“Three-quarters of California’s paroled sex offenders previously banned from living near parks, schools and other places where children congregate now face no housing restrictions after the state changed its policy in response to a court ruling that said the prohibition only applies to child molesters,” the Associated Press reported, citing statewide data compiled at its request.

“The rate is far higher than officials initially predicted. The state expected half of the 5,900 parolees would have restrictions on where they can live or sleep lifted when the corrections department changed its policy following the March ruling. Instead, data shows that 76 percent of offenders no longer are subject to the voter-approved restrictions.”

The pronounced shift underscored the structural dilemmas policymakers have faced in dealing with the state’s significant population of sex offenders. “In some more urban jurisdictions offenders can’t legally live anywhere so they’re forced to live on the streets in some cases,” the Eureka Times-Standard noted — a domino effect that has led to fears of greater crime and recidivism.

But the new policy has already been accused of dramatically overcompensating. “[E]ven some whose offense involved a child no longer face the 2,000-foot residency restriction, officials disclosed in explaining the higher number,” the Times-Standard added. “That’s because the department’s new policy requires a direct connection between where a parolee lives and the offender’s crime or potential to re-offend. Only rarely is the assailant a stranger to the victim, the type of offender whose behavior might be affected by where he lives.”

Extralegal punishment

Although elected officials have shown an understandable unwillingness to appear soft on sex crime, attention has turned in recent years to the ways in which the state’s array of punishments can expose sex offenders to threats and risks well in excess of the law itself. Last month, convicted Vallejo predator Fraisure Earl Smith was ejected from a Motel 6 after having been released from a psychiatric hospital. Homeless, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Smith wound up “living out of a vehicle somewhere in the Vallejo area under the watchful eye of security officers for Liberty Health Care Corp., the contractor that the state hired to handle his release.”

Sex offenders have also faced sharp difficulties in prison. This month, a report issued by the state Inspector General revealed systematic abuses against inmates, with sex offenders singled out for extralegal harm. Investigators found “rising violence statewide in special housing units designed to protect vulnerable inmates, including sex offenders, gang dropouts and prisoners with physical disabilities,” ABC News reported. “Guards can now use an electronic state database to easily see which inmates have an ‘R’ coding that designates a sex offender. Some spread that information, knowing sex offenders are often marked for retribution, the inspector general found.”

Persistent problems

Other recent anecdotes, however, have told a different story. “A sex offender with a stolen boarding pass got through airport security in Salt Lake City and checked in at a gate for a flight to California before he was caught” this November, as the Associated Press observed. A recent three-day sweep of Sacramento’s American River Parkway found many transients there to have run afoul of the law. “Sixteen people were arrested for outstanding warrants,” KCRA recalled; “another 12 were not properly registered as sex offenders.”

The sheer number of offenders has grown large enough to pose a bureaucratic problem, making it harder to determine which are more likely to re-offend than others. Sizing up that challenge, the state board overseeing California’s sex offender registry rolls recommended to state legislators last year “that only high-risk offenders, such as kidnappers and sexually violent predators, should be required to register for life,” as the San Francisco Chronicle noted. “Others could be removed from the registry 10 to 20 years after the offense.”

Substantial changes to the law are underway at both the legislative and judicial levels. In Sacramento, lawmakers are seriously considering a plan that would pare down California’s sex registry rolls. At the same time, a high-profile court decision has triggered a wave of legal activism successfully targeting city and local ordinances banning offenders from some public areas.

The state’s sex offender registry is overseen by a body known as the California Sex Offender Management Board. In a report issued last month, the Board recommended that the Legislature alter the way it maintains the registry, which has ballooned to nearly 100,000 names. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, the Board reasons that perhaps thousands of registrants “do not necessarily pose a risk to the community,” including about 900 who have not engaged in a sex crime for over half a century.

Registry

California began its sex offender registry in 1947 — the first state to institute such a program. Today, 46 other states have sex registry programs that use a tiered system to differentiate between types of offender, based on factors such as time spent on the registry, risk of re-offense, and the severity of the initial offense.

As legislators expected, however, floating changes to California’s registry process is highly controversial. Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, supports the Board’s plan, but admits the mere notion of slimming the registry is “radioactive.”

Opinions may be poised to shift, however. California is one of a handful of states that opted out of the so-called Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, a registration mandate that included juvenile offenders and was passed by the U.S. Congress in 2006. To secure state compliance, Congress threatened to withhold millions of dollars in federal enforcement grants.

Now, some compliant states are questioning whether the law makes it effectively impossible for once-youthful offenders to reintegrate into society even if they never offend again. The same logic is at work in the recommendations of the California Sex Offender Management Board.

Constitutional questions

Even more important than public opinion, however, is the latest turn of events in the courts. Last month, the California Supreme Court allowed a lower court ruling to stand that struck down local ordinances meant to keep sex offenders away from children in public places. Instrumental in the ruling was the case of a registered Irvine sex offender. By visiting a tennis court at a local park, he violated a local ordinance. Despite pleading guilty, his public defender successfully claimed that state law trumped the ordinance.

In California and other states, public park rules have taken on a strange life of their own. In areas where sex offenders are clustered — thanks to widespread legal restrictions on where they can live — parents have pushed to create public parks simply to keep them away from their children. The strategy underscores a simple yet nettlesome dilemma: pushing sex offenders to the margins of society keeps them at bay in the immediate term, yet increases the kind of nothing-to-lose attitude many communities fear most from predators.

The California Supreme Court’s implicit stance on the matter has emboldened advocacy groups keen on rolling back similar ordinances statewide. An organization called California Reform Sex Offender Laws has contacted cities around the state, warning of federal lawsuits if public-places ordinances are not eliminated or changed.

In response, cities in Orange and Kern counties have already taken action or likely soon will. As many as half of Orange County cities have public-park rules of the kind affected by the Supreme Court’s inaction.

The future of California’s approach to sex offenders may depend on the momentum of similar debates in the state over drug crime, punishment, and the possibility of rehabilitation. The constituency supportive of drug abusers is larger and more powerful than the constituency willing to push for an agenda that is, by any measure, softer on sex offenders.