The Contra Costa Times has published an interactive map showing the parts of the Bay Area that would be off-limits to sex offenders if the tough 2000-foot residency provision in Proposition 83 go into effect if, as expected, the measure is approved by voters in three weeks. It’s an excellent representation of the effect that the measure would have on a particular region of the state. A statewide map would be even better.

The Contra Costa Times also runs an article on Proposition 83 today, with the following key paragraph:

To legal scholars and critics, including some sex-crime detectives and prosecutors, [the 2000-foot provision] present[s] serious concerns. Among them:

* Whether Prop. 83 would apply to already convicted sex offenders — the thousands now behind bars, on probation or parole, or even the tens of thousands who have been free of the criminal justice system for years, living in the community, some of them homeowners.

* That it would too broadly restrict where all registered offenders can live, including those whose convictions were for sex crimes against adults.

* That it would cross a constitutional line into public banishment if registered offenders could find nowhere to live in most of the state’s population centers — as maps produced by the state Senate suggest.

The article goes on to quote an expert in Ohio, where a 1000-foot sex-offender residency law was enacted in 2003, as saying, “What’s going to happen is that communities are going to go so far [in enacting their own more restrictive variations] that the Supreme Court’s going to have no choice but to step in.”

Consult our Hot Topic page on Proposition 83 for more information, including to a link to a study from the Stanford Criminal Justice Center Sentencing and Corrections Policy Project that goes into detail about the limits that will be imposed on sex offenders by Proposition 83 — including misdemeanor sex offenders, not just those convicted of felonies.

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