07/24/2011
By Scott Cooper Williams
Some officials call for Green Bay residency ordinance to be reviewed
Wisconsin taxpayers have paid nearly $100,000 in the past year for county jails to house convicted sex offenders whose prison sentences have ended but for whom no other housing option exists.
That figure includes the cost of hiring private chaperones to escort offenders on housing searches, often in communities with tough restrictions on where offenders can live.
Green Bay's restrictions, for example, have contributed to the $56,000 the state spent on sex offenders at the Brown County Jail. That's by far the most spent in any county by the state Department of Corrections to manage homeless sex offenders.
The state also has paid for similar arrangements in other counties.
The unintended fallout from state registration of sex offenders is prompting some Green Bay officials to rethink a local ordinance that makes it nearly impossible for offenders to move into the community without approval from a city review board.
Green Bay ordinance
Green Bay Police Chief Jim Arts said 30 offenders are living "underground," which means they have given up on finding approved housing and no longer are reporting their whereabouts to police, as required.
"I just don't think this ordinance is doing what it intended," Arts said. "You could make a very strong argument that we're less safe."
When the Green Bay Sex Offender Residence Board denies an offender's application to live in the city, that offender sometimes faces the prospect of being sent to the county jail until another housing opportunity turns up.
[name withheld], who served 10 years in prison for molesting children, spent another eight months — after completing his sentence — in the Brown County Jail before he found an apartment this summer in Bellevue.
At a rate of $28 a day paid to Brown County by the Department of Corrections, [name withheld]'s extended jail stay cost state taxpayers more than $6,700. Paying a chaperone $17 an hour to escort [name withheld] outside the jail for four hours each weekday cost taxpayers another $10,000.
[name withheld], 36, a Green Bay native, said he objected frequently to being held in the jail and being "baby-sat" whenever he was allowed to go look for an apartment or a job.
"That was mind-blowing to me," he said. "I was stressed. I was frustrated."
State officials said the rules and procedures for running the state's sex offender registration program allow them to house offenders in county jails when no other option is available.
The state spent $60,000 on county jail housing, and $39,588 on chaperones for sex offenders statewide between June 2010 and June 2011, according to state corrections documents obtained by the Green Bay Press-Gazette.
In Brown County, the costs were $20,247 for housing and $36,260 for chaperones during that period.
Officials said they could not produce data for previous years because the records are not maintained in a central location.
Generally, no more than one or two such offenders are inside the jail at a time, and none are there now, Brown County Jail administrator Larry Malcomson said. The county agrees to the extended housing arrangement and chaperoned releases as a way of helping state officials manage their sex offender monitoring duties, he said.
"It's different — I'll give you that," he said. "But their hands are tied, with all the restrictions."
Lance Wiersma, director of sex offender programs for the corrections department, said the funding comes from his department's estimated $1 billion-a-year budget. It's a worthwhile investment that protects the public by assuring that offenders are monitored.
Wiersma acknowledged that offenders often are unhappy about being detained in a jail after completing their time in prison.
"It's not a comfortable situation, I don't think, for anybody involved," he said. "Sex offender management in the community is a very difficult thing. Our staff faces many challenges."
Into the community
State law generally requires that offenders be released back into the county where their crime occurred.
In Green Bay, the state operates a transitional living facility where up to 15 offenders live temporarily after getting out of prison. The former motel has operated since 1994 and has been called a model for local sex offender management.
Concerned that too many offenders were congregating in the city, however, Green Bay aldermen in 2007 passed an ordinance prohibiting offenders from living within 2,000 feet of any school, park or other place where children gather.
That covers virtually the entire city — including the Shawano Avenue facility — and it has prompted neighboring communities to impose their own restrictions against sex offenders.
As part of the ordinance, Green Bay's Sex Offender Residence Board was established to hear appeals and to decide which offenders get permission to live in the city.
At a July 13 meeting of the board, Chairman Dean Gerondale said he was considering proposing that his board relinquish authority over who lives in the state's transitional living facility. Noting that board denial sometimes lands an offender in the county jail, Gerondale said: "That's costing the taxpayer a heck of a lot more money."
Arts met with board members at the same meeting and agreed that Green Bay's 4-year-old ordinance should be reviewed.
"I think it's worth opening up again," he said.
