Through some volunteer work I was doing, I met a man who violently shook and killed his own child. He had no remorse. After 15 years in prison, his answer to “Why did you do it?” was, “He wouldn’t f*cking shut up.” Yet, there he stood, with only 6 months to serve on probation, no mental health counseling required, just right back out into the world.<\/p>\n
The attitude he had while speaking to me left little doubt that he would hurt someone again if he became irritated enough. I didn’t even feel safe being on the opposite side of a heavy wooden desk, knowing that no fewer than 15 people would run to my aid if I called out for help.<\/p>\n
Around the same time, a man came in who’d been caught up in an online sex sting. I have a lot of opinions about those that we’ll get into at some point, but for now I’ll just say that there was no actual victim and that the man is autistic.<\/p>\n
The woman online messaged him first. She told him she was 27, and he was sent a photo of a woman who was clearly around 27. She was the aggressor. She messaged nonstop until he responded. Every time he stopped responding, she would message relentlessly again.<\/p>\n
Soon, she started messaging about sexual things. He’d never even had sex before and didn’t say much back except, \u201cOh my,\u201d \u201cwow,\u201d and \u201cok.\u201d After 2\u20133 weeks of this, she begged him to come over to her house. After a couple of days of her begging, he finally agreed.<\/p>\n
She said, “My parents aren’t home,” and he said, “Okay.” She said, “I’m only 13, lol,” and he thought she was joking or saying something that he didn’t understand because of his autism, so he ignored it.<\/p>\n
After all, they’d had very adult conversations for weeks now; she didn’t type like a kid, and she definitely didn’t look like one in her photos, so he brushed off the comment without thinking much more than, \u201cThat\u2019s a weird joke,\u201d and drove to the address she’d given him.<\/p>\n
He was promptly arrested the minute he stepped out of his car.\u00a0The female officer on the other end of the chat was actually 27; it was actually a photo of her, but she\u2019d said she was 13 while he was on his way there. Somehow, that\u2019s a felony sex crime.<\/p>\n
That man served 10 years in prison before being released on probation. Within three weeks of being released, his probation was revoked for “Failure to Register as a Sex Offender,\u201d which, in his state (note that each state has its own rules and that\u2019s another topic or problem entirely) is automatically another felony and means he had to serve the rest of his probation in prison.<\/p>\n
He was sent back to prison for five years. Why? Because he misunderstood something.<\/p>\n
When he left prison, he was released to his mother\u2019s house. Within a few days of being home, either his probation officer or the Sheriff\u2019s Department (I am unsure as to which) determined that someone didn’t measure correctly and his mother\u2019s house was 15 feet too close to a church for him to be allowed to live there. So he had to leave. The rules they gave him when he was released stated, “You must report in person within forty-eight (48) hours of establishing or changing a primary or secondary residence.” There are a few ways a person could read that, and, in his mind, that meant he needed to report within 48 hours of finding a new place to live.<\/p>\n
After a couple of weeks of trying to secure him a place to live, his mother found a cousin who had a house in a place he could live and was willing to rent his basement to him.\u00a0 After having slept in his car for the past two weeks, that sounded wonderful. He moved in and, within 24 hours, was standing at the Sheriff\u2019s Department to register his new address, just like he thought he was supposed to.<\/p>\n
He filled out the registration form and gave the officer his information. He thought he was doing exactly what he was supposed to but, instead, was promptly arrested for not reporting in person within 48 hours of leaving his mother\u2019s house.<\/p>\n
I met him when he was released after the five additional years he served in prison for that violation.<\/p>\n
The most accurate way I could describe his demeanor would be terrified and defeated.<\/p>\n
He\u2019d spent 15 years in prison, the last four in a facility that has a Sex Offender Rehabilitation Program. He\u2019d been deemed a Level 1 Offender (the lowest level and the least likely to ever commit another sex crime).<\/p>\n
I went through his entire case file, including reading the transcripts that led him to where he was to begin with. All I can say about that is that he wasn\u2019t the one who was a predator in that situation. A lot of men would have fallen for that. I doubt, from reading the conversation, that most anyone in that conversation would believe they were talking to a 27 year old woman and, after weeks of that, would not have thought the person on the other end was remotely serious when they said, \u201cOh, I\u2019m only 13, lol.\u201d<\/p>\n
They\u2019d preyed on a man who didn\u2019t understand nuance in communication to begin with, and they’d arrested him for something I fully believe he was entrapped by. At some point, I\u2019ll be sure to share more information on how many of these stings are conducted and just how horrible they actually are.<\/p>\n
He was released without probation this time since he\u2019d already served that time in prison. He was on his own, still confused, and had no idea where to turn. He knew he couldn\u2019t live with his mother because of the proximity of the church nearby. His mother couldn\u2019t move because she was on a fixed income.<\/p>\n
I set out to help as much as I could. After reading his case file, I recruited a friend from the Sheriff\u2019s department who has a son with autism to completely and fully explain the registry rules to him. He even gave him his personal cell number so that he could call or text him if he ever felt confused by any of it, had any questions, or needed his help.<\/p>\n
As I was walking this 35-year veteran officer out to the door, he looked at me and shook his head, saying, \u201cThis is bullshit; this isn\u2019t the law enforcement I signed up for. Why is this being done to people? There are enough bad guys out there without us making up more.\u201d<\/p>\n
He was right. Those words still echo in my mind when I read or hear about some of these cases. They\u2019re making criminals out of vulnerable people instead of protecting us from the ones who are actually trying to cause us harm.<\/p>\n
The man registered as being homeless, so I asked him where he\u2019d been sleeping. My heart sank when he stated that he was sleeping outside across from one of the Sheriff\u2019s offices so that they could see where he was all the time and might not arrest him. I immediately started working on trying to find him a place to sleep that wasn\u2019t on the ground in the middle of winter.<\/p>\n
I called every homeless shelter, every outreach program, and every organization in my city that I thought might take him in or be able to help me find him a place. No one would take him.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t take sex offenders.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s not dangerous… He never touched anyone. It was a sting; he was confused.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter; we aren\u2019t allowed to take them.\u201d<\/p>\n
The reasons ranged from losing grant money to being afraid to lose donors and not wanting to be responsible if something happened to someone.<\/p>\n
\u201cLast week, you provided a space for a man who stabbed three people.”<\/p>\n
\u201cHe isn\u2019t on a sex offender registry.\u201d<\/p>\n
So I purchased a heavy duty sleeping bag and some warm clothes for the man and focused on finding him a job so that we could find him a place to rent.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve never had a difficult time finding a job for anyone with a felony conviction. Many companies will happily hire them because they get tax breaks from the government for hiring felons and because they\u2019re generally reliable and work incredibly hard.<\/p>\n
Well, finding a job for someone who is on the sex offender registry, autistic, and in a state that has work location restrictions is like throwing a diamond ring into the Atlantic Ocean and trying to find it with a child sized sand sifter.<\/p>\n
I had plenty of businesses that were willing to hire him, but he couldn\u2019t work at any of those places. They were too close to a park, a school, a church, a skating rink, a daycare, a baseball field, a playground, or another place that registered sex offenders are not allowed to be near. It didn\u2019t matter if he worked a shift when children weren\u2019t at school; he still couldn\u2019t be near one. It didn\u2019t matter if we worked out a schedule where he wouldn\u2019t be at work when church services were happening; he still couldn\u2019t work 985 feet from one. It had to be 1000 feet, regardless of whether the place was open while he was working or not.<\/p>\n
I called the registration office and asked if they had suggestions for places where he might be allowed to work that I could call. \u201cWe don\u2019t keep track of that,\u201d yet that\u2019s information they collect and post on their public website.<\/p>\n
So I went through the registry. One by one, I pulled up registrants profiles and googled the workplace addresses that were listed. I used that to compile a list of places that might hire him.<\/p>\n
I finally managed to get him a few interviews, and he secured a job. We raised enough money to put him in an extended stay hotel for a few weeks so that he could get his first paycheck and we could work on finding permanent housing.<\/p>\n
Finding housing proved harder than finding a job. Background checks are required at most places. Even the landlords who are my go-tos for felons wouldn\u2019t take a sex offender because that meant their property would be listed on the Sex Offender Registry. I was given reasons like, \u201cMy other tenants won\u2019t want to live there,\u201d \u201cI\u2019m afraid it\u2019ll hurt the property value,\u201d and the two who were willing to rent to him informed me that there\u2019s actually a law stating how many Registered Sex Offenders they\u2019re allowed to rent to, and they were already renting to the max number that they could take.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been over a year. I haven\u2019t given up trying, but I don\u2019t know if I will ever be able to find him a permanent residence. He is still homeless. He showers at a truck stop and goes to work every day. At night, he sleeps on the ground near the Sheriff’s office or in an Extended Stay when he can find one that\u2019s not within 1000 feet of any school, licensed daycare center, other childcare facility, church, public park, playground, recreation center, public athletic field, or any other place that\u2019s geared toward children, such as a jump park, a skating rink, or a YMCA.<\/p>\n
Oh, and the extended stay can\u2019t have a pool or meet the maximum number of Registered Sex Offenders either.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s practically nothing I can do to get him housing; just finding a job was a major feat. In the meantime, I\u2019ve told him to save every penny he can in the hope that he can eventually save up enough to pay in full for a mobile home or a fixer upper somewhere since he also has no credit with which to obtain a loan.<\/p>\n
Is society somehow safer by having him homeless and on a registry rather than in a secure living situation with his mother, 985 feet from a church?<\/p>\n
Circling back to the man who killed his own child because \u201che wouldn\u2019t f*cking shut up,”We had no problems finding him a good job and a decent apartment. Although, last I heard, he\u2019d found a girlfriend and moved in with her and her small children. I don\u2019t know if she has any idea about his past or not.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no registry for that.<\/p>\n
For the record, I am not advocating for more registries. We don\u2019t need them. What we need is some common sense.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Through some volunteer work I was doing, I met a man who violently shook and killed his own child. He had no remorse. After 15 years in prison, his answer to “Why did you do it?” was, “He wouldn’t f*cking shut up.” Yet, there he stood, with only 6 months…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":144,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7,6],"tags":[10,9,11,12,8,13],"class_list":["post-142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","category-personal-story","tag-common-sense-laws","tag-entrapment","tag-homelessness","tag-residency-restrictions","tag-sex-stings","tag-work-restrictions"],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/www.forcedtoregister.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/handcuffed-hands-of-a-prisoner-behind-the-bars-of-2023-05-24-16-17-31-utc-2-scaled.jpg",2560,1707,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.forcedtoregister.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/handcuffed-hands-of-a-prisoner-behind-the-bars-of-2023-05-24-16-17-31-utc-2-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.forcedtoregister.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/handcuffed-hands-of-a-prisoner-behind-the-bars-of-2023-05-24-16-17-31-utc-2-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.forcedtoregister.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/handcuffed-hands-of-a-prisoner-behind-the-bars-of-2023-05-24-16-17-31-utc-2-768x512.jpg",640,427,true],"large":["https:\/\/www.forcedtoregister.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/handcuffed-hands-of-a-prisoner-behind-the-bars-of-2023-05-24-16-17-31-utc-2-1024x683.jpg",640,427,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.forcedtoregister.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/handcuffed-hands-of-a-prisoner-behind-the-bars-of-2023-05-24-16-17-31-utc-2-1536x1024.jpg",1536,1024,true],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.forcedtoregister.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/handcuffed-hands-of-a-prisoner-behind-the-bars-of-2023-05-24-16-17-31-utc-2-2048x1365.jpg",2048,1365,true],"post-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.forcedtoregister.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/handcuffed-hands-of-a-prisoner-behind-the-bars-of-2023-05-24-16-17-31-utc-2-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"minimalist-blogger-x-grid":["https:\/\/www.forcedtoregister.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/handcuffed-hands-of-a-prisoner-behind-the-bars-of-2023-05-24-16-17-31-utc-2-350x230.jpg",350,230,true],"minimalist-blogger-x-slider":["https:\/\/www.forcedtoregister.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/handcuffed-hands-of-a-prisoner-behind-the-bars-of-2023-05-24-16-17-31-utc-2-850x567.jpg",850,567,true],"minimalist-blogger-x-small":["https:\/\/www.forcedtoregister.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/handcuffed-hands-of-a-prisoner-behind-the-bars-of-2023-05-24-16-17-31-utc-2-300x180.jpg",300,180,true]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"Jenna","author_link":"https:\/\/www.forcedtoregister.com\/?author=1"},"uagb_comment_info":9,"uagb_excerpt":"Through some volunteer work I was doing, I met a man who violently shook and killed his own child. He had no remorse. After 15 years in prison, his answer to “Why did you do it?” was, “He wouldn’t f*cking shut up.” Yet, there he stood, with only 6 months...","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forcedtoregister.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forcedtoregister.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forcedtoregister.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forcedtoregister.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forcedtoregister.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=142"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.forcedtoregister.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":149,"href":"https:\/\/www.forcedtoregister.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions\/149"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forcedtoregister.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forcedtoregister.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forcedtoregister.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forcedtoregister.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}