Sex Offender Residency and Spatial Equity

Abstract

Recent legislation at the local, state and federal levels has mandated spatial restriction zones around sensitive facilities, such as schools, daycares and public parks, to minimize the exposure children have to convicted sex offenders. A potential byproduct of this legislation is the clustering of offenders in certain areas outside restriction zones. Accordingly, efforts are now being directed toward ensuring an equitable spatial distribution of exposure to convicted sex offenders. In particular, laws are being enacted or resurrected to thwart such clusters. The question addressed in this paper is what approaches can be used to assist planners and public officials in the further development of policy for mitigating community impacts associated with the spatial distribution of sex offender residences. We review and develop methodologies for use in assessing and managing residential impacts. Application results suggest that these modeling approaches can provide insight for policy development useful to local and regional governments.

Efficient identification of geographic restriction conditions in anti-covering location models using GIS

“…Grubesic and Murray (2008) evaluate residency impacts of legislation oriented at convicted sex offenders. In particular, such laws aim to limit where offenders can live in relation to minors, and seek to ensure that inequitable concentrations of offenders in any local area do not result.…”

“…Thus, communities are enacting laws the prohibit offenders from living within some pre-specified distance of each other. A typical standard is a quarter of a mile, or 1,320 ft. Grubesic and Murray (2008) use the ACLP to assess the maximum number of offenders a community should or could have, given housing conditions and other legislative mandates.…”

“…mization problems are commonly referred to as anti-covering or node packing models, and have been essential in supporting forest management, nature reserve design, telecommunications equipment siting, defense, water conservation, social service provision, zoning policy development, franchise outlet location, cartographic design, and a range of other planning contexts (see Moon and Chaudhry 1984;Murray 1999;Goycoolea et al 2005;Downs et al 2008;Grubesic and Murray 2008). Further, they are related to minimum separation and dispersion models (see Erkut et al 1996;Church and Murray 2008).…”

The disruptive anti-covering location problem

“…For example, policy makers may expect a greater number of retailers in the marketplace and thus greater market penetration and sales from licensed retailers. As another example, Grubesic and Murray (2008) use the ACLP to estimate how many sex offender residences can be located in a town, when each residence needs to be at least a minimum distance apart from each other as well as sensitive places like schools and parks. Whereas the ACLP can be used to solve for an "optimistic case," the DACLP can be used to solve for the "pessimistic case", if the objective is to locate as many individual residences as possible.…”

“…This model can be useful in a ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT A C C E P T E D M A N U S C R I P T number of possible applications. For example, the anti-cover location problem has been used by Grubesic and Murray (2008) to test possible policies on sex offender residential location. They used the ACLP to identify how many sex offenders could take up residence in a city when each offender had to live at least a given distance apart from all other sex offenders as well as from all public places where children are likely to be present (e.g.…”