Sentenced to Homelessness: The Case for Housing Sex Offenders

“Housing restrictions arguably make reoffense more likely by distorting offenders’ incentives, exposing women experiencing homelessness to violence, providing grounds for familial manipulation, and impairing monitoring programs.”

Trigger Warning: This article deals extensively with sexual violence (including against children), sexism, classism, and incarceration.

In 2009, a homeless encampment under the Julia Tuttle Causeway in Miami attained international infamy when it came to light that its residents were all registered sex offenders (RSOs). In 2018, another encampment emerged in the same county, this time hosting hundreds of RSOs on a roadside outside Hialeah. These camps attracted dramatic concentrations of criminals as a result of stringent municipal residency restrictions that bar RSOs from living within a specified radius of protected locations, such as schools and parks. Known as “buffer zones,” these laws aim to reduce rates of reoffense by restricting offenders’ access to areas frequented by minors.

Florida is not alone: localities across the country have established buffer zones, usually ranging from 500 to 2500 feet. In effect, these laws can exclude RSOs from entire regions. For example, 93% of residential properties in Newark, New Jersey fall within 2500 feet of a school. In 2015, the Rhode Island General Assembly increased buffer zone distances for the worst offenders from 300 to 1000 feet. Ultimately, these restrictions serve little purpose other than pushing offenders into homelessness and spawning encampments such as those in Julia Tuttle and Hialeah. In the interests of the communities that sex offenders enter upon release from prison, the federal government should issue guidance for states to scale back the distance of local buffer zones.

Buffer zones are not the only barrier to housing that RSOs face. By HUD decree, “lifetime” registered offenders cannot receive federally funded housing assistance. Not only does this restriction impose homelessness on poor offenders, it also saddles the offender’s family members with a painful choice: enter homelessness together or split up. In addition to coordinating a reduction in buffer zones, HUD should remove this affordable housing ban.

Buffer zones disproportionately impact poor offenders because they have the most dramatic effects in urban areas, where over half of voucher holders and households in public housing are concentrated, along with many indispensible social services. While RSOs with sufficient income can relocate to less densely populated regions, this option is often unavailable to those offenders who depend on cities for housing and services. Due to the inaccessibility of housing for RSOs, law enforcement transported many of the residents of the Florida encampments directly to these locations upon release from prison.

It is not clear that buffer zones, though well-intentioned, meaningfully protect the welfare of the children they aspire to benefit. First, a significant number of sex offenders subject to these laws were not arrested on charges related to minors, so it is unclear why buffer zones present an appropriate response. Second, despite sensationalized media portrayals to the contrary, the vast majority (93 percent) of children who experience sexual abuse are the victims not of strangers, but of familiar friends or family members. Buffer zones offer little solvency in these far more common situations. Third, buffer zones do not prevent sex offenders from living next door to minors or traveling to distant neighborhoods where they wouldn’t be recognized, so the policies are blunt at best.

Housing restrictions arguably make reoffense more likely by distorting offenders’ incentives, exposing women experiencing homelessness to violence, providing grounds for familial manipulation, and impairing monitoring programs. One possible distortion of offenders’ incentives occurs through increased personal instability. People experiencing homelessness are systematically deprived of agency. From such a position, perpetrating violence might provide an RSO with a mechanism to reassert control over their life. Law and criminology professor Annie Cossins writes that men “have different social and economic access to ways of accruing power and engaging with institutions of power. The question is, how do those men who are vulnerable to recurring or chronic experiences of powerlessness alleviate their vulnerability?” She goes on to suggest one answer: “Sexual behaviour with children allows a man to accomplish masculinity and overcome experiences of powerlessness when his power is in jeopardy.”

This analysis does not essentialize marginalized men as violent. People experiencing homelessness face strong countervailing pressures to conform to the law, and Cossins notes that “victim report studies show that child sexual abuse does not have class, racial, or ethnic boundaries.” Instead, the argument provides a reason to believe that denying a home, what Mathew Desmond calls the “wellspring of personhood,” to people who have revealed a willingness to commit sexually violent crimes might increase the prevalence of reoffense.

Recidivism is particularly likely due to a psychological phenomenon known as the Golem Effect, which holds that negative expectations are a self-fulfilling prophecy: when people are forced to identify as criminals, they act according to that identity. Homelessness only exacerbates this otherization. Moreover, without the prospect of integration into a community, RSOs lose an important incentive for reform. Prison with its “three hots and a cot” starts to look not-so-bad compared to life in a tent under a Miami causeway, which lowers the deterrent force of prison time. Monica Williams, author of The Sex Offender Housing Dilemma, concludes, “Far from ensuring public safety, residence restrictions can make it more difficult for sex offenders to reintegrate into society, which may in turn increase the likelihood of reoffending.”

In the case of offenders at high risk of reoffense, denying them housing exposes homeless women to the threat of sexual violence. The National Online Research Center on Violence Against Women reports, homeless women “are particularly vulnerable to multiple forms of interpersonal victimization, including sexual and physical assault at the hands of strangers.” Moreover, the prospect of sleeping rough may allow RSOs to guilt trip their families into reopening their doors, which could endanger family members, including past victims. The solution is simple: greater housing stability for offenders would mitigate these concerns.

Parole requirements and sex offender registries are intended to enable monitoring of RSOs by law enforcement and the community, but these programs are ineffective when applied to people without addresses. In 2006 the Washington Institute for Public Policy reported that recidivism rates were 50 percent higher for sex offenders who had failed to meet registration requirements. Parole requiremets and sex offender registries deserve reform in their own right as components of a hypersurveillance infrastructure that facilitates the criminalization of poverty, but even policymakers who are averse to dismantling these systems should prefer functional monitoring of housed offenders to the status quo.

Right now, parole and registration requirements only serve to recriminalize homeless RSOs. Because national law requires that registered offenders notify the authorities within three days of a change of address and laws can mandate frequent meetings with authorities, offenders experiencing housing instability are more likely to be in noncompliance with their registry requirements. In fact, failure to report to officer is the most common technical violation of parole and probation conditions. Moreover, sex offenses are classified by severity into three tiers, and a repeat offense automatically brands a previous offender with a higher tier. Problematically, this structure ratchets up the tiers of homeless offenders through public urination charges, which carry a registration requirement in at least twelve states. Sometimes the injustice begins even before a conviction: an August New York Times feature revealed a pattern of sting operations across Washington State that legally employed “deception, trickery or artifice” to entrap usually harmless men in sex offense cases. The article explains that “for law enforcement, stings are an efficient way to make high-profile felony arrests and secure convictions.”

These sources of reincarceration waste state resources on otherwise law-abiding citizens, and returning RSOs to prison exposes them to violence at the hands of prison gangs that traditionally target sex offenders. This concern is so acute at high security federal prisons that the Federal Bureau of Prisons “recognizes sex offenders as a vulnerable population within a prison setting.” One previously incarcerated RSO reported his cellmate pressing him: “The only people who don’t show their papers are murderers and sex offenders; which one is it?”

To recap, upon release, the current system denies poor RSOs access to housing in precisely the areas that contain affordable housing and services, then sends them back to prison for their subsequent homelessness, where they face violence until release. Rinse and repeat with a more severe charge on each iteration. Florida lawyer Peter Aiken confirms, “Once they’re on the sex registry, landlords won’t rent to them. They can’t get jobs. For all practical purposes, their lives are ruined.” I turn now to further injustices the system inflicts on RSOs under the assumption that readers of the HOPE Blog already belong to the choir of housing advocates and so possess the requisite experience to thoughtfully engage with the argument that homelessness is an illegitimate and disproportionate punishment for many sex crimes. However, I want to caution advocates to stake the claim to reform on the former arguments regarding reoffending, rather than these latter arguments to which the public may prove unsympathetic. In fact, in light of the highly charged nature of the issue, I offer that a poor attempt at raising the topic is worse than no attempt at all due to the risks of backlash and retrenched biases. Note that foregrounding reoffense is strategic only insofar as advocates can marshal these arguments in service of housing opportunities without contributing to problematic associations between poverty and criminality.

Most defendants plead guilty rather than bear the shame of a trial by jury, but judges and lawyers are not legally obligated to provide information about the “collateral consequences” of a conviction, including buffer zone restrictions and HUD regulations. Withholding information lures unwitting defendants into plea deals they would have otherwise rejected. Moreover, collateral consequences cannot undergo criminal challenges in court, which deprives defendants of a principal channel for redress of unjust legal consequences.

These policies have also inflicted ex post facto harm on offenders who were convicted before the housing barriers were instated. For example, I worked with a client through HOPE’s Housing Assistance Collaborative who had been convicted of a sex offense at least a decade before the passage in the mid-nineties of the federal laws that mandated registration and community reporting. Though he had never formally registered, HUD’s regulations exerted a chilling effect on public housing authorities, who took one look at his background check and rejected his applications. This client suffered from severe chronic knee pain, but his doctors could not proceed with the surgery until he had secured stable housing for his recovery. These circumstances would have conferred high priority for housing on anyone else, but his criminal background confounded the triage that ought to animate the allocation of affordable housing. In another instance of retroactive punishment, when Rhode Island increased its buffer zones in 2015, Pawtucket authorities identified RSOs who were in violation of the new law to force them to relocate.

I worked with another HAC client who similarly received a rejection from a Rhode Island housing development that feared a HUD lawsuit despite the fact that this client was no longer required to register in the state. Why had the development rejected his application? Because during his registration period in RI, he had taken a brief roadtrip to Florida, where he had dutifully registered in accordance with Florida state law. He did not know at the time that Florida’s standards would classify him as a lifetime offender. This label has haunted him ever since because HUD’s guidelines hold that a lifetime registration status in any state precludes tenancy in every state. For over six months, the client has been waiting for a response from Florida’s registry regarding the prospects of removing his name. HUD should allow housing authorities to adjudicate these cases according to the laws of their own states.

The National Housing Law Project reports that landlords often act more harshly than the law demands by issuing blanket rejections on all previously convicted applicants — regardless of current registration status. Importantly, this article’s dual proposals would still allow landlords and managers of affordable housing complexes to reject some offenders on the basis of personal discretion, but the current rules foment stigma and excessively harsh standards. Reforming buffer zones and the HUD regulations would devolve authority to the actors best-positioned to protect current tenants. For example, the manager of a subsidized housing development could reject an RSO’s application out of concern for the single mom and child who live upstairs.

Social control manifests in other practices targeting RSOs besides buffer zones and HUD regulations. Consider the dystopian “chemical castration” requirements some states have implemented in attempts to reduce recidivism. RSOs also sometimes suffer the threat of vigilante violence as in 2018 when mob protests erupted at the Providence house of a recently released offender. That same year, the Rhode Island ACLU challenged a state law that would have capped Harrington Hall’s sex offender admittance to ten percent of the Cranston shelter’s occupancy.

Insofar as no politician wins votes by advocating for greater leniency for perpetrators of repulsive crimes, don’t expect to see a national reduction in buffer zones or legalization of affordable housing for lifetime RSOs any time soon. In fact, the incentives of cities when setting buffer zone distances amount to an arms race to establish the most restrictive ordinances. When one city increases the distances of its buffer zones, neighboring locales are forced to respond by raising theirs by an equal or greater degree to prevent displaced sex offenders from moving in en masse. The co-sponsor of a 2015 buffer zone bill in the Georgia Statehouse declared, “my intent personally is to make it so onerous on those that are convicted of these offenses… they will want to move to another state.”

That said, some states have contributed to a recent precedent for negotiating down buffer zones among their cities, perhaps in part because offenders are more willing to change city than to relocate across state lines, so states are less subject to the competitive forces behind inter-municipal buffer zone inflation. In 2006, for example, Washington State replaced all local zones with statewide 880-foot zones. The federal government should issue guidelines to deescalate buffer zones and enforce the changes through threats to cut grant funding, as it does to ensure compliance with national registry requirements.

Some RSOs have committed horrific crimes, but sentencing them to a lifetime of being kicked from prison to the street and back again exacerbates sexual violence, unduly punishes their families and communities, and inflicts monstrous injustices on offenders themselves. Housing is a human right. That means everyone deserves safe, just, affordable housing: even sex offenders.

An earlier version of this piece appeared in the Brown Political Review on April 20, 2019.