How Many Registered Sex Crimes Criminals In Florida
The hamlet where half the population are sex offenders
By Linda Pressly
BBC World Service, Florida
Phenomenon Village lies deep in a sea of light-green. This is sugar pikestaff land, south Florida. At the edge of the everglades, and over 2 miles from the nearest town, around 200 people alive in the small, dandy bungalows.
More than than 100 of them are registered sexual practice offenders - people who were constitute guilty, and have usually served a prison sentence, for a sex criminal offence. At that place is one woman, the rest are men. Some of them viewed child pornography, or molested their own children.
Others abused minors when they were in positions of power - in that location is a teacher here, a pastor, a sports motorcoach. In that location are those who accept been to prison for exposing themselves. A number of residents were bedevilled because they had sex with underage girlfriends.
Under Florida's state police none of them can alive within 1,000 anxiety of a school, mean solar day care heart, park or playground. Cities and counties have extended those restrictions up to 2,500 feet - about one-half a mile. And in some places swimming pools, motorbus stops and libraries are out of bounds likewise. The issue has been to button sexual practice offenders out of densely populated areas.
Miracle Village is two miles from the nearest town, Pahokee
The laws of Florida have fabricated Phenomenon Village an attractive option. Information technology was fix in 2009 by the late Dick Witherow, a pastor with Matthew 25 Ministries.
He saw the difficulties sex offenders faced when trying to discover a identify to live. Although they tin travel pretty much anywhere during the day, at night they must exist at an address that complies with the residency restrictions.
Applications to Miracle Village from potential residents arrive daily. "We go between 10 and 20 a week", says Jerry Youmans, the intake co-ordinator for the ministry, and too a registered sex activity offender.
"We try not to accept people with a history of violence or drugs, or to take whatever diagnosed paedophile - that is, someone who can just get sexually aroused by a kid. We want to protect the people who are already here and those who were living here earlier u.s.."
Edgar Walford moved into the village before the sexual activity offenders arrived
Edgar Walford moved in 10 years ago - back in the days when it was known as Pelican Lake and was home to cane-cutters and their families. He arrived in South Florida from Jamaica in 1962, and spent his working life harvesting the saccharide that stretches every bit far equally the eye can run across.
Retired at present, he spends his days tending an extensive garden of cassava, sweetness potatoes, bananas - a whole range of fruit and vegetables that he gifts to his neighbours.
"It'south a very peaceful place, no 1 troubles nobody," he says. And how does he find the dozens of sexual practice offenders who have moved in over the last few years? "They're practiced people. I've made plenty of friends. The only thing nosotros miss is the kids, and the school bus don't come here no more."
A few children do live at Miracle Hamlet - Florida'southward laws don't cease sex offenders from living in the aforementioned neighbourhood as minors, although their terms of probation may ban them from having any contact with them.
Christopher Dawson, a 22-year-old, is a registered sexual practice offender prohibited from speaking to anyone under the historic period of 18. When he was 19, he had what he says is a consensual sexual human relationship with a fourteen-year-old. He believed she was older.
"I knew her for a year, and we dated for a few months", he remembers. "Her parents testified against me, and I was sentenced to two years' house arrest followed by viii years' probation."
When he violated the terms of his probation past speaking to the younger brother of a friend, he spent four months in the county jail. Then the approximate ordered him to move to Miracle Hamlet - the alternative was a lengthy prison sentence.
"It's been a blessing in disguise. It was upsetting to get out my parents, but I feel every bit though I have a destiny with Miracle Hamlet. I feel at home and safe here - I honey the people," he says. "Fifty-fifty though I have the label of a sex offender, I'chiliad non a monster. I made a mistake and I've faced the consequences."
A talented musician, Christopher plays drums for the ring that leads the services in the small church building at the heart of Phenomenon Village.
This is a Christian community dedicated to helping sex offenders rebuild their lives, but non-Christians are accepted, and everyone is welcomed at church. There are anger direction and bible study classes. And, equally a condition of their probation, most of the sex offenders attend psychological treatment programmes. Some of the offenders have jobs in local towns.
With its neatly cut lawns, and luscious, tropical vegetation, this is an idyllic, rural community. It is like shooting fish in a barrel to forget that some of its residents accept committed serious and shocking crimes.
Pat Powers, the executive managing director of Matthew 25 Ministries, was a superlative youth racquetball double-decker. In the early 1990s he was convicted of sexual contact with 11 minors. As a built-in-again Christian, he says he is using his experience equally a sexual activity-offender to influence others.
"I can meet through these guys' stories. And so if we get someone here and they say, 'I'yard not guilty, all I did was await at a picture. I say, no. You lot're guilty, period.' Because the only fashion you lot're going to change is to admit you are wrong."
Pat Powers
At the Methodist church in the nearby town of Pahokee, some of the sex activity offenders from Miracle Village provide live music for the services. They are appreciated members of the congregation, and i of them is a preacher here.
But having then many sex offenders close by has unnerved some locals. Kathy was raped at knife-point when she was a teenager. Decades after the event, she is nonetheless struggling to come up to terms with her experience. And she isn't impressed with Miracle Village.
"I don't think it's a phenomenon at all," she says. "Perchance it is for the sex activity offenders, merely for me it'due south more like a nightmare on Elm Street."
Pahokee'southward Mayor, Colin Walkes, believes people are coming to terms with their unusual neighbours living just outside the town.
"I know at kickoff there was a lot of opposition to them, because the whole thing was about protecting our number 1 asset - our kids. Just we're moving on, and this is a country of second and third chances for people who make mistakes. As long as law enforcement is involved and there are no problems, the community volition accept them."
It is the task of police officer Detective Courtney Minton, from Palm Beach County's Sexual Predator and Offender Tracking Unit, to monitor the sexual practice offenders living at Miracle Hamlet.
She visits weekly to verify addresses, and cheque residents have registered all their details in accordance with the law.
On a scorching Th morning in June, she cruises effectually in her ruby-red pickup truck, stopping at the houses on her list. Some people are not in because they are at piece of work, so she leaves a calling card. At one home, she talks to an offender's wife.
Detective Courtney Minton
Dorsum in her truck, she reflects on her chore - often she has an intimate cognition of someone's crimes.
"The offender I just checked on is a instance I worked on a few years ago equally a detective - he was molesting his daughters. And so I made the charges against him, and worked the investigation. Then he went to prison, he got out, and at present information technology'southward my task to be checking on him," she says.
Detective Minton has a instance-load of 300. At that place are 900 registered sexual practice offenders in Palm Beach County. Across Florida there are effectually 55,000. Enforcement of the residency laws is expensive.
And at that place is a debate nigh whether the restrictions actually make the population safer. Campaigners say there is no empirical evidence to bear witness that recidivism rates are lower among sex offenders who live away from places like schools. Supporters of the laws merits it is common sense - if you lot let sexual predators alive close to anywhere lots of children gather, more will exist at take chances.
Many of those residing at Miracle Hamlet do so because they cannot observe anywhere else in Florida that complies with the constabulary. For others it is home. So what would happen to the community if the residency laws were revoked and then sexual activity offenders could live anywhere they chose?
"Sex offenders would still live here," says Pat Powers. "It'south very peaceful out hither in the middle of nowhere."
You can hear more most this story on the BBC World Service programme Assignment on Th 1 August.
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