Tent camp of homeless sex offenders near Hialeah ‘has got to close,’ county says
Seven years after Miami-Dade County shut down a camp housing about 100 homeless sex offenders under a bridge in Miami, it’s now trying to deal with an encampment on the outskirts of Hialeah that has almost three times as many residents registered to live there.
Police and social workers on Monday night visited the roughly 30 tents set up near warehouses that sit by railroad tracks outside Hialeah’s city limits, the legally registered homes of more than 200 people convicted of sex offenses against minors and barred from living within 2,500 feet of schools, parks, daycare centers and other places where children congregate.
“This has got to close,” said Ronald Book, the powerful head of Miami-Dade’s homeless board who has also lobbied for the county’s tough residency restrictions on sex offenders. “The complaints have continued to grow and grow and grow.”
Book said about 270 offenders are registered as living in the tent village outside Hialeah, sitting on either side of the 3500 block of Northwest 71st Street. There is no electricity, running water or bathroom facilities, leading to complaints of human waste being tossed roadside and around the warehouses whose fences front the tents. Others use bathrooms at a Wal-Mart and a Walgreens about a mile away.
Claudia Marie Baker, 58, who said she spent nine years in prison on child-pornography charges, has lived in a tent there for about a year. “My sister has five different real estate people looking for places for me,” said Baker, who said she was convicted as a man, Gregory Baker. “Every place they picked, it was too close.”
The 2,500-foot restriction is far tougher than Florida’s 1,000-foot rule, but matches the limit for some local governments across the country, including Lake County near Orlando and Pasco County north of Tampa. In dense Miami-Dade, hemmed in by the Everglades and the Atlantic Ocean, the 2,500-foot rule eliminates wide swaths of Miami-Dade’s housing stock as an option. The county also bars sex offenders from homeless shelters where families are housed, making most of the tax-funded emergency housing off limits, too.
Miami-Dade adopted the 2,500 limit in 2010 after the Tuttle controversy, replacing a patchwork of city laws that generally had the same distance in their sex-offender restrictions.
Book, a prominent lobbyist, visited the camp with county homeless staff who take direction from him, and with daughter Lauren Book, a Democratic state senator who runs a nonprofit, Lauren’s Kids, dedicated to fighting child sexual abuse. The elder Book’s advocacy for the county’s sex-offender law — named after Lauren Book, a childhood abuse victim — landed him at the center of the Julia Tuttle controversy, with some tent residents naming the encampment Bookville.
The county shut down the Tuttle encampment in 2010, and Book said the homeless agency placed the more than 100 residents in private apartments and other residences outside of shelters and in compliance with the 2,500-foot limit. Monday’s deployment was designed to start a similar process, with the county offering to help with rental subsidies and placement to get the tent residents to move. The action followed a New Times story profiling the tent village in early August.
There have been other encampments in Miami since the Tuttle one closed, including one in Miami that lasted until 2012 when the city created a tiny park that triggered the 2,500-foot restriction. Book said any former Tuttle residents living in the Hialeah encampment would have lost a prior home, since Miami-Dade determined each registered Tuttle offender had found a place to live.
Miami-Dade’s restrictions on where sexual offenders live largely survived a suit by the American Civil Liberties Union in 2014, which was filed for anonymous plaintiffs that a lawyer said Monday were living in tents near Hialeah at the time. A federal judge rejected the bulk of the ACLU’s complaint that the local law constituted unfair punishment, but the nonprofit is appealing whether the county can enforce restrictions on offenders convicted before the law went into effect.
Jeff Hearne, a Miami lawyer working on the case, said the county rules create the problem that Miami-Dade spent Monday night trying to solve.
“It’s our position that forcing people into homelessness is punitive,” Hearne said.
Because probation rules require sex offenders to sleep at the addresses where they’re registered, he said, many tent residents could afford to live elsewhere if they were allowed to do so.
“Many of them have places they can go to,” he said. “They have family members who have homes that can keep them there. Many of them have rooms they rent to keep personal belongings. But at night, they’re forced to go out and sleep in tents.”
Well of course Ron Book wants it close down. Each day it remains, makes him look like the heartless b@$tard that he is. Guilt from being a bad absentee father, has led to this and it’s beyond shameful. And how discouraging it is, to those 270 people, and us also, that the ACLU can’t even win a lawsuit to try and help these people. That’s sad that our justice system is just that screwed up. Just further fuels the justification of those of us who just see no end in sight to our plight and why many of us are just so exasperated to the point of just not even want to try anymore, and unfortunately some of us, have totally given up and decided not to live anymore. Well, I can see why. God help us. So I have to ask, where in the world do they expect these people to live at next?……the Everglades?? There you go, pitch a tent right next to a gator or a giant python. That’ll do it.
The ACLU did win in the 11th Circuit.
The case is pending.
Hmm then the person that wrote that article needs to be made aware of that. It makes it sounds like the ACLU didn’t succeed in doing anything.
They can live in their homes, With their FAMILIES !! Where they Belong !!!. Atleast everyone would be accounted for !!. But allowing that to happen would be admitting that a EXOFFENDER is human !!. And nobody wants to do that !!!.
No one gives a crap about us until it starts to bother someone else. There is no proof that distance limits from anywhere has any effect on recidivism. It is all smoke and mirrors so the politicians can LOOK GOOD to the voters…Mine was a bad choice, but I get to live the rest of my life as a criminal because these bull-crap laws keep getting thrown back into my face,,,
I’m sharing this post for sure. “Enough is enough” means they came to a dead end on the road and the pressure from the community is mounting. It’s time to face the truth, I truly belief this is light at the end of the tunnel and it’s not a train.
Also, when those RSOs were moved to those Bookville apartments after the Causeway didn’t I hear something about after the media fervor died down many of them were forced to leave?
Yes – they displace them to homestead. Far away from their jobs (or any job opportunities), families and public transportation. As soon as the vouchers run out, they have to leave, back to the same situation. Eventually a new colony forms. Book gets sent in to break that one up.