...Oh Dear Gods...

I stumbled onto this blog by accident while looking for a lawyer joke. The 'suck' of this situation is overwhelming, and that's no joke at all.

Having lived in the town of Bremerton, WA., for several years, I have some experience with the sex offender dynamic- Over the past two decades, other municipalities moved their 'undesirables' to Bremerton in ever increasing numbers. Level ones and twos were very common, and level threes frighteningly plentiful as well; and this was without a facility to house them. They were just paroled here because we (meaning the other cities like Seattle and Tacoma, or even Spokane and Yakima on the other end of the state,) didn't have enough jails and halfway houses to hold them all anymore.

Recidivism has been an all-too-frequent occurrence in this area, as one might expect. (Google 'Bremerton' and 'CPS' and 'Sex Offenders' if you want to cry yourself to sleep sometime.)

And yet, because we don't have that 'facility NIMBY-nimbus' hanging over us, our real estate prices remain higher than average for the state. -Call it "Trickle Down Theory," if you like. They trickle down,
through the cracks, and no one notices until something horrible and lurid shows up on the news.

Sure, sometimes when a particularly heinous scoundrel is 'situated' into the community, the sheriff notifies the immediate neighbors. If any of them have kids, then there's folks yelling down in the gov't building, and that makes it into the local paper, but it stops there. And our real estate agents here could be Ringling Bros. pros, the way they contort around disclosing S.O. status in their clients' neighborhoods.

I hope you folks fare better than us. Take heart in the fact that your monster has one head; or at most, a handful. One facility is easier to confront than a whole badly broken system, but we're still trying.

Good luck!

-Stuart Dempster, (late of Bremerton, but now elsewhere, thank
goodness.)