8 November 5-11, 2026 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com NEW TIMES | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | tutional. Florida law bars offenders convicted of crimes against victims younger than 16 from living within 1,000 feet of a school, childcare facility, park, playground, and, as of this summer, public pools (including those at apartment complexes and condominiums). Public data shows Broward County alone has nearly 800 childcare facilities and close to 600 public and private schools. Add the county’s dozens of pools considered public under the new law, and mapping where sex offender registrants can legally live becomes a nearly impossible task — even for experts using mapping software. New Times’ visits to the Fort Lauderdale encampments also revealed another potential concern. Men living there said only about a dozen registrants typically spend the night at the sites, even though FDLE records list doz- ens more there.The discrepancy raises obvi- ous questions: Where are those registrants actually living? And do these laws intended to box in convicted sex offenders ironically make it harder for authorities to locate them, potentially putting the public at greater risk? While all the offenders New Times spoke to (whose names we have altered to protect their identities) freely admitted they’re on the registry, most, including Kenny, declined to discuss the crimes that put them there. After 10 p.m. on a Thursday, his camper was parked behind Fort Lauderdale’s Egg & You Diner alongside 10 other offenders living out of their cars. He had a well-paying job tinting windows for a major car dealership in South Florida before landing on the registry. Kenny still tints windows and could afford to rent an apartment or home — there’s just no avail- ability in the narrow slices of Broward and Miami-Dade counties open to him, he says. “It’s a really bad living situation for us,” he says. “For the first two days I was sleeping in the Walgreens parking lot across the street.” He’s on probation for another six years, so he is required, like many others on the regis- try, to wear an ankle monitor. Kenny is lucky enough to have a job that affords him a camper where he can charge his digital ankle monitor. Others less fortunate may post up at a McDonald’s to charge theirs. “I see such kind people going through so much pain,” Kenny says. “People can’t get a break for one issue. All crimes are bad, but they use this to call us monsters. We want to live normal lives, but people treat us like lep- ers.” The offenders who agreed to speak with New Times carried an air of resignation. The men say they feel powerless in their plight. Mark, a 54-year-old-man living out of his mom’s car until he can afford one, was watch- ing videos on his iPad when New Times ap- proached in the same encampment. “Most of the men pretty much keep to themselves, but everyone is really pretty nice to one another,” he says. “We’re all in the same boat.” Mark says he cannot live with his mother because her Palm Beach County home is about two blocks from a school, placing it within an area restricted under sex offender residency laws. Mark works at a tire shop in West Palm Beach and returns to the lot each night, where he must remain between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. He keeps his path of travel be- tween work, the encampment, and his mom’s house during the daylight hours when he’s al- lowed over there. “I’m lucky,” he says. “I have a job and some family support, but a lot of guys don’t. I would be out in the streets too if not for my mom helping me.” Parole officers, he says, don’t have maps of restricted areas to provide. The result is a haphazard system. Mark says about 12 men spend their nights at the encampment. Pub- licly available FDLE records, however, indi- cate 66 registrants should be there nightly. New Times stayed for an hour between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. and noted just 20 cars in the parking lot. New Times later visited the other major encampment under the 17th Street bridge in Fort Lauderdale, where even fewer registered residents appear nightly, according to men living there who agreed to speak about the is- sue. When New Times visited, five men and seven cars were in the parking lot encamp- ment. A man there said only about 10 men show up each night. Darren, 62, doesn’t have a car like some of his neighbors, so he sleeps on the ground in the parking lot, a stone’s throw from million-dollar yachts at the Hilton Marina. A Florida court convicted him of sending a lewd image of him- self to an undercover officer posing as a minor about a decade ago. He has struggled to find work or afford a car. Renting a place to live is “not even in the picture,” he tells New Times. He says he spends his days panhandling for money to eat and most of his nights “try- ing to stay out of the way.” His skin bears the signs of a white man who has spent years shuffling under the South Florida sun. His thin frame evidence of spending hours each day on his feet in search of sustenance. “I’m really just a normal guy who made one mistake,” he says. “I’ve been paying for it for years.” Registry mandates and residency restric- tions on sex offenders first appeared nation- wide in the 1990s and have gotten stricter since their enactment. They started with buf- fer zones around schools and churches. Over time they’ve expanded to include school bus stops in Broward County and, statewide, pub- lic pools. The purpose of the registry and its coin- ciding residency restrictions seem logical enough: Prevent future crimes by keeping people convicted of sex offenses against mi- nors from living near places where children congregate. But multiple studies indicate these resi- dency restrictions are counterproductive, in- cluding a 2005 study on male sex offenders in Florida and the effects of an early residency restriction law by internationally recognized Barry University researcher Jill Levenson. Such laws destabilize the lives of men who’ve been released from prison and may actually increase the risk of re-offending. The forensic psychologist Cynthia Calkins Mercado (along with Levenson) wrote as much in a 2008 pa- per focused on the impact of residency re- strictions on community reentry. To assess the modern efficacy of easy-to- pass residency restrictions, New Times spoke with University of Massachusetts Lowell criminology professor Kelly Socia; he helped push for law changes when New Times broke the story about sex offenders living under the Julia Tuttle Causeway in 2007. His research is cited in several other scientific papers writ- ten on the topic. He says only a couple of dozen experts in the U.S. research sex of- fender residency restriction policies. “Their restrictions were so onerous, com- bined with getting out of prison, they don’t necessarily have a lot of resources to find housing,” he says. “They basically had to live underneath the Julia Tuttle Causeway, and that was their registered address. That’s where they met their parole officers. That’s where they had to sleep at night.” After years of neglect and the addition of the pool restriction law, offenders have even fewer legal places to live in South Florida. They’ve been shunted back under bridges, into parking lots and onto the railroad tracks near Hialeah. Socia says the vast majority of men are never again arrested for a sexual offense. Well over 90% of sex offenses are committed by first-time offenders. “For the general population of people who are released with a sex-crime conviction, their chances of being re-arrested for another sex crime are actually quite low,” he says. “Es- pecially compared to public perceptions.” According to a 2010 survey from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs, 72% of 1,005 respondents said they believe at least half, if not most, con- victed sex offenders will commit additional sex crimes when released. In reality, Socia says, recidivism rates are somewhere be- tween 5% and 15%. Some might argue that low recidivism rates suggest the system is working as in- tended. Socia disagrees. Rather than prevent crimes against kids, they in fact marginalize “All crimes are bad, but they use this to call us monsters. We want to live normal lives, but people treat us like lepers.” “Like lepers” from p7 Photo by Kristin Bjornsen A parking lot beneath the 17th Street Bridge in Fort Lauderdale, where registered sex offenders are required to check in nightly.