Miami Sex Offenders Moving Closer to the City

MIAMI (March 15) -- Voncel, a convicted child molester, stood by her dilapidated motor home surveying the damage after bulldozers leveled an outcast enclave beneath Miami's most noted bridge.

A filthy mattress and splintered lumber riddled with rusty nails laid at her doorstep. She sifted through the scattered detritus in search of an extension cord that ran from her camper to the communal generator. The cord, she discovered, had been severed by the Florida Department of Transportation earth-movers. She would spend the night in the dark.

A change in the law allows her and other sex offenders to move into a more populated area of Dade County. But she isn't happy about it.

"I can't take it here anymore," said Voncel, 45, who has been living under the Julia Tuttle Causeway bridge for three years by orders of authorities and county law. "This right here, this is worse than prison."

The Julia Tuttle, spanning the water separating Miami and Miami Beach, was the only place Voncel and other sex offenders released from nearby prisons could call home. The law prevented them from living within 2,500 feet of schools or their bus stops as well as parks, day-care centers and other places children congregate.

Up to 100 convicted sex offenders called the bridge home at any given time over the past few years. Their ranks spilled out from beneath the bridge to the grassy, trash-strewn strip along the highway. The tents and plywood homes were reminiscent of the tar-paper Hoovervilles of the Depression-era 1930s.

However, a recent change in the law allows offenders like Voncel, convicted of molesting a friend's two teenage children, to live in designated sex offender settlements in the city. A trailer park and an old hotel in Hialeah are the staging ground for what Dade County officials hope will prove a successful effort to reintegrate offenders into society and help them find gainful employment.

However, they still must reside at least 2,500 feet from schools and cannot loiter near places where children congregate.

The Julia Tuttle settlement is to be completely vacated by the end of the month. Voncel and the few remaining inhabitants have mixed feelings about the move.

She said she is glad to be moving and hopes to resume working as a hairdresser, though she isn't so sure she and others can make it on the outside.

"My motive is to get out of here," she said while dragging on a cigarette and sipping a beer. "But those trailer parks where they're putting us are no good. Too many drugs and (prostitutes). I don't want to be around that."

Others share her cynicism about the likelihood of sex offenders making a successful go of it living in an ordained community.

Jill Levenson, a professor of human services at nearby Lynn University, is an authority on residency restrictions for sex offenders. She said the closing of the bridge settlement was a "step in the right direction." But she argued that the current restrictions -- making it illegal for convicted molesters to come within 300 feet of schools or parks -- do little to "prevent offenders from repeating their crime."

"Living restrictions are not going to prevent a motivated offender from molesting a child again," Levenson said. "All it does is create barriers in stability and prevent them from becoming a stable, conforming citizen."

Many of the bridge-dwelling offenders said they couldn't find steady employment after their convictions because law requires they inform a potential employer of their crimes, forcing them to rely on handouts from families and friends.

Noted state lobbyist Ron Book, who favors the living restrictions for sex-crime offenders, said the laws work to curtail repeat offenses.

"We've are satisfied that we've been moving in a positive direction; we already have gotten some of the colony of offenders and predators resettled in the community," Book said, noting that the number of bridge dwellers has shrunk to a dozen or so, though a handful of recently released sex offenders arrived in recent days.

Book answers criticism of the living restriction on sex criminals with a favorite analogy. "Laws that prohibit people from committing crimes with a gun don't stop everybody from committing crimes with a gun, but it works and serves as a deterrent ... residency restrictions, per se, do not stop offensives against children, but they are a deterrent in some regards," he said.

Longtime bridge dweller and convicted child molester Patrick disagrees. The 48-year-old former chef and self-proclaimed first resident of the Julia Tuttle settlement said sex offenders with an insatiable taste for minors will strike again no matter where they live.

"Kids are everywhere," Patrick said.

He is a sinewy mustached man who confessed to touching his 9-year-old stepdaughter -- a one-time drunken indiscretion, he said.

"You send us down here to live, and kids come by to fish,'' he added.

Patrick, like other offenders heading to the newly designated sex-crime communities, said he thinks the program is ultimately doomed to failure. The surrounding community ultimately will reject the presence of sex criminals, he said, eventually prompting the creation of another outcast society, perhaps under another bridge other than the Julia Tuttle.

"This isn't the last of places like these," he said.