Ten years ago Kit Murphy McNally, my wife, agreed to serve on a special state committee to carry out one of the most thankless jobs a state could ever assign to a group of citizens—finding an acceptable location in Milwaukee County for a facility to house convicted sex offenders returning to the community.
It was a job a whole lot of folks never wanted them to accomplish and actively worked to sabotage.
But Kit, who’s long advocated for justice in our criminal justice system, and other committee members—including academic experts, law enforcement professionals and city and suburban political leaders—sincerely tried to come up with a solution.
The problem is sex offenders have always been demonized with a broad brush as if slavering hordes of them were hiding behind every bush waiting to leap out on innocent children. Opportunistic politicians have little trouble whipping up frenzies of fear over every release so they can play heroes by passing harsh new laws.
But in a democracy, it really shouldn’t be easy for political demagogues to continue to incarcerate people after they have already served their legal sentences, especially after they successfully complete treatment and experts testify they’re unlikely to reoffend.
Hatred can be difficult to turn off. It gets hard to tell who the predators really are when ex-offenders return to a community and face vandalism or arson to properties where they’re living.
Anyone returning from incarceration needs support to succeed. But many Wisconsin politicians refuse to help them succeed even though it would reduce threats, real or imagined, to public safety. Instead, they push the limits of decency and legality trying to keep people locked up for years after they’ve served their sentences.
For more than a decade, courts, including the Wisconsin Supreme Court, have warned that failing to find somewhere in the free world for ex-offenders to live jeopardizes the constitutionality of laws imprisoning sex offenders long after they’ve served their sentences and completed treatment.
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That was the purpose of the citizens committee in 2005. To prevent state sex offender laws from being overturned, the committee was charged with finding some place for ex-offenders to live where they could be closely monitored after incarceration.
But as soon as the committee located even some remote sites with access to transportation for work and basic needs that were far from schools and gathering places that could be used to stir up public panic, politicians and others would pressure property owners to take those sites off the market.
The citizens committee finally concluded that a logical site was on county land near the already secure House of Correction in Franklin.
For their months of conscientious work, the committee members got to sit before a public hearing at Wisconsin State Fair Park listening to busloads of hysterical Franklin residents condemning them for their callous indifference to the vicious murder and rape of Franklin’s children. The crowd waved inflammatory signs, photographs of children killed in distant states and even baby shoes.
Housing Bans Don’t Protect the Public
Such ugly public demonstrations of human hatred do nothing to deal with the truth about child sexual abuse known to anyone in law enforcement: strangers snatching children off the street are extremely rare. The horrible crime is overwhelmingly committed in the home by a family member or someone else known to the child.
That’s why ordinances throughout the county banning former sex offenders from living in a community, which began with Franklin in 2005 shortly after that public hearing, do nothing to realistically protect children either.
And now the chickens courts warned us about 10 years ago are coming home to roost.
Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Dennis Moroney, a conservative judge, recently ordered state officials to ignore local residency laws to find a home for Joe Wofford Jr., a convicted sex offender who has been held for “treatment” for 19 years after the end of a three-year sentence.
When Wofford petitioned for his release under the state law used to hold him after his sentence, four experts testified Wofford was no longer likely to reoffend. Moroney ordered him released under state supervision.
When the state claimed local residency bans prevented them from finding housing, Moroney ordered the state to ignore the local ordinances and free Wofford by the end of May.
Moroney said none of the goals of the state law governing release of sex offenders after serving their sentences and completing treatment “are achievable if every municipality in Milwaukee County precludes supervised release of a person committed.”
The last rational attempt 10 years ago to create housing for former sex offenders returning to communities after incarceration failed after political predators inflamed local opposition.
But courts in a democracy can’t allow politicians to incarcerate people forever who have already served their sentences and satisfied every legal requirement for their release.
If they did, we wouldn’t be living in a democracy.
