IA: Break up Iowa’s sex-offender clusters (Opinion)

Three previously convicted sex offenders living in a west Davenport mobile home park are heading back to prison for abusing more kids. Full Op-Ed Article

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The title is misleading. The opinion piece actually advocates REMOVING residency restrictions, so as to PREVENT clustering in the first place, which is an admirable position.

If you only read the headline without the article content, you would most likely conclude that the paper is advocating the CREATION of a NEW law that breaks up clusters in ADDITION to maintaining the residency restriction zones.

This sounds like an editorial mistake, or perhaps a disagreement, within the department.

Here we go again…one has to wonder if they(politicians, law enforcement, parole, etc) put several there when they obviously knew were likely to reoffend(those of us who have been in the system know we’ve come across a few like this, even if they are the extreme minority). By grouping the scumbags together they knew were a problem, they knew they could exploit it to get more laws passed.

From the article:
“But if you’re an impoverished parent with no computer and little rent money, your children can become victims awaiting perpetrators clustered together by state law.

For decades, Iowa law has prohibited some convicted sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of most schools and child care businesses. But not all sex offenders. Those with existing residences near schools can stay after their conviction. If a school or day care opens near convicted sex offenders’ current homes, they can stay.

And no sex offender is restricted from living next to a public pool, playground, library, water park, fast-food restaurant or any of dozens of places where kids may congregate.

So this incomplete ban does little to distance sex offenders from kids. And it does plenty to concentrate sex offenders near poor children.”

It is clear this author believes all sex offenders pose a significant risk to children and seems to only fault the residency restrictions for not applying them to all the places were children exist — and for placing them near the computer deprived poor. He also believes the registry protects the public, if you have a computer to access it. Not sure about Iowa, but here even the poor have smart phones. Not a good argument.