The Cocoon

My DH is out of the house this evening, attending a community meeting hosted by our local sheriff's department. Normally we would not be interested in meetings like these, but as it happens, our general area is going to be host to a registered sex offender, starting tomorrow.

Frankly, we've had a lot of responses to this since the notification first went out a few weeks ago. The immediate response is, of course, fear. You receive a notice in the mail (or, in our case, by email from a neighbor) and it has a number attached to this person, this man who is a known threat to society and who for reasons unfathomable to you is being released from the prison where he has been safely kept for the past thirteen years. The second response is, what can I do about it? We investigated the numbering system--what does that number mean? What are the details of the (multiple) cases that were successfully prosecuted against this man? Why is he rated likely to reoffend?

This has thrown a lot of comfortable assumptions into clear relief. Because we live in a rural area, it is very easy to think it is safer than other areas because it's relatively isolated, it's quiet. Our neighbors are nice people, so surely the people on the streets around us must be nice too. This is a very comfortable way of thinking, but it's not very accurate--and really we don't think that way all the time. Both DH & I have checked the map for known addresses of sex offenders (and we do so on occasion to update our sense of where they are) and up to this point they have all been more than 3 miles away, in distinct neighborhoods that are not our neighborhood. Now, however, we will have a convicted rapist living a mile away. A convicted rapist, I might add, who would have been a lifer in jail under the "3 strikes & you're out" law, but for the mistake of an officer testifying at his last trial, who let slip that he had a prior conviction. That was the grounds by which the appeal process reduced his sentence and made him eligible for parole.

It's quite easy to think that because we are reasonably rural, we couldn't be a target for crime. We have been in the habit of leaving our tool shed unlocked. We have a second shed that's not locked. It doesn't matter that it's not used, it's a place that someone could use to hide, or scope out our house & habits. That has changed. We have padlocks now, and we use them. We also did not have any sort of 'early warning system', aka a dog. That is changing as of tomorrow at 10 am. We will be the proud owners of a labrador retriever puppy, redeemed from our local humane society. We will have the irritating agony fun of house training the dog, and training her to leave our parrot alone. However, we will have a (not for long) small ball of furry energy to play with our kids, and to bark enthusiastically when someone shows up at our house or in our yard. As she gets bigger, hopefully she will also serve as a deterrent. We have alarms on our windows and doors, and we use them. We may get a gun (with the proper safety training and precautions since we have kids).

It helps to know that all of his victims have been adult women, his own age, whom he met that day in a bar or restaurant, or was already acquainted with. He has no history of burglary or enticing his victims in any way. He will be living with a family member and the department of corrections officer stated that his guardians are very interested in ensuring that he toes the line of all his parole conditions. He is not permitted in any bar or restaurant that serves alcohol, nor on any private roads. He has boundary conditions on how far he may travel from his home, and a curfew at night. He has obtained a job working with his family members through their business (which we will not be patronizing). The corrections officer at the community meeting emphasized that he has served his sentence and is legally a free man, subject to his parole conditions for 24 months.

At the end of the day, I think the corrections officer really hit the nail on the head for us. He said, "If learning that a registered sex offender is moving into your neighborhood makes you change the way you are living in your house, then you probably weren't living safe enough to begin with." Yup. And we are rectifying that right now. It isn't good enough to rely on comfortable thoughts of quiet and rural addresses. Nor is it enough, frankly, to rely on the goodness of one's neighbors. I hope that by cultivating safer habits and more awareness, we can still enjoy the substantial benefits of our neighborhood without fearing for our family when we're outside. Honestly we probably have more to worry about with a dog that a neighbor is dogsitting, who has gotten loose and charged at children, and bitten a neighbor. That is more real and present danger. But I am exceedingly grateful that God has ripped open our little cocoon in a very gentle way.