people a second chance at life without outcasting them, and saving the public money on needlessly jailing them.
Before such a thing could be introduced, I would suggest a complete overhaul of the current sex crime laws. It would need to be reserved for VIOLENT sexual offenses, and probably used as a last resort, i.e, you get one chance, and if you do it again, you get castrated.
All this stuff about 18 year olds having consentual sex with their 16 year old girlfriends and getting on the sex offender list is ridiculous. I think the consent age should be lower, and there should be some sort of law stating that if a someone has consentual sex with someone who is 5 years within their age, it should not be seen as a crime (or something along those lines).
They should just put them all on one of the keys and call it Pedif Isle.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they sue for traffic noise and win.
The average length of time served for MURDER in the US is 10 years. And when they get out, they don’t have to live under a bridge, do they?
Sex crimes are not worse than murder.
#26:
Sex crimes *are* as bad as murder. If you believe sexual preference is inborn, you have to accept that you can’t rehabilitate a child molester. Hang ’em.
There are certain areas of this nation that are obsessed with sex offenders and sex offender laws, and it is quite evident from the posts I see here that many make no attempt at sound reasoning.
It is an ‘I am better than thou’ mentality I see in many posts, with some boardering on murderous vigilantism. These people should be watched because they are fantasizing about murder. One or two will eventually want to do physical harm to carry out those fantasies.
It is amazing that so many people who obviously consider themselves intelligent and probably god fearing are people who have psychological problems that make them so hateful of other people, regardless of how minor an offense a person might have done.
There are two things we activists are fighting against, 1) willful ignorance and vigilante hate, and 2) vigilante minded lawmakers. In some states it seems the lawmakers, governor, and the people have all people taken over by some demonic influence. That’s what it seems.
So if they can’t live anywhere, they have every incentive to disappear, change states, assume new names, and move in next door to you…only without visits from probabtion officers, without the police knowing their wheareabouts. Basically drive them underground where no one has any possibility of keeping an eye on them. Good move.
Either keep them locked up (unconstitutional) or offer them some sort of tracking device and let them live where they want (with REASONABLE restrictions).
And yes, remember that in the eyes of the law in the US, getting a bj from your girlfriend 1 month before she’s legal nets you exactly the same lifetime banishment as raping a 5 year old. And more time than you’d get for killing her.
Li, I wish you were right. You’ll never convince my two boys. Both were sexually brutalized at 5. Both have severe mental problems even today. They are now 38 years old and suffering a lifetime punishment for being young and in the wrong place.
You’d rather them be dead?