After Prison, Few Places for Sex Offenders to Live

By STEPHANIE CHEN

CEDARTOWN, Ga. -- After two years of fitful searching, Christopher Noles and his family finally found a modest three-bedroom house in rural Georgia. The bedrooms are cramped, the kitchen plumbing leaky. There isn't a neighbor in sight.

But the lonely old house is a last refuge. Mr. Noles is one of nearly 16,000 sex offenders convicted in Georgia who, under state law, can't live or work within 1,000 feet of a church, school, day-care center, skating rink, park, swimming pool or any other place where children gather. Failing to register an address could mean 30 extra years in prison for a convicted sex offender.

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Andrew Kornylak/Aurora Select for The Wall Street Journal

For Christopher Noles and his family, this three-bedroom house in rural Georgia is a last refuge. Being listed in a database of sex offenders, Mr. Noles can't live or work within 1,000 feet of any location where children routinely congregate.

The crime that placed Mr. Noles, now 31 years old, in Georgia's database of sex offenders was having sex in August 1996 with his girlfriend. He was then 17, while she was 14. Both said the sex was consensual, and they later wed. But state law at the time said it was statutory rape for either an adult or a minor to have sex with someone under the age of 16. After the girl became pregnant, a family member reported the liaison to police. Mr. Noles pleaded guilty and spent three months at a prison boot camp.

He thought he paid his debt to society. But under a 2006 Georgia law, Mr. Noles and nearly every person convicted of any of dozens of crimes considered sex offenses must be listed on a publicly available database. They must keep police notified of their address at all times and can never reside or work near any banned area.

An additional requirement prohibits any convicted sex offender from volunteering at church. Mr. Noles says he skips all church activities -- including a play in which his 11-year-old daughter performed at Pleasant Valley South Baptist Church in Silver Creek, Ga. "I'd rather be able to tuck my kids into bed every night than to have to dream about them from prison," he says.

Laws cracking down on sex offenders enjoy broad public support across the U.S. All states require offenders to report to law enforcement, but Georgia's statute is considered to be among the toughest such laws in the U.S. for its living restrictions and sentences. The law has set off messy conflicts between politicians and others who argue sexual criminals should be aggressively tracked and isolated and those who say lawbreakers -- especially juveniles and nonviolent offenders -- deserve a second chance.

Among the most vocal critics of the laws are police. Some sheriffs say the crackdown on sex offenders forces them to divert substantial resources from investigating active criminals to monitoring and tracking offenders who aren't threatening. Enforcing the additional restrictions from the 2006 law cost sheriffs' offices about $5 million in 2007, says the Georgia Sheriffs' Association.

Some states also object to a recent federal law requiring states to impose strict standards for registering sex offenders, arguing it's too costly and no more effective than their own state laws.

"Oh, my God, it's overwhelming," says Capt. Ronald Applin, who works in the Fulton County sheriff's warrant-service division that tracks down anyone deemed too close to children for comfort. Monitoring more than 1,500 sex offenders in the state's most-populous county requires four deputies full time, he says.

It's not clear whether the laws have had any effect on the frequency of sexual offenses in Georgia. Only 90 of the 15,800 people listed as sex offenders are classified by law-enforcement officials as dangerous "predators," which the state defines as someone who is at risk of perpetrating a future sexual offense. The number of rapes in the state increased slightly between 2006 and 2007, but the laws haven't been in effect long enough to establish clear statistical patterns, experts say.

Law-enforcement officials say the law has forced many sex offenders to move. According to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal of records compiled by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, more than 8,400 of the sex offenders on the registry, or 68%, moved between June 2006 and November 2008 -- far higher than in previous periods. More than a hundred left the state entirely.

Still hanging over those listed on the Georgia registry is a provision approved as part of the 2006 law forbidding them from living within 1,000 feet of a school bus stop. But enforcement of that requirement was stayed by a federal judge in response to a lawsuit filed by several sex offenders. If the measure ultimately goes into effect, the vast majority of Georgia would be legally uninhabitable to anyone on the registry, according to sheriffs across the state.

Defenders say residency restrictions are one of the few ways society can protect itself from repeat sex offenders. "Nothing is going to be 100% effective unless every single offender goes to jail," says Monica Lukisavage, a day-care operator in Stevens Point, Wis., whose daughter was abducted at age 13 by a neighbor in 1995, held in captivity for three months and repeatedly raped and beaten. "But these restrictions are a step in the right direction."

Laura Ahearn, executive director of Parents for Megan's Law and The Crime Victims Center, based in New York, says employment and residency restrictions are necessary, because therapists and treatment organizations can't guarantee a sex offender won't re-offend. "Residency restrictions can give the community more security and safety when they know offenders are being monitored," she says.

More than 30 states, including California, Michigan and Ohio, already ban sex offenders from residing in certain areas, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Several states have also dramatically tightened their registry requirements.

Georgia first imposed residency restrictions in 2003, banning sex offenders from living near schools, day-care centers and parks. But the issue only exploded onto the public radar in February 2005, when 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford was kidnapped from her family's home in Homosassa, Fla. The girl was raped and killed by being buried alive just 150 yards from her home.

Stirred by the Lunsford case, Georgia State Rep. Jerry Keen introduced sweeping revisions to strengthen the Georgia registry law. The changes banned offenders from working near those locations and added churches, swimming pools and school bus stops.

But soon there were signs that the newly strengthened law might have gone even further than intended. Law-enforcement officials were required to order hundreds of people to move. The requirements make no distinction between the most heinous sex offenders -- such as child rapists -- and those who had consensual sex with an underage girlfriend. More than 800 of those on the Georgia list committed their offenses before they turned 19 years old, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Since then, exceptions have been added to Georgia's statutory-rape laws reducing the charges against minors having sex.

Generally, offender names are on the list for life or can't be removed until at least 10 years after probation. It's unclear how many of the nearly 16,000 offenders tried to have their names removed since the law went into effect, but the petitioning process is difficult. Between 2006 and 2008, 70 records were deleted from the registry based on court orders, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. In 2007, Georgia's Supreme Court ruled that the new 1,000-foot restrictions violated property rights. But state lawmakers circumvented the court's decision by allowing offenders who had long owned their property to remain in their homes.

Former Polk County Sheriff's Office Maj. Mike Sullivan says the proximity-based employment and residential restrictions create a false sense of public safety. None of the 78 offenders he was tracking before he retired committed their crimes on victims they lived or worked near, he says. Instead, he worries that the residency laws destabilize past offenders by forcing them to move or lose their jobs and that pushing sex offenders to cluster together in the few livable areas of the state could ultimately encourage illegal behavior.

At the time the 2006 law took effect, Mr. Noles, then a truck driver, was busy dropping off loads at Davenport Lumber Company in Rockmart, Ga. After getting divorced from his first wife of seven years, he was raising his newborn son with his second wife, Rita. The sheriff told him to stop delivering to the lumber company because its grounds bordered a church. It made no difference that Mr. Noles didn't work on Sundays, rarely was at the lumber yard and had letters from his boss begging a probation officer to let him stay, citing a clean, two-year work history. For the last two years, he has been unemployed the majority of the time, scraping by as a freelance construction worker.

"I'll do any job I can, but the law is forcing me out of the county," he says. "And there just aren't that many job opportunities out here."

It took two years of scavenging real-estate ads and dozens of nights in motel rooms for the Noles family finally to locate and rent a home that didn't violate the sex-offender statute. Mrs. Noles says she is tired of repeatedly uprooting her life to comply with the law. Now, with many acres of wide pastures surrounding the new home, she is hopeful. "This time, it's for real," she says. "We're staying."

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