Some of Robert's South Jordan neighbors are afraid of him. So much so that one resident wrote Gov. Olene Walker asking that she do something about getting him out of the neighborhood.
The concern is this: Robert is a convicted sex offender who lives a short distance from the neighborhood school, Elk Meadows Elementary, 9800 S. 3448 West, and children walk by Robert's home as they go to and from school.
For Robert, who is currently on parole and listed on the state's sex offender registry, the situation is nothing new. Prior to living in his current South Jordan neighborhood, he received the same treatment at his previous home from a woman who did not want him in the neighborhood.
But, according to the Department of Corrections, Robert has also successfully completed all of his treatment programs and is due to be released from parole in the near future, although he will remain on the sex offender registry for several more years. The governor's office forwarded the letter from Robert's neighbors to Corrections officials.
Robert declined to speak about the situation, but his parole agent, Mark Brienholt, said Robert was "pretty upset" with all the unwanted attention.
"For some reason people have really been on this guy," Brienholt said. "More so than other offenders."
Robert's problem highlights a controversial issue growing across the nation: Should registered sex offenders be allowed to live near schools or day cares, and is enforcing such a restriction legal?
A handful of states have passed "child safety zone" laws restricting where sex offenders can live. But some of those states also face legal challenges to the statutes.
Alabama was the first state to pass restrictions on sex offenders in 1996. Under Alabama law, offenders cannot work or live within 2,000 feet of a school or day care. Other states also prohibit what sex offenders can do within a certain distance of a school or day care ranging from living and working to volunteering and even traveling.
In Iowa and Tennessee, the constitutionality of laws outlining where sex offenders can live is being challenged. Likewise, an ordinance in Albuquerque preventing sex offenders from living near schools was also put on hold earlier this year after the ACLU filed suit claiming it violated the civil rights of sex offenders.
Assistant Utah Attorney General Craig Barlow concurred that trying to restrict a person because of history raises serious constitutional questions.
"You can't prohibit drug offenders from living near pharmacies or alcoholics from living near taverns or kleptomaniacs from living near people who have stuff," he said.
If someone tried to place such restrictions on sex offenders they would probably only be able to live in Utah's most rural communities, he said.
"The whole notion of where do they live begs the question of population. Any inhabited places are probably in some distance to a church, school or day care," Barlow said.
The Deseret Morning News compared the number of registered sex offenders to the number of schools in Salt Lake County's four major districts: Salt Lake, Granite, Jordan and Murray. The News counted all of the districts' elementary, junior high and high schools as well as special schools and alternative schools.
There were 280 schools listed in 32 ZIP codes in the four districts in the Utah State Office of Education Media Notebook. In those 32 ZIP codes were 1,337 sex offenders according to the Utah Sex Offender Registry. That equates to about 4.8 sex offenders for every school in the four major districts.
The ZIP code with the most registered sex offenders per school was 84111 in Salt Lake City. Lincoln Elementary School, 1090 S. Roberta, is the lone school in that ZIP code. There are a total of 52 registered sex offenders in that ZIP code, according to the sex offender registry. Agents from Adult Probation and Parole say that the area is also one where offenders have historically been able to access affordable housing.
The News' survey did not include day cares per sex offender.
Most school district officials had no comment on the survey or the issue of whether to ban sex offenders from living near schools.
Granite spokesman Randy Ripplinger, however, did acknowledge the difficulty faced by the parole board and offenders in finding housing.
"It's not like they could say, 'You can't live in a school district,' " he said. "That would be impossible."
'False security'
Barlow, who prosecutes many sex cases, noted that abuse cases involving strangers were rare and attacks outside the victim's own home were even more uncommon.
In 97 percent of abuse cases the attacker is someone the victim knows, he said, and 70 percent of those attacks happen in the victim's own home.
If Utah were to have a law banning sex offenders from living in certain areas, "to some extent it would be a real sense of false security," Barlow said.
Furthermore, Barlow said he wasn't sure how a law like that would be worded.
"The problem is, how do you get (a statute) that is practical or constitutional? It would have to be both. If you make it so draconian, (sex offenders) stop registering all together and then the value is gone."
The state is not required to notify every resident or school individually if an offender moves into their neighborhood. Because the sex offender registry on the Internet is considered a public document it satisfies the conditions of Megan's Law.
Passed in 1996, Megan's Law requires states to provide the public with certain information on the whereabouts of convicted sex offenders. It was named after Megan Kanka, a New Jersey girl raped and killed by her neighbor, a convicted child molester. Kanka's parents were unaware of the man's criminal history.
Brienholt doesn't deny that Robert has a problem.
"It's kind of like an alcoholic. Generally they're never cured. The best you can hope for is they refrain from that type of behavior. You give them the tools to do that through treatment and supervision."
Brienholt said Adult Probation and Parole has actually stepped in on several occasions and told parolees where they can and cannot live. In one incident, he said he made a sex offender move after the woman in the house directly behind him started a day care.
"We make 'em move. They can't be right next to a school, church or playground on the same street or directly adjacent to them. We do not allow that at all," he said. "We preapprove every place they live."
Department of Corrections spokesman Jack Ford said the "not in my backyard" attitude goes not only for sex offenders but drug and violent crime offenders as well.
But with 22,000 people on probation or parole in Utah, Ford said if restrictions were put on each one, "We wouldn't have anybody living anywhere."
Utah's Board of Pardons and Parole does place some restrictions on sex offenders leaving the prison system, but that doesn't include limiting their housing choices, board chairman Mike Sibbett said.
"There is a condition on (an offender) that he cannot go where children congregate, which are schools or parks or even malls. We've been pretty hard on them," Sibbett said.
Sibbett said that in his 15 years on the board the only living arrangement restriction the board has ever imposed was related to a violent offender whose offense occurred in a small community in rural Utah and the board prevented that person from living in the same community as his victim.
"It would have been poison to put them back in there," he said.
The board, Sibbett said, relies heavily on parole officers to monitor an offender's post-incarceration behavior and would address a living arrangement situation only if a concern or problem was raised, he said.
The board considers each offender's history individually when setting conditions for parole, because no two offenders present the same level of risk to public safety, Sibbett said.
"It's about the situation," he said. "Not all sex offenders are the predators and pathological personalities people assume they are. After 15 years on the board I recognize that there are murderers and then there are murderers. It's the same with sex offenses. There are sex offenders and then there are sex offenders."
Common misperceptions
Dr. Michael Stevens, director of Psychopharmacology Research for Valley Mental Health, agrees. Sex offenders do primarily fall into two broad categories which include different kinds of predatory behaviors.
Those who prey randomly on "unknown" victims represent a much smaller portion of the sex offender population than those who are "domestic sexual offenders," such as biological relatives, he said. The mere presence of a sex offender within a neighborhood does not necessarily mean then that the person presents a significant threat.
"Actually if you do a Google-like search, and you read very reputable news sources, you'll find some confusion in the distinction between those (offender) groups," Stevens said. "That uniformly tends to reinforce the public lack of knowledge and the public's tendency to think that a sexual offender represents a single syndrome."
In making its decisions about releasing a sex offender to parole, the board also considers whether the offender has successfully completed treatment, board administrator John Green said. It is generally true that most offenders do not get a parole date until such treatment is successfully completed, Green said. Those who refuse treatment typically stay incarcerated for longer periods of time.
Statistics show that treatment does have an impact on a sex offender's behavior, Corrections spokesman Ford said.
Between 1991 and 2001, only 18.9 percent of offenders who completed sex offender treatment returned to prison — those returns were for parole violations, but not for new sex offenses, Ford said.
"That's contrary to what the media would have people believe," Ford said. "Those recidivism numbers are significantly less than those for other kinds of offenses."
In Robert's case, Brienholt said AP&P actually checked out his house before he moved in to make sure it was in an appropriate location. If a school or day care is a couple of streets over, he said that's OK.
"The closest analogy I can make is an alcoholic. There's a lot of alcoholics out there who go the rest of their lives without touching another drink," he said. "Through proper treatment and supervision we feel they can become a minimal risk to the community."
E-mail: preavy@desnews.com, jdobner@desnews.com