Sex Offender Restrictions Turn Residents of New York Into Residents of Limbo

Among
the policies
that have been widely adopted in this country to deal with sex
offenders, two of the worst are residence restrictions, which are
not only ineffective but counterproductive, and civil commitment,
which allows the government to continue detaining offenders after
they serve their sentences by relabeling them patients. New
York has managed to combine these two themes by imposing
residence restrictions so onerous that sex offenders due to be
released from prison cannot find legal places to live. The
solution: keep them locked up.

Under New York’s Sexual Assault Reform Act, which took effect in
2005, level-three sex offenders and all sex offenders whose victims
were younger than 18 are prohibited from going within 1,000 feet of
a school or any other facility that mainly serves children. The
New York Times reports
that “lawyers who represent sex offenders have prepared a map
showing that nearly all of Manhattan is off limits.” That means sex
offenders not only are not allowed to live in Manhattan; they are
not even allowed to visit or pass through it, unless they can
somehow do so without running afoul of the 1,000-foot rule. Yet
somehow they were allowed to stay in Manhattan homeless shelters
until last February, when the Department of Corrections and
Community Supervision suddenly realized that was illegal. Under the
new policy, sex offenders are allowed to live only in the few
homeless shelters that comply with the 1,000-foot rule, although
I’m not sure how they manage to get to those locations without
coming impermissibly close to one school or another.

Due to the shortage of legal residences, the
Times reports, “dozens of sex offenders who have
satisfied their sentences in New York State are being held in
prison beyond their release dates.” Most of of those offenders
(about 70 out of 101) are New York City residents—or were. Now they
are residents of legal limbo, and “some have begun filing habeas
corpus petitions in court, demanding to be released and claiming
the state has no legal authority to hold them.”

In a
lawsuit filed last April, a sex offender who was ordered to
leave his Brooklyn home because it was too close to a school argues
that New York’s limits violate his rights to intrastate travel and
to free association (including association with his own
family). He also argues that the restrictions amount to ex post
facto punishment—a plausible claim given the complete
absence of evidence that such rules serve a legitimate
regulatory function.

As the Times notes, residence restrictions in some
jurisdictions have forced sex offenders to live in bizarre and
isolated places such as an encampment under
a bridgein Miami and 
a trailer in the parking lot of a prison on Long Island. That
sure looks a lot like punishment, and there is no reason to think
it protects public safety. If anything, this sort of banishment
makes recidivism more likely by sending the message that there is
no hope of living a normal life.