Please note that the following section discusses sexual violence. Take care while reading.
We often are forced to waitlist promising prospective residents due to our housing capacity. Yvie* was one of our waitlisted clients, for whom a spot didn’t open up until it was too late.
Yvie* was released from prison to a faith-based residential program. She was unable to return to her family because it would not meet the parole requirements.
Upon learning of her registry status, the associated Church and its membership decided they were no longer able to house Yvie and told her she had to leave.
That’s when her mom called us for help.
Over the next few months, we corresponded with Yvie’s mother, trying to find Yvie other housing options while she remained on our waitlist.
The rush was urgent. A requirement of people on the registry is that they maintain a physical address that they can report to probation. However, they cannot reside in a federally-funded housing or domestic violence shelter.
So if you are housing insecure or unable to maintain an address that meets the distancing requirements from parks, playgrounds, daycares, and schools, you will get a probation violation and you can go back to jail or prison.
Despite our best efforts, we were unable to find Yvie housing and lost contact. When a spot opened up, we contacted her mother again, only to learn that she was in jail due to failure to report an address.
We quickly communicated with her public defender last November and were fully prepared to accept her into our residency at her court date. However, parole declined to release her and sent her back to prison, where, as best as we can tell, she won’t be released until July 2024.
Benevolence Farm will hold a spot for her until she is released, but we are incredibly frustrated with a registry that punishes people who can’t meet the impossible standards set by probation and parole.
Yvie’s story is horrifically typical of people on the sex offender registry. As an organization that accepts people of all record types, including the registry, we see firsthand how this policy fails to keep our communities safe.
Due to the stigma around sex crimes, advocacy involving the sex offender registry is emotional and challenging. We want to lean into those hard conversations here at the Farm and find a way that centers the needs of survivors and holds people accountable, without this level of unnecessary punishment by the state and our communities. More unhoused people unable to have their needs met does not make our neighborhoods a safer place.
We also recognize the reality that many people on the registry are survivors of sexual violence themselves, particularly women.
It is our hope that, by sharing Yvie’s story and others like hers, we can shed a bit of light on this complicated matter and create a space for more productive conversation on how we address sexual violence in our community.
If you’d like to learn more about the sex offender registry, check out the first season of American Public Media’s In the Dark here: https://features.apmreports.org/in-the-dark/
You can also learn about Shauna’s experience on the sex offender registry as a mother thanks to The Marshall Project: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/09/17/shawna-a-life-on-the-sex-offender-registry
*Names have been changed to protect privacy.