Voice of Reason found the way to my mailbox this morning with an update on the Julia Tuttle Causeway.
Here's a bit of the story. Be certain to visit VOR's blog (here) to read each story in entirety.
As reported by the BBC...
FL- Miami's tent city for sex offenders
A Miami law is forcing many of the city's sex offenders to sleep rough under a bridge, reports Emilio San Pedro for the BBC's Americana programme.
The area under the Julia Tuttle Causeway in downtown Miami has in recent years become the unlikely home for a growing community of about 70 convicted sex offenders.
(...)
"Welcome to American justice," said Dr Pedro Jose Greer, the Dean of Florida International University's Department of Humanities, Health and Society, as he met me under the bridge to discuss the squalid conditions at the camp.
"We have people living together with mental and physical illnesses in an environment where people can't possibly sleep because of the cars going by overhead - where you can smell the urine and see the trash mounting all around us."
Dr Greer has for decades been a leading advocate in Miami for homeless people and their right to receive adequate medical and social services.
He told me that he has become increasingly angry over the last few years at the existence of this camp and the lack of an alternative way to reintegrate these convicted sex offenders into society.
"What we're doing is we're saying 'let's take the people that we most despise, that did some of the most egregious things in society and let them all get together and not supervise them and let them wander around the community'," he tells me with a clear sense of frustration in his voice.
"This is the stupidest damn law I have ever seen and it's purely mandated by revenge without any consideration for the well-being of these people - who deserve better despite the severity of their crimes," he says.
The problem for people like Julio is that the serious nature of the crimes they committed makes it very difficult for them to get much sympathy from the local community or from local politicians - who for the most part have found the issue too sensitive and downright controversial to become involved.
However, earlier this month, one City of Miami commissioner, Marc Sarnoff, did just that.
With the backing of the city government, he wrote a letter to the state governor, Charlie Crist, asking him to shut the camp down.
He based that request on the fact that there is a small island that serves as a weekend park for boaters and their children that lies within the existing local boundaries.
I met Mr Sarnoff on a sunny morning at a local park, where some boys were playing baseball with their coach.
He told me that his top priority remained protecting these children from sex offenders like the ones who lived at the camp.
"Let me be absolutely clear. I'm not here to support or endorse anything with regard to sexual offenders. They are my least bit of concern," he tells me. "However, they are living in squalor. I don't think human beings will stay in that condition. They're going to start leaving and what we thought was a good law of 2,500 ft to keep them away from our children will eventually push them back into the population."
Mr Sarnoff hopes that the letter to Governor Crist will force the state either to find some alternative place to house the sex offenders or force some form of legal action that will get the state's courts, which are not beholden to the desires of the electorate, involved.
For the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and others like Dr Greer - who believe the offenders have already served their time in prison and deserve the right to attempt to get on with their lives - the camp's existence and the desperate conditions there serve as a troubling reflection of the values of modern-day Miami.
"The question is - have we become a society that doesn't let you die but lets you suffer? Do we just say we're living in the Middle Ages - an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth?" Dr Greer told me after we had finished touring the camp.
"I think we've gone beyond that."
Read what a Miami dad has to say here. (You might be surprised).
Be certain to take a few minutes to listen to the 2/16/2009 BBC broadcast where "Matt Frei looks at different responses to America's prison crisis."
