Miami-Dade County, famously, has established laws that prohibit sex offenders from being within half a mile of a park, school, day care, or any place where children could hypothetically gather. In reality, that made it impossible for the city’s sex offenders to live anywhere at all, other than camping under the Julia Tuttle Causeway. (Until a few years ago, probation officers were instructing newly released prisoners to go live there.) It turned out there was another legal spot—a chunk of vacant, city-owned land—and a dozen sex offenders had started camping there, at the advice of probation officers, the men say. So the city established a “park” there—they plopped some rusty toys on the 100-by-40 foot parcel of land and declared it consequently off-limits to sex offenders. →
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I just read Russell Banks’ novel “The Lost Memory of Skin” which relates directly to this subject. Read it, not only because Banks is one of America’s best and most relevant fiction writers, but because he humanizes the stuff that most of us find repellent.
It doesn’t take a lot to be classsified as a sex-offender. And, although some offenses are “criminal” in every sense of the word, the offenders themselves are people who now find themselves, in Miami, anyway, with nowhere to live. Yet they are released from prison, having “served their time”, to find themselves just beginning their real punishment outside of any system of justice or rehabilitation.