Students are putting a lot of emphasis on the health and safety of their living environment these days. You have to try and eat organic, non-modified foods. You want to make sure that you’re not being poisoned by lead paint in your apartment or by pesticides in your water. And you want to keep the devil nicotine out of your body and the public air that you breathe.
While all these issues are fairly safe and easy to talk about, there is another concern in the neighborhoods where University students live that is so close to invisible that very few people even think to think about it. If we could have Donald Rumsfeld expound on it, he would describe it as one of those unknown-unknowns, which University students have to become aware of and thereby change into a known-known.
The fact is that there are registered violent sex offenders, who are not students themselves, living among some of Eugene’s most dense off-campus student populations. According to data analyzed by the InfoGraphics Laboratory in the University’s geography department, these populations can hold as many as two hundred registered University students per block.
Of course, one could argue that we have to strive to be an egalitarian society and that these violent felons should be absorbed back into society upon completion of prison terms because they have been rehabilitated and are ready to be productive, valuable, integrated members of the community. One could also argue that a violent sexual offender who is registered with the Oregon State Police and under supervision by a probation officer is much less of a threat than the violent sexual offender who is much more invisible and much more dangerous because he has not been indicted or convicted.
But neither of these side discussions begins to address the propriety or reasoning that underlies a decision to allow these individuals to live so intimately with the very population groups that they have targeted.
One registered violent sexual offender, who lives just one block from campus, is described by the Oregon State Police online sex offender inquiry system as targeting adolescent and adult females, and is further characterized as a “power rapist” who uses “grabbing, threatening to kill, forcing/coercion” as methods to attack his victims. The listing for this individual goes on to describe him, in all capital letters, as an “EXTREME HIGH RISK DANGEROUS SEXUALLY VIOLENT OFFENDER.” I think we all have to ask, again, why this individual is allowed to live in such proximity to such a concentration of the population group that he targets.
If the courts and the Oregon State Police view him as such a threat to these young women, why is he allowed to live within 300 feet of two sororities, not to mention that he is allowed to live somewhere that has direct line-of-sight into several windows of those same sororities?
Other registered violent sexual offenders living in the same neighborhood have targeted very young boys and girls in the past and they are restricted from contact with children or frequenting “places where minors are known to congregate,” yet there is a school for pre-school-through-eighth-grade children just 300 feet away, and again with direct line-of-sight from where these individuals live.
But these individuals do not live in these places because nobody is paying attention. According to an Oregon State Police official, all sex offenders under supervision by a parole officer have to have their living situation and location approved by their parole officer. And each parole officer will have to determine if it is appropriate for the offender to live across from a school, or next to a sorority because there are no general “distance” requirements for how far away from a restricted population an offender must live. Generally speaking, few people would want to have a violent sex offender as a neighbor, but the official bureaucratic stance seems to be that because these individuals have to live somewhere, they may as well live anywhere that pleases them the most.
This is unacceptable. Violent sexual felons should have to live according to strict restrictions placed upon their behavior. There should be places where they can and cannot physically be because they are deemed by the legal system as constituting a continued risk to the public, and especially the population group that each felon has targeted in the past. To allow these violent sexual offenders to live next door to those whom they pose the greatest risk is irresponsible and dangerous, and University district residents should question the wisdom and reasoning of the parole system that would allow such arrangements.
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