In
the annals of public relations by a government office, the case of Allison
Taylor may be a cautionary one in public policy schools for years to come. Let’s think of the worst thing you could do
as a government agency to make people mad.
I’m not talking about the government deciding to rustle up 500 cows from
a rancher who owed the BLM $1 million for grazing fees he abjectly refused to
pay (here’s looking at you Cliven Bundy – pay your grazing fees and shut
up).
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| Home were 24 violent sex offenders were sent to live |
No,
how about this: you run the state agency
in charge of supervising high-risk sex offenders after they finish serving
their prison sentences, and you decide to house two dozen of them in a house in a residential neighborhood, and not
tell anyone.
According
to the Houston Chronicle: Taylor had overseen the “Office of Violent Sex Offender
Management that oversees the residential programs for about 350 sex offenders
kept in state custody because of the severity of their crimes” since about
2003. These are people that a fair
percentage of Texans would just as well like to see shot on sight.
Taylor’s
downfall started when she decided to move 24 of these high risk offenders out
of a half-way house in Pasadena, Texas (an industrial Houston suburb) to the
Acres Homes neighborhood in north Houston (an area with plenty of kids) without
any notice to residents or area lawmakers.
When the neighbors found out about it, there was immediate uproar. It also came out that Taylor’s office had
decided to build a prison camp-like center in rural Liberty County (just
northeast of Houston) to house 50 to 100 offenders without any notice to local officials. Reaction to that was swift as well.
In
some respect, I understand whatever frustration she had in her job. It’s the ultimate NIMBY. No one wants these
guys in their neighborhood, at all.
There is nowhere in the state where there is not someone who will
protest that a violent sex offender is going to be housed. But putting 24 in a residential neighborhood
was too much. Maybe she feared for the
lives of the former convicts. Maybe she
was just fed up with trying to do her job and not having anywhere for the
violent sex offender ex-convicts to live.
Either way, plunking them down in populated areas was either going to
get her fired, or them shot, or both.
She got fired from her job and took a different one with the state. To date, no news about any of the sex-offenders
having been shot by the local population.
It’s
a hard question, though. Where do you house violent sex offenders when they get
out of jail. The guys in north Houston are in “civil confinement” a program
that supposedly is intended to transition offenders out of confinement once they complete rehabilitation, but no one ever has in 15 years.
(See Chronicle story). In Florida, there is a community on the edge
of the Everglades where they live, away from everyone else, called Miracle
Village. (see story here).
In Texas, there’s got to be a place far away
from everyone else, where no one will complain.
At that point, though, they’d literally be in the middle of nowhere.
There’s no miracle village in north Houston.
There doesn’t appear to be one on the make in Liberty County. For now, in Texas, no one wants to live next
to the hundreds of violent sex offenders who’ve been let out of prison. I don’t blame them. I don’t either.
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