Southside Pride

No news is more concerning to the residents of a neighborhood than that a sexual predator will be living in their midst. Community notification has been required by law in Minnesota since 1997, and is a key component in the supervised release of high-level sex offenders. But the sheer number of notices they receive in their mail has doubly alarmed residents of certain neighborhoods—particularly Phillips, and in the Jordan neighborhood on the near north side. Indeed, they have been the recipients of the greatest number of offenders in the city, and the great concentration has prompted some to speculate that they are having dangerous criminals dumped upon them. The Minnesota Department of Corrections insists that that not is the case. However, the pattern of placement in Minneapolis is a testament to the great problems involved in housing and supervising these most threatening individuals.

On a recent Tuesday night, State Representative Karen Clark held a public meeting to discuss the concentration of sex offenders in Phillips, and to get public reaction to a spate of new House legislation regarding their release. The meeting included presentations by a number of individuals involved with the supervision of sex offenders, including Stephen Huot (a psychologist and Director of Sex Offender Services for the DOC) and Lt. Mike Sauro of the Minneapolis Police, in charge of community notification for dangerous offenders. The meeting took place at Hans Christian Andersen Elementary School in Phillips—and began with a walk to the home of three convicted sex offenders a scant few blocks away.

The ongoing furor in Phillips focuses in particular on the post-incarceration living conditions of what are termed “Level III” sex offenders. That designation, assigned to a sex offender by the DOC, represents a rating of how likely the parolee is to re-offend after his release. The rating takes into account both the crime for which the individual was originally convicted, and other circumstances about his life that may affect his ability to remain in compliance with the conditions of his release. On this scale then, Level I represents the lowest risk, Level III the highest.

All released offenders, it should be noted, have served out their sentences. However, the DOC realizes that the impulsive tendencies of violent sex offenders require that they be closely monitored after their initial release from prison, to prevent them from harming anyone else. To that end, the DOC has instituted a series of safeguards that intensively track the behavior of released offenders over the first year of their release, and keeps close tabs on their whereabouts for the following decade.

The release of any parolee designated as a Level III offender results in a number of actions designed to minimize the threat to the community. First, the community where the offender is to live is notified that he will be moving there in advance: his name and picture are distributed door-to-door, and a community meeting is held to inform the residents about the individual and his crime. At the same time, local law enforcement officials are given all public information on the individual. When the offender moves in, it is under what the DOC calls “intensive supervised release.” The conditions for release stipulate that the offender must be at home during certain hours, and is subject to random visits by parole officers every few days. Other terms are often imposed, including prohibitions from visiting bars, schools, playgrounds, and other locations that may encourage threatening behavior on the part of the offender. Any violation of those conditions results in immediate re-incarceration.

A year of blemish-free release may result in the offender being lowered to a Level II designation (which gives law enforcement more discretion about how much information to distribute to the community when he moves, but still requires information to be distributed to schools and daycare centers); another year still and he can be downgraded to Level I, basic registration of residence with the DOC. All levels of sex offenders must register their whereabouts for a decade after their release. Again, failure to do so results in incarceration.

Often the supervised release of an offender involves a whole series of moves in and out of prison for what the DOC terms “technical violations” of the parole agreement—missed meetings, failed sobriety tests and the like. “The system is designed to show the offender we mean business,” says Huot. But, because every time the same offender re-enters society there has to be another community meeting, it looks like there are more offenders than there really are. For instance, although there were 23 Minnesota communities with Level III offenders living in them, there have been notifications in 33 separate communities last year.

While few would disagree with the wisdom of such strict supervision and comprehensive notification, the system does have a major problem: a stable, long-term residence is an absolute necessity for the offender to successfully re-enter society; but his extreme notoriety makes it nearly impossible to find a landlord willing to rent to him. The problem is compounded by many parolees’ lack of savings or income. As a result, the DOC works with certain landlords who express willingness to cooperate to house released sex offenders. But because no one relishes the idea of living next door to one, the DOC and landlord typically make arrangements to rent all of the units in a duplex or triplex to sex offenders of various levels.

The consequence of such an arrangement is that it can multiply the concentration of violent offenders in a given area: one parolee moving to an area brings another. Indeed, this phenomenon is largely responsible for the concentration of Level III offenders in Phillips. The neighborhood has a large volume of low-cost rental housing, much of it in small, subdivided houses. Thus, if a certain offender may be inclined to live in a different community, it still may be easier to find housing in Phillips or Jordan.

Clark and other elected officials have taken it upon themselves to remedy this situation by introducing a variety of legislation governing where Level III offenders may be placed. They include severe restrictions on locating an offender within 1,500 feet of another sex offender, a stipulation designed to reduce the extreme concentration of offenders within the Phillips and Jordan neighborhoods.

In a parallel piece of legislation (one whose relevance was underscored by the proximity of Hans Christian Andersen school to the home of several offenders), Clark proposed that Level III offenders not be allowed to reside within 1,500 feet of either a school or park.

The DOC has balked at the practical implications of the bills, however. At the meeting, Huot held up a computer-modeled map of where Level III offenders could theoretically reside, assuming only the prohibition on living 1,500 feet from a school or park: the map looked like Swiss cheese with a particularly fine grain, showing tiny pockets—many smaller than a city block—where they could live. The ironic result, Huot pointed out, would be an even more extreme concentration of offenders into tiny pockets of the city. “No one wants their kids going to school near a convicted sex offender,” he pointed out, “but imagine being the family living on a block filled with them.”