An Associated Press article uses the town of Gilroy in southern Santa Clara County as a test case of the worries that rural areas of the state have about Proposition 83, which would essentially force most sex offenders to look for places to live that have less political clout than cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, which are able to close off most of their land area to sex offenders because of the large number of schools and parks within their boundaries. Some of the concerns of Gilroy and other rural communities about Proposition 83 include a relative lack of social services resources for sex offenders and the risk that law enforcement resources will be stretched thin by a mandate to track and monitor a notoriously difficult-to-track population.

According to a draft report obtained by the Associated Press from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s Division of Adult Parole Operations, Proposition 83, if it passes, will require the relocation of 2400 sex offenders in Los Angeles County alone. A recent Los Angeles Times article summarized Iowa’s experience with a similar law that was passed in 2002 and upheld by the state supreme court in 2005. Since that law went into effect, and since the greater Des Moines area passed ordinances that are even more restirictive than the state law, 98% of the greater Des Moines area is off-limits to residency for sex offenders.

It’s worth noting that the Desert Sun, a newspaper that serves Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley, where a lot of sex offenders could theoretically be compelled to move, supports Proposition 83 in an editorial published today. Similarly, the Napa Valley Register recommended a “yes” vote on October 17, saying that any misgivings about the measure are “overshadowed by the damage done by those who commit felony sexual offenses.”

On the other hand, the Merced Sun-Star on October 25 recommended a “no” vote, editorializing that:

In other states, [laws like Proposition 83] have backfired, pushing sex offenders into sparsely populated rural and suburban neighborhoods where law enforcement is thin and where counseling, psychiatric and other social services that many mentally disordered offenders need are in short supply or nonexistent. The same is likely to happen in California.

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.