Few in the community want sex offenders living on their street.  But, if they aren't living in a local neighborhood, then where are they living?  That's a good question - one that state corrections agencies sometimes have difficulty answering when sex offenders are released into communities where they cannot find housing, leaving some on the street.

This situation raises an issue that is critical to public safety -- how can they be effectively supervised if they are homeless? 

The answer: they can't.

Since sex offenders typically pose a high risk to society, the lack of supervision that is created when they can't find housing is particularly problematic to corrections agencies and communities alike.  Sex offenders who have no permanent addresses can not be monitored as easily as those who have an unchanging living environment.  Also, if they have no stable residence, sex offenders are less likely to undergo treatment and more likely to reoffend.

For these reasons, in 2002, the Washington State Department of Corrections (DOC) joined forces with a wide array of state and local agencies to confront the challenges associated with sex offender housing.  The collaborative effort, Housing High Risk Offenders: A Partnership for Community Safety, marked the first time so many different entities had come together and set their sights on the common goal of helping sex offenders find places to live.

"It's a community issue," said Victoria Roberts, Community Protection Administrator for the DOC.  "If we don't [address this issue] as a collaborative effort, I don't think we'll ever come up with the solutions that we need to find."

Finding answers to the complex questions that accompany the issue of sex offender housing is the primary task of the partnership, which was formed as a result of a media melee involving the DOC a few years ago.

Spurred To Action

According to Roberts, the DOC began to focus on reentry programs for high-risk offenders in 2000 because many of the offenders who posed the greatest risk to society, like Level III sex offenders and dangerously mentally ill offenders, were returning to their communities with no place to live.

"We couldn't inform law enforcement [where they would be]," Roberts said.  "The next time we'd hear from them [after they were released] was when they committed another crime."

Realizing that law enforcement's inability to supervise this population was jeopardizing public safety, the DOC tried to figure out a way to keep these offenders on its radar screen once they were in the community.  One method the department used to achieve this goal created quite a stir.

"We began putting [sex offenders] in motels [after they were released]," Roberts said.  "That blew up into a media nightmare."

When the media caught wind of the DOC's "dirty little secret," as many news articles and television programs called it, journalists began to report that communities were not being notified of this new DOC practice, claims that Roberts said were untrue. 

Regardless, the department, under media pressure, had to act fast to come up with a better way to address the housing needs of high-risk offenders.  The Partnership for Community Safety was born out of this situation.

"All of the media [coverage] created the impetus for the partnership," Roberts said.  "It created a significant need to do the work and come up with some answers," she added. "The crisis brought people to the table who may not have otherwise come."

Including a Community Perspective

One of those individuals who sat down at the table alongside representatives from many different agencies was the partnership's co-chair, Suzanne Brown-McBride, Executive Director of the Washington Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs. 

"This group of individuals at a state level is one of the most multi-disciplinary groups I've ever seen convened," said Brown-McBride.  "We all have our portion of this issue to bring to this."

According to Brown-McBride, whose organization aims to stop sexual violence, sex offender housing is an issue that victims, too, should be concerned with, because it may prevent offenders from committing future crimes.

"It doesn't serve the interest of public safety, nor does it serve victims to have these individuals transient, homeless and unsupervised," Brown-McBride said.  "A real drive for doing this work is that offenders who are more stable are less likely to reoffend."

Brown admits, while it is easy to advocate for these offenders to remain permanently incarcerated, it is not realistic.

"For the most part, the law cannot keep these individuals in [prison] forever," Brown-McBride said.  "These folks were not hatched in prison.  They came out of our communities and they will go back to our communities."

So, when sex offenders return to communities, where will they go?  With nearly 18,000 sex offenders in Washington, that is a tough question to answer, but one that the partnership has already begun to answer.

Setting Standards

"We're focused right now on developing emergency housing guidelines," said Roberts. 

The guidelines are focused on the designation of emergency shelter options for sex offenders in specific communities, the linkage of shelters , law enforcement, victims groups and the DOC and education and training for providers who deal with high risk offenders.  While these standards are being set at the state level, four teams have been put in place locally throughout the state to help communities develop their own protocols based on the guidelines.

"At the state level you need your policy-makers and legislative support to look at what the solutions are," Roberts said.  "You need the local groups to be able to put some reality to the ideas developed by the state-level group."

Brown-McBride agrees.

"What [the local groups] are, in a lot of ways, are testing grounds for what's been developed at the state-level," she said.  "The Local Area Teams are also a way for us to learn about how different communities [work]."

Aside from developing emergency shelter guidelines for the Local Area Teams to implement in communities, the Partnership for Community Safety has also made some progress in other areas during its first full-year of collaboration.  The partnership has developed model standards for community sex offender notification, which emphasize community education and notification meetings, and discussed ways to better support the local teams.

But, the partnership still has a long way to go.

"We're still at baby stages in terms of getting the community to grapple with this issue and figure out that these offenders are not going to go away," Roberts said.  "We're still struggling.

Over the next year, the partnership hopes to solidify the guidelines it has been working to develop and dig deeper to get to the root of the problem of finding sex offenders places to live, according to Brown-McBride.

"We're looking into different model of housing," she said.  "We are looking into a lease-unit approach."

While there is still a lot on the horizon for the Partnership for Community Safety to accomplish, its mere existence is an accomplishment in itself, Brown-McBride said.

"We started that state dialogue and we've created several tools [for agencies to use]," Brown-McBride said.

"The biggest [thing] we've accomplished is increasing awareness of the issue," Roberts added.

Resources:

To contact Victoria Roberts, call (360) 753-1550

To contact Suzanne Brown-McBride (360) 754-7583