DOC crackdown on sex offenders ruining mission

BY FRED GRIMM

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You'd think that the supervision and discipline and therapy and strict curfews and drug testing and spiritual guidance and actual beds offered by the St. Francis Mission might be preferable to having jobless, homeless sex offenders prowl the streets and sleep under bridges.    No, we prefer to keep our magical thinking that they will all just disappear if we play NIMBY enough.

Apparently not.

The Florida Department of Corrections has warned the last 10 sex offenders enrolled in the treatment program that they must be gone in six weeks.

Stripped of those clients, the mission will almost certainly fall into bankruptcy. St. Francis has become collateral damage, ruined by uncompromising laws limiting where sex offenders can reside.  This in itself should be a criminal act!

DECADES OF SERVICE

The mission, located in Fort Lauderdale a few blocks south of the Broward County Courthouse, has been salvaging outcasts since 1969.

For the first 35 years, St. Francis, in a converted house with an Alamo facade under a mission bell, provided treatment and shelter for alcoholics and drug addicts. Five years ago, the Florida Department of Corrections approached St. Francis and asked the mission to take on another kind of client.  Now, why would ANY other group or individual take the chance that the community will simply put in a park or some other "place where children congregate" and put an end to their investment?

Ultimately, the DOC request would prove both ironic and probably fatal to the mission. St. Francis agreed to provide beds for sex offenders.

The killer blow came Jan. 10, when the city opened a kiddie playground several blocks away but close enough to trigger the residency ban. The DOC, the very agency that referred their parolees to St. Francis, now said they had to go. Or face parole violations and prison. (DOC gave the mission residents a list of possible residences, all hundreds of miles north of Fort Lauderdale.)

OUT OF TIME

Chris Mancini, the Fort Lauderdale attorney who has taken on the money-losing proposition of representing the mission, went to court and asked for an injunction.

DOC agreed to give the parolees another 60 days before enforcing the evictions. The reprieve ends Oct. 21.

Mancini thinks he could eventually prevail in the courts, challenging the evictions on constitutional grounds. But the trial and the appeals would take years to resolve. St. Francis is down to its last few weeks.

The mission, staffed by volunteers, takes no government money and gets by on charitable donations and the $200 weekly fees paid by each client. St. Francis needs at least 14 of its 20 beds filled with paying clients just to break even. It's already losing money. And with 10 clients forced to evacuate before the end of next month, St. Francis is facing a fiscal disaster. The mission just doesn't have the money and the time it would need to revert back to treating alcoholics and drug addicts.

AN ILLUSION

Bad enough that our politicians passed state, county and city laws banning sex offenders without contemplating that offenders would be forced into homelessness, but no one thought to include an exception for supervised treatment programs like St. Francis.  There were many, many things that were not thought about, this is just one of them.

Residency bans create the illusion of protecting children. St. Francis provides actual protection, keeping the men employed, supervised, in therapy, drug- and alcohol- free and away from kids.  This will continue until the media and the politicians decide it is time to tell the public the truth about sex crimes and recidivism and just a few honest, courageous Legislators say ENOUGH PLAYING POLITICS, I WANT TO PROTECT OUR CHILDREN!

But we'd rather have that illusion.(magical thinking) Just toss the men into the street.  where they may abscond, be homeless, helpless, angry, have no support, have nothing to lose.

As always, thank you Fred Grimm for making public this outrage.  I am sure if you asked many people, something like St. Francis housing and helping former sex offenders would be thought a wonderful idea.  That is as long as it was not in their neighborhood, city, or county.

We must stop this magical thinking and realize that we must do what WORKS and we must do it NOW and we must do it HERE because, if you want to believe it or not....those former sex offenders WILL NOT DISSAPEAR!

Meanwhile, St. Francis, after so many years of good work, probably won't survive to celebrate next month's 40th anniversary. Just collateral damage.