On Nov. 7 voters will be offered what seems to be an easy solution to one of our state’s most complex problems: supervising sex offenders and preventing future victimization. Proposition 83, known as Jessica’s Law, talks tough but in the end doesn’t do what it takes to protect our communities. Victim’s Advocates across the state have taken a hard look at this initiative and have determined that Prop. 83 won’t protect our children and might place our communities at greater risk.

The 2000 foot residency restrictions might seem like a good idea at first glance, until you consider that in dense urban areas most sex offenders wouldn’t have a legal place to live. Where will they go? Well in Iowa, which implemented similar restrictions, the number of offenders who stopped registering has doubled. Many of those who chose to comply but lived in urban areas were forced to relocate to rural areas. Neither result is acceptable. If a sex offender is lost he can’t be supervised adequately and community safety suffers. If too many sex offenders relocate to rural areas, where law enforcement is already stretched thin, resources will be overwhelmed and community safety suffers.

Simply outfitting an offender with a GPS bracelet is not the same as ensuring intensive supervision by a trained corrections professional. GPS doesn’t work when the unit loses its charge (which is every 6-9 hours), the satellite loses its signal (which could be in a building, on a train or in a dense urban area), or when an offender is not near a cellular tower (which is many parts of rural California). Those are just “accidental” technology failures. Offenders who are actively intent on bypassing the GPS units can do so easily by leaving the unit unplugged, wrapping it in tin-foil, or simply cutting the plastic bracelet with a pair of scissors. What we need is more personal, skilled supervision by corrections and law enforcement personnel to monitor, manage and supervise dangerous offenders.

Even if these massive expenditures on an unreliable and largely unproven GPS technology were warranted, it is unfair to saddle local communities with hundreds of millions of dollars related to this unfunded mandate. Once an offender is no longer under parole supervision, the cost for GPS is left to local communities. Quite simply, Proposition 83 is a completely unfunded mandate that will leave local governments in the lurch.

There is at least one thing that I agree with the proponents of Proposition 83: this is about children. As a sexual assault victim advocate I believe that all the children in California deserve to safe from sexual offenders. I believe that children in our rural communities shouldn’t face the threat of thousands of additional sex offenders in their towns. I believe that children in our urban areas should know where dangerous sex offenders live, instead of wondering how many predators have gone underground or missing in their neighborhood. I believe that all of our children deserve to feel secure knowing that our most dangerous offenders are being supervised by a skilled corrections officer, not a fragile gadget which renders an offender a dot on a map. I believe that our children deserve laws we can afford and promises we can keep.

Robert Coombs M.A.
Director of Public Affairs
California Coalition Against Sexual Assault (CALCASA)

For more information about the CALCASA position please visit www.calcasapublicpolicy.org