This is the impact of lawmaking by emotion instead of reason.  Jessica’s Law, the initiative passed by the voters in 2006, could increase the risk of crime.  No one could have anticipated that, right?  I mean, when you force ex-cons to sleep under bridges and give them no hope of rehabilitation, and you hobble police departments and sap their ability to actually track sex offenders, how could crime go up, right?

In the 15 months since voters approved Jessica’s Law, which restricts where paroled offenders may live and requires electronic monitoring of their whereabouts, the state has recorded a 44% increase in those registered as transients, according to a report released by California’s Sex Offender Management Board.

The law prohibits ex-offenders from living within 2,000 feet of places where children gather, but it lacks adequate definitions of such places, the report says. And in some counties and cities, the law’s residency restrictions make large swaths of housing off-limits.

Unresolved questions about major parts of the law make it impossible to determine whether the state is safer now from sex offenders, panel member said. Some said the law could be making things worse.

Tom Tobin, the board’s vice-chairman and a psychologist, said that homelessness removes offenders from their support systems, such as family members, which increases the chances they will commit new crimes.

“I see homelessness as increasing overall risk to public safety, and as a very, very undesirable consequence of probably a well-intended law,” he said.

While I don’t necessarily agree with the connection between homelessness and public safety, certainly THIS kind of homelessness, of former sex offenders, is not desirable.  But it falls along the same stupid, shortsighted, Tough On Crime ™ policies we’ve seen in California for 30 years.  We extend sentences longer and longer and then try to build our way out of the inevitable overcrowding problem (by the way, that building plan was wildly optimistic; they’re now talking about 6,900 less beds and a longer time to get them constructed); we punish sex offenders with an unrealistic law that actually endangers the state’s citizens instead of protects them.  This is the legacy of a failure of leadership.

Let me clear out my Inbox and set you on your weekend way:

• The Megan’s Law website apparently is being used as a hit list and may have led to at least one death.  This is the downside of a “what about the children?” über alles mentality.

• I’m not entirely certain about this claim that state lawmakers could have solved the mortgage crisis back in 2001 by cracking down on predatory lending practices.  It’s a boilerplate story, a typical “they bought off the politicians” frame.  But the problem, as Paul Krugman notes today, is that home prices lowered, leading to negative equity for homeowners.  Not sure what the lawmakers could have done about that.  This is a national crisis that required federal action.  And what action could be taken on the state level is in the purview of the Attorney General.  Jerry Brown is investigating home loans from Countrywide Financial for improprieties, particularly forcing buyers with good credit into subprime mortgages.

• For all the talk about Steve Poizner, he is doing his job in suing Blue Shield for their loathsome practice of dropping patients retroactively after they seek coverage.  Blue Shield’s response?

The state’s interpretation of laws governing policy cancellations “is simply wrong.”

Stupid state, not knowing their own laws as well as a private entity!

• Nancy Pelosi is under fire for saying that Republicans like this war.  Juan Cole is right to slam her for assuming that Republicans would act in good faith and help to end the war after the 2006 elections.  What Republican Party was she talking about?

• Anthony Wright has the new amendments released to the public on the new health care reform.  I should have a lot more on this over the weekend.

• I know that I didn’t execute a House roundup in November, but honestly there wasn’t a whole lot going on in the races.  So I postponed it and will have a December roundup in the next few days.

• And finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the California Democratic Party buying three grand in French wine from Fabian Nuñez, who’s now a wine salesman, I guess.  I have to acknowledge Kevin Spillane (two Republicans in one day, I know) from the No on 93 campaign for the funny move of sending a bottle of Two Buck Chuck to Nuñez’ office.  It is an award winner.

It’s an open thread.

So now we learn that the implementation for Jessica’s Law is completely impossible and will likely never happen.

Law enforcement leaders who pushed for a ballot initiative requiring sex offenders in California to be tracked by satellite for life are now saying that the sweeping surveillance program voters endorsed is not feasible and is unlikely to be fully implemented for years, if ever […]

The difficulties include the impracticality of tracking sex offenders who no longer must report to parole or probation officers, the lack of any penalty for those who refuse to cooperate with monitoring and the question of whether such widespread tracking is effective in protecting the public.

The biggest issue, however, is that the law does not specify which agency or government should monitor felony sex offenders — and shoulder hundreds of millions of dollars a year in related costs.

That said, these same law enforcement officials claim that the law is worthwhile, mainly because they don’t want the egg on their face for the next 20 years, and they can quietly put the whole thing to rest once everyone forgets about it.

In truth, the unworkability of this law, which trades liberty for security and provides neither, making it far more difficult to track sex offenders while beginning a slippery slope toward lifetime surveillance of anyone who commits a crime we collectively decide not to like in the future, was obvious from the beginning.  It was written poorly, and maybe some of that can be fixed.  But the restrictions on housing have caused ex-cons to live under bridges, which seems to me to set the table for them to commit more crimes so they can get some shelter.  The lack of reporting to parole officers, too, just drops these offenders off the map – when the point is supposed to be to FURTHER track them so they don’t molest again.

This is also about the dangers of ballot-box budgeting.  With the vague nature of the funding in the law, everyone’s trying to force payment on somebody else.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state law enforcement leaders, who were allied in backing the measure, are engaged in a standoff over who should bear its financial burden.

“I don’t know of any agency that has the resources to track and monitor . . . in real time,” said Vacaville Police Chief Richard Word, president of the California Police Chiefs Assn. “You’ll need an air traffic controller to track these folks.” […]

Corrections analysts estimate that it costs the state up to $33 a day in equipment and labor to monitor a sex offender by GPS, and it would take nearly $90 million a year just to track the 9,000 now on parole if all were subject to Proposition 83.

Once offenders are discharged from parole, the state will no longer monitor them electronically, Corrections Secretary James Tilton said last month, because his department lacks jurisdiction at that point. The agency also is overextended, with an overcrowded prison system under review by the federal courts.

Nick Warner, a lobbyist and spokesman for the California State Sheriffs’ Assn., said the state’s refusal to monitor sex offenders after parole “passes the buck to local law enforcement, who are not equipped to handle them.” He said the state was “setting up communities to fail” and predicted that the matter would end up in court.

Schwarzenegger, who faces a $10-billion state budget gap next year, said through spokesman Bill Maile that he would wait for the sex offender board to address the question of who should fund lifetime GPS tracking before taking a position on the issue.

The law is clearly unworkable and unsuccessful.  Yet it got 70% of the vote because these flaws were hidden from public scrutiny.  And as a result, everyone is afraid to say we should scrap it, due to political factors.

Welcome to your direct democracy in action!

See also:
Jessica’s Law Tag
What California should learn from the Genarlow Wilson case (but almost certainly won’t)
 

I was rendered almost ill by John Edwards’ stance in the debate against the decriminalization of marijuana because “it would send the wrong signal to young people.”  Chris Dodd made a strong response that cut to the heart of our failed prison policy.

DODD: Can I respond, I mean just why I think it ought to be? We’re locking up too many people in our system here today. We’ve got mandatory minimum sentences that are filling our jails with people who don’t belong there. My idea is to decriminalize this, reduce that problem here. We’ve gone from 800,000 to 2 million people in our penal institutions in this country. We’ve go to get a lot smarter about this issue than we are, and as president, I’d try and achieve that.

This, of course, is most acute in California, where we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop on a federal court order that could potentially force the release of thousands of prisoners due to overcrowding.  State Sen. Gloria Romero held her ground and didn’t allow the usual spate of tougher sentencing bills to pass the Legislature this year.  So once again, George and Sharon Runner will go to the ballot with a punitive measure designed to make themselves look tough while further battering a crippled prison system.

A year after bringing to California Jessica’s Law, the crackdown on sex offenders, the husband-and-wife team of state Sen. George Runner and Assemblywoman Sharon Runner announced Monday a new initiative that would target gang members for tougher prosecution and dedicate nearly $1 billion annually to enforcement and intervention.

The Republican legislators from Lancaster hope to collect enough signatures to qualify the measure for the November 2008 ballot, and they have the backing of the father of the state’s three-strikes law as well as law enforcement officials, including Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca.

The Legislature has already rejected this bill, and it would again constrain the state budget with another walled-off mandate while doing nothing to address the major crisis in overcrowding.  It’s feel-good nonsense for “tough-on-crime” advocates.

By the way, let’s see how the last initiative the Runners promoted, Jessica’s Law, is working out:

Hundreds of California sex offenders who face tough new restrictions on where they can live are declaring themselves homeless, making it difficult for the state to track them.

Jessica’s Law, approved by 70 percent of California voters a year ago, bars registered sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school or park where children gather. That leaves few places where offenders can live legally.

Some who have had trouble finding a place to live are avoiding re-arrest by reporting that they are homeless – falsely, in some cases.

Experts say it is hard to monitor sex offenders when they lie about their address or are living day-to-day in cheap hotels, homeless shelters or on the street. It also means they may not be getting the treatment they need.

“We could potentially be making the world more dangerous rather than less dangerous,” said therapist Gerry Blasingame, past chairman of the California Coalition on Sexual Offending.

I agree with all of that except the word “potentially.”  We felt good about “getting tough” on sex offenders, and now we have them living under bridges and untrackable.  How do you think “getting tough” on gang violence is going to work out?

California should get ready for scenes like this:

Five convicted sex offenders are living under a noisy highway bridge with the state’s grudging approval because an ordinance intended to keep predators away from children made it nearly impossible for them to find housing.

Some of them sleep on cardboard raised slightly off the ground to avoid the rats. One of the men beds down on a pallet with a blanket and pillow. Some have been there for several weeks […]

The conditions are a consequence of laws passed here and elsewhere around the country to bar sex offenders from living near schools, parks and other places children gather. Miami-Dade County’s 2005 ordinance – adopted partly in reaction to the case of a convicted sex offender who raped a 9-year-old Florida girl and buried her alive – says sex offenders must live at least 2,500 feet from schools.

“They’ve often said that some of the laws will force people to live under a bridge,” said Charles Onley, a research associate at the federally funded Center for Sex Offender Management. “This is probably the first story that I’ve seen that confirms that.”

Am I asking for sympathy for sex offenders?  Absolutely not.  But putting people into desperate situations like this only exacerbates their despair and will do nothing but lead to more crimes.

over…

Statistics show that it doesn’t matter where sex offenders live relative to where their sex crimes are committed.  Laws like Prop. 83 are pieces of feel-good legislation that does nothing to actually protect minors and does violate the civil rights of the perpetrators, if we care about that anymore.  And last year’s sex offender initiative, passed by the voters last year and subsequently ruled partially unconstitutional, will lead to this kind of scene in urban areas.

Everyone feel safer now?