4

Sex Offenders Turn The Trailer Parks That Accept Them Into Safe Havens

James inherited his trailer park from his father, and before he owned it, he'd had no idea a huge chunk of the residents were sex offenders. As soon as he learned the truth, he set about researching the quickest and easiest way to kick them all out. "But then I met one who gave the rent check and thanked me for letting them stay there," he says. "Without the park, he said, he would have literally nowhere else to live nearby. And by 'nearby,' he meant 20 miles." James previously had vague plans of helping the less fortunate, but nobody was going to make an inspirational movie about this shit.

Plus, he says, keeping them on had a bonus: "Sex offenders always pay on time." That's not a joke. They're required to find jobs as part of their release conditions, which makes them a surer bet than a lot of other people in the trailer community. Sex offenders also made the neighborhood safer, ironically enough. Police knew how many high-risk people lived there, and responded by prioritizing the area when it came time for patrols. Oh yeah -- police were totally aware that James was running a sex offender commune. They welcomed the idea, and whenever they released a new inmate, someone in the department would unofficially suggest the trailer park as a possible place to live. Rental agencies knew too. So thanks to the grapevine, word got around, even without James putting up a neon sign saying "Sex offenders welcome!" Every time a vacancy opened in the park, there was a renter with a record eager to move in.

That's the thing: Everyone involved with the system knows that these people need a place to live, and that it's to everyone's benefit that they find one (including their victims!). But solutions must come under the table, unless you want to be seen as aiding predators. We have a long history of creating a broken system and then declaring the dysfunction to be part of the punishment. That's not how laws work! Or how they're supposed to work, at least.

3

Running The Park Had Complications -- Like Keeping Kids Out

So while there was no flashing sign in front of the park that said "Sex Offender Paradise. Free WiFi!" there was one that said "No Children Allowed." This wasn't a matter of law. The law says offenders can't live near specific public areas where children congregate, not that they can't be near any kid anywhere at any time. James put the rule in as a precaution. "It could have tempted them," he says. "No way was I allowing that."

2

The Way We Treat Offenders Post-Release Helps No One

Though James sees many of his residents as people who made one mistake and should now be forgiven, we're guessing a lot of you aren't too broken up over the pains experienced by sex criminals. These people did evil stuff. They deserve to be punished.

But here's what you have to remember: Restrictions on sex offenders aren't designed to be a punishment. The Supreme Court actually ruled on this. If registries were a punishment, they would be unconstitutional (and when they're judged to be punitive, courts keep striking them down). The offenders already got the full punishment that we decided they deserved when they went to jail. Everything afterward is in theory put in place to make them live in normal society without assaulting anybody.

Yet the public keeps taking it upon themselves to go after released sex offenders, which rarely results in anything good. Trailer parks like James' see nightly vandalism, with everything from spray-painted messages to sacks of dead rats stuck in a clothes dryer. James recalls one resident who received regular verbal abuse from others in town. After he fled one store to get away from the people hounding him, his tormentors tailed him by car, yelling curses until he lost them by steering into a random side street. The guy then drove back to his trailer and didn't leave for a month.

"He had other people buy him groceries," says James. "He quit his job." He didn't get another job for six months, and then he never went outside, other than commuting there and back. "He had several mental health issues, and that day pushed him over the edge," says James. "It broke him." You can hate the crime all you want, but after the criminal's been punished, you've got to reintegrate them back into the world. "Because if you don't, and take it to the extreme, you can destroy someone who was trying to become right again."

1

Yes, Some Of Them Relapse

One of James' residents, a child molester, was pretty much always drunk. He came home one time after being stopped by police, bragging to the rest of the park about how he'd escaped a DUI: "I demanded a blood test, and they let me go!" When police called the park about the resident sometime later, James figured the guy's drinking had finally landed him a violation. But then the police demanded a key to the man's trailer, saying they had a warrant. "All of this over a DUI?" asked James. No, said the policewoman. The resident had assaulted another kid. Later, it happened again, with another resident.

Overall, you can expect 13-35 percent of sex offenders to get caught breaking a law within 15 years of release, depending on what sort of sex crime they originally did. That's a big number. But it's actually dramatically below the recidivism rate of ex-prisoners in general and much less than what people think it is. People assume that most sex offenders will rape again, basing this "knowledge" on the villains seen in every episode of Law & Order: SVU. You can argue that maybe far more could be offending without getting caught, and of course that's impossible to know, but also remember how closely they're being monitored.

Reoffending hurts everyone, says James, even beyond the obvious effects on the new victim. "The other non-offender residents think less of everyone as a whole now ... The other offenders get mad at him or worry that it might happen to them and call in for more treatment. And of course the town used it both times as a crusade to 'Get them all out.'" After that second relapse, someone ran for city council promising to pass a law to kick the sex offender residents out. He won.

In the end, no law was necessary. After two years in charge, James sold the park. The relapses and the overall hassle had gotten to him. The final straw was when another family applied to move in and James couldn't bring himself to dig up an excuse to turn them down and keep the place running.

"The park's gone now," he says. "They tore it down some years ago." In its spot is a supermarket, and the residents have all left for elsewhere. "I can't tell you where they went. But I hope they found another haven."

Evan V. Symon is a journalist and interview finder guy for the Personal Experiences section at Cracked. Have an awesome job or experience you'd like to see in an article? Then post us up here or here!

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For more, check out 5 Things I Learned From Being Addicted To Child Porn and 5 Ways We Misunderstand Pedophilia (That Makes it Worse).

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