a public defender

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Out of Maryland comes the news that legislators are considering shifting their focus away from residency restrictions. I cannot tell you how much this gladdens me. Finally the push against residency restrictions is beginning to pay off and hopefully more states will follow suit and try to cultivate legislation that will actually accomplish the goals they seek.

Sen. Norman Stone and Del. John Olszewski Jr. now say the focus of their bills is likely to move away from residential restrictions toward other legal remedies.

The possible changes come after studies conducted in states where similar laws have been passed or considered conclude that such restrictions have little effect.

In their current form, these bills would be standard fare - restricting how close sex offenders can live to “areas populated by children”.

Both Stone and Olszewski, however, say their bills may be altered to reflect the growing body of opinion in legislative and law-enforcement circles nationwide that residential restrictions are ineffective and, in some cases, counterproductive.

A report presented to the Florida legislature in 2005 was among the first to call residential restrictions into question, saying that statistics showed no decrease in the likelihood that convicted child sex offenders would commit new offenses, despite the presence of restrictions.

The Florida report went on to say that “such policies may ultimately be counterproductive,” noting that residential restrictions tended to cause many offenders to move into small-town and rural areas where they were poorly supervised by law enforcement authorities and had little or no access to psychiatric treatment, or drove them underground, where they were not monitored or treated at all.

Absolutely on point. The article also does a good job of highlighting other states where these laws are being questioned.

This analysis has been echoed in states like Texas, Colorado, Kansas and Minnesota, where legislatures have rejected residential restriction bills, as have cities including Topeka, Kan., Maplewood, Minn., and Covington, Ky. Legislatures in other states, including Georgia and Oklahoma, are revisiting their residential restriction statutes.

However, it seems that Iowa is now being looked at as the vanguard of this movement. Lots more after the jump, so click on the link to read the full post.

The most complete body of evidence, however, as well as the most surprising array of residential-restriction opponents, may befound in Iowa, where child-protection activist groups, prosecutors, local police officials and several county councils have asked the state legislature to repeal a 2002 residential-restriction law almost identical to the Olszewski-Bromwell bill.

The Iowa County Attorneys Association, the prosecutors’ group, issued a report debunking most of the popular arguments for residential restrictions, saying that research shows there is “no correlation between residency restrictions and reducing sex offenses against children or improving the safety of children.

“Research,” it goes on to say, “does not support the belief that children are more likely to be victimized by strangers at the covered locations than at other places. In fact, 80 to 90 percent of sex crimes against children are committed by a relative or acquaintance who has some prior relationship with the child and access to the child that is not impeded by residency restrictions.” Moreover, the Iowa authorities noted a doubling of the number of sex offenders who failed to register after residential restrictions went into effect.

You can read the Iowa coverage and report here [.pdf] and then click on either “megan’s law” or “residency restrictions” to see full coverage of this topic.

So what are some of Maryland’s proposed changes?

“The Iowa situation was brought up in testimony before the [Senate] Judicial Proceedings Committee last week,” he said. “We’re starting to look at other things now, like strengthening prohibitions on places these guys can’t go, like schools and playgrounds.

“What comes out of it may be less about residency and be more site-oriented.”

And finally, a few of the smartest sentences spoken by a legislator on this topic that I have seen:

Referring to what he has gleaned from the experiences of other states, Olszewski observed that “the introduction of this legislation has opened up a flood of information.”

“The bill only has a slim possibility of passage this session,” he said, “but we’ve learned a lot, and I hope we can come out of this with a good bill that we can get passed next year.”

All I can say is, it’s about time.