Original Article
02/14/2010
By ERIK SHILLING
MANSFIELD -- The reasons vary, but the fact remains: Richland County has the highest rate of serious felony sex offenders in the state.
Some place partial blame on state lawmakers, whose implementation of the Bush Administration's far-reaching
Adam Walsh Act was hard and swift. Among other things, that law compelled even misdemeanor sex offenders to register with authorities upon release.
- The Adam Walsh Act, residency restrictions and the online registry are all to blame. The residency restrictions forces offenders to move into certain areas of the state, that is why you get groups of them living near each other. It also forces them into homelessness. The online registry makes it hard to get a job or home, and to keep that job or home. It's obvious, if you'd think about it for awhile!
Others blame the Mansfield Volunteers of America, a halfway house for convicted sex offenders, which some local officials say gives incentives for offenders to stay. For still others, the reasons for such high numbers are much more complex, involving and revolving around the area's ongoing, destabilizing economic situation.
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The research shows that higher concentrations of sex offenders have been found in more socially disorganized and disadvantaged communities," said Cynthia Mercado, a psychology professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and an expert in public policy regarding sex offenders.
- And why is that? It's because of the residency restrictions, they push offenders to live in certain areas of the state, which is usually run down areas, or out in the country.
There's no evidence, Mercado said, to suggest offenders live in communities where they think they'll find a bigger pool of easy targets. In fact, it's not all that much about choice. They stay, she said, "
due to job availability, social ties or financial constraints."
- A vast majority of those labeled sex offenders, are not out trolling for their "next victim!"
The Walsh Act
Whatever the reason, the statistics speak for themselves. Nearly 28 of every 10,000 residents in Richland County are Tier II or Tier III sex offenders, according to a News Journal analysis of sex offender statistics provided by the
Ohio Attorney General's Office (
Contact). That statistic gives Mansfield, by far, the highest per capita high-level sex offender rate in the state, even when the men housed at Volunteers of America are excluded.
In Geauga County, where the fewest high-level sex offenders reside, the rate is one-tenth of Richland's -- about 3 for every 10,000.
Tier II and Tier III offenders are those convicted of crimes including soliciting prostitution, sexual battery, sexual contact with a minor, kidnapping, forcible rape and murder with sexual motivations, nearly all felonies.
These designations were codified in the Walsh Act. That statute was a legislative attempt to create a national, standardized system for registering sex offenders. Once each state complied, federal officials said at the time, the resulting database could go live nationally, capable of notifying anyone with Internet access the whos, whats, wheres and whens of those convicted of sex crimes.
Holly Hollingsworth, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Richard Cordray, said Ohio officials pursued implementation of the act aggressively. Three and a half years after the law was passed, Ohio remains the only state to have complied.
- And it's going to cost them a ton of money, more than they receive in grants, to maintain everything involved with the sex offender laws.
The Walsh Act this year added to local rolls just three dozen or so offenders -- all Tier I, misdemeanor offenders, less than 10 percent of Richland County's 397 registered sex offenders.
In other words, more than 90 percent of sex offenders here committed felonies or repeated misdemeanors.
- Come on, just about anything that will land you the sex offender label, is a felony!
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You get extremely concerned when you hear that a young person is missing or didn't get off the bus," said Mansfield Service-Safety Director Phil Messer, who until recently was the city's police chief. "
When something like that happens, we go into crisis mode."
- And that is the typical knee-jerk reaction for politicians who want votes and to look good to the sheeple, they exploit an issue like a child abduction to pass more draconian, unconstitutional laws.
Too wide of a net?
Some criminals have protested the new sex offender classifications.
_____, 31, of Mansfield, is one of them. He was convicted in 2000 of attempted rape and corruption of a minor after police said he forced a 14-year-old girl to commit sex acts at gunpoint. After serving almost seven years in prison, he was released in 2007 to five years of parole. Originally classified as a Tier I offender, he was reclassified as Tier III after the Adam Walsh Act took effect in 2008. He appealed the state reclassification.
- At gun point? Sounds to me like the Tier III is the appropriate tier for this man, if all this is true. Also, how ironic, the news media gets the typical worst case, or a bad case, and shows that to make it seem like that is the norm, or to further demonize sex offenders.
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They classified me as a repeat or habitual offender, someone who seeks out victims, which isn't true," _____ said recently from his home in north Mansfield. In 2008, Richland County Common Pleas Judge James DeWeese agreed, ruling that a retroactive reclassification of _____'s status was wrong.
The reclassification changed _____'s registration requirements. But it also meant notification cards would be sent to everyone within a mile radius of his Burns Street home, and the same thing would happen every time he moved.
After the state appealed DeWeese's ruling in _____'s case, the Ohio Supreme Court issued a stay in December, which returned him to Tier 1 status until justices hand down a formal opinion, which could come at any time.
Currently unemployed, _____ worked at StarTek, the Mansfield telemarketing firm, until he was fired over the conviction last June amid a wave of firings of employees with criminal records there.
- This is the problem, nobody wants to hire a sex offender, even if the job has nothing to do with kids. So therefore they become homeless and jobless, and then the state expects them to pay all the insane fees?
"
As of now, it's pretty hard to find work," _____ said.
He insists that what's past is past, and says classifying him in Tier III cheapens the value of a registry that, in the end, he would support.
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It's like the boy who cried wolf," _____ said. "
Someone's going to be a predator for real, but (the public) will think that everyone's a predator, and then something will really happen."
Factoring in the VOA
Officials here say another factor contributing somewhat to the county's high offender count is the local joint enforcement effort.
Lt. Dino Sgambellone, commander of the METRICH special enforcement unit, said local detectives handling sex-related crimes are very busy.
For more than two decades, those detectives also have cooperated with Richland County Children Services when it comes to juvenile sex crimes, conducting joint investigations and sharing information.
A former Children Services investigator, Carrie Benham-Daniel, is director of the Mansfield Volunteers of America. She also attributed the county's high rate to the teamwork of investigators.
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They're all very good at what they do," Benham-Daniel said.
Still, others question the outcome at the other end of the legal process -- once those caught, convicted and imprisoned are released to parole or probation.
Messer, Mansfield's long-time police chief, is one of many local law enforcement people who contend that despite Volunteers of America's claims to the contrary, the state-contracted agency also is a factor in the high number of offenders living here.
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The sex offender population grew dramatically when they opened," Messer said. "
If they're here for a year of treatment and they establish contacts here and they're comfortable in the community, they could stay."
Sgambellone agreed, adding that because many of the offenders undergo treatment in Mansfield, many stick around once their term at the halfway house is over.
Volunteers of America houses 58 Tier III offenders. "
There's a lot of them," Sgambellone said.
Benham-Daniel said employees there work hard to make sure offenders do not stay in the area. She said numerous safeguards were built into the system to ensure offenders who leave the facility also leave the county.
- They have to stay somewhere, and that is why the halfway house had so many. Where do you expect them to stay? If everyone passed laws so they were "not in my backyard," then where would they stay?
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When they walk in the door, their (probation or parole officer) and myself make sure they know they have to go back to their county of conviction or residence," Benham-Daniel said. "
They just don't leave here and we don't know."
Up to a quarter of the 58 offenders there can come from anywhere in Ohio; the rest come from a wide 19-county radius. And while Volunteers of America and parole authority officials have offenders on post-release control sign agreements stating they'll return to the county they came from, neither these agencies nor law enforcement can force offenders to live up to those agreements.
DeWeese, through whose courtroom many local sex-crime cases pass, recently said once offenders complete post-release control, they can stay in Mansfield, regardless of where they've come from.
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There's no way to make them go anywhere else," he said.
"The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly." - Abraham Lincoln
