Chapter 25: The Hard Reality of Sex Offender Probation
This is part of a series. For more please go to the Table of Contents.
I had been told a few days ahead of my release from prison that I’d be going out very early in the morning. The reason given was that they had to get me to the bus station in time for the only daily bus going to my home town of Reevestown. I protested, “But my family is coming to pick me up — you don’t have to take me to the bus station.”
“Well that’s when your being released either way,” said my release officer. “If your family doesn’t show up by 9:00, you’re going to the bus station.” I suppose lots of inmates insist that their families coming for them, but the promised families often fail to show.
The night before, my dorm offer told me to make sure I was packed and ready to go. I really didn’t have much stuff left because I’d given most of it to Rick (Book 1, Ch. 19, subheading Saying goodbye). The officer came back right after they turned the lights on at 5:00 AM and said, “Are you packed?” (Yes) “Then take it with you to breakfast — you’ll be going straight out from there. You’re not coming back here.” Fine with me!
Sure enough, when I got to the chow hall (Sunday breakfast was grits, freeze-dried potato slices & fake scrambled eggs) the officer on duty told me, “When you’re done eating, sit over in the corner and wait. You’ll be called to the front office from here.” Which is exactly what happened — after about an hour. Following that, the release process took about another hour and a half, by which time my two brothers and sister were there to receive me and give me big hugs on my way out of the gate!
As it happened, my sister only planned to greet me, hug me and then get on a plane to go home, so one of our first stops was to drop her off at the Dolphin City Regional Airport. Still, it was very nice of her to come all that way just to pick me up from prison! From there we had to head straight to Reevestown because it turned out my probation officer was to meet me at the Greyhound bus station at 5:00 PM that same day to fit me with the ankle bracelet that is one of the badges of shame for all sex offenders on probation in my state. However, we stopped for lunch at a southern barbecue restaurant — my first meal out of prison!
From the bus station my brothers took me to pick up my suitcase at my storage room — the same suitcase I had dropped off there 20 1/2 months earlier on the morning I went to prison (Book 1, Ch.1, subheading Final Hours of Freedom) which had everything I needed for the first few days. Then it was on to the timeshare unit which my ex-wife had arranged for me for my first 10 days (Book 1, Ch. 22, subheading Light at the end of the tunnel), and which my new probation officer “temporarily approved” as meeting all of my state’s very harsh but not at all unusual sex offender distance and separation residency requirements from schools, parks, playgrounds, child care centers, etc. etc. I wasn’t going to be able to live at any of my own properties because none of them met those very harsh standards, but I was hoping to use those 10 days to work with my property manager to find a permanent place that did meet the standards. That turned out to be a vain hope — she informed me that her agency would never approve a sex offender at any of their rentals, no matter that she knew me personally.
Meanwhile my first full day of freedom was filled with other must do items including registering with the local sheriff’s department and updating my driver’s license as a sex offender using, of course, the address and unit number of the timeshare as my new legal address. I also had to register my car which my brother had brought back to me. I had given it to him before going to prison. Although that took hours — as any trip to the local DMV does — the good news was that contrary to the horror stories I’d heard from other inmates, my driver’s license really wasn’t emblazoned with the words SEX OFFENDER in big block letters. It did, however, have the state statute number of my offense in itty bitty letters down in the corner where the average person would never notice it but a cop would. I also received a very ordinary un-coded license plate. Wrong again, Inmate.com prison gossip!
Not just NO, but GO TO HELL!!
Then in the morning of my second full day out, as I was standing in a very long line outside the local Social Security office in my first (unsuccessful) attempt to reinstate my Social Security payments, my probation officer called me with the terrifying news that my timeshare unit had been disallowed as a residence — because there was a playground in the complex! Not only would I NOT be allowed to stay there during my nightly 10 pm to 6 am curfew, but I had to locate, secure and get another residence approved by the probation office that very day so I’d have someplace to “reside” that night! How could I possibly do that?!
This is when I was introduced to the sleazy, unscrupulous, predatory world of sex offender ghetto housing. My probation officer told me, “Well, we have a list of approved rooming houses and apartment complexes that meet the state’s standards and where the owners rent to sex offenders. I’ll be happy to read that list to you over the phone so you can get started making phone calls. You have to have something arranged by the time I get off work at 5:00 today.”
Holy shit! I immediately got out of the Social Security line and started calling everything on the list. This is what I found:
The advent of harsh distance and separation requirements for sex offender residency in my state — and in most other states in our great country — has created a predatory industry of sleazy landlords who specialize in finding cheap, run-down dumps that meet these harsh requirements in crappy neighborhoods where the neighbors are unlikely to complain, then converting them into rooming houses and packing them full of sex offenders who are forced to pay unconscionable rents to live in a dump. Neighborhoods where these cheap dumps can be acquired soon become sex offender ghettos. All these sex offender ghettos were on Reevestown’s west side, at least 5–10 miles out of town, in areas well known to be crappy neighborhoods.
For example, one of the phone numbers I called led to a lady who owned a small apartment building on a dirt road in a rural ghetto which she had packed with over 150 sex offenders! Another number was for a man who ran an old run-down trailer park which he had similarly packed full — but unfortunately he had no vacancy! The going rental rate for these dumps, per sex offender, was $150 per week ($650 per month, since the average month has 4 1/3 weeks and there were no “monthly rent discounts”), plus you had to pay first, last & $200 security deposit just to get in.
One of the guys I called turned out not to be a landlord at all, but rather a “rental agent” — a fellow sex offender who had found a niche wherein he had gotten to know all the sleazy sex offender landlords in town, knew who had vacancy, and promised to tell you what choices were out there today and get you in to the dump of your choice and all nicely approved by your probation officer by 5:00 pm. For this he charged a $200 non-refundable “finder’s fee.” If you have never found yourself in this kind of housing predicament it may sound completely ridiculous to you, but I told him if he could get me in someplace that was closer to town and at least as good as any of the other places on the probation officer’s list I’d cheerfully pay. And he delivered on his promise — by 5 pm I had an approved new address.
The Dump
So … what was my new “residence” like? The good news was that it was neither an apartment complex nor a trailer park — it was a house that my new landlord “J.D.” was still in the process of butchering into a rooming house. Originally built in the 1940’s as a small 3 bedroom 1 bath home, the carport had long ago been converted into a 4th bedroom and second bath. By the time J.D., a sleazy realtor and investor, got his grubby hands on it the previous May, he had a fairly run-down but habitable 4/2 in a lousy neighborhood for which he paid about $60,000.
J.D. claimed he’d gotten a mortgage on this house, so let’s say he financed $50K and his monthly PITI payment was $400. He could have been satisfied to pack 4 sex offenders in there, 3 paying $650/month and the one in the “carport master suite” paying more — $750 — because it had its own bathroom, kitchenette & private entrance. That’s $2700/month, or $2300 net. (All these sex offender dumps are rented with “utilities included”).
Or he could have taken the “easy road” to packing more guys in there, by first enclosing the living room and then cutting the “old master” in two bedrooms (both of which he was in fact doing). This easy road would have packed in 6 sex offenders yet still retained the “carport master” at the higher price, so now you’re talking about $4000/month, or $3600 net — a total sleazy cash cow with about 2 weeks worth of framing work and minimal modifications to the electrical & AC/heating systems. If you later decided to sell this dump the bedroom enclosures could be undone in nothing flat and you’d still have a house to sell.
But no, J.D. was much too greedy for either of these two options. He couldn’t live without gutting out the entire inside of the original house — everything including the kitchen, leaving only the original bathroom in place — and turning that area into 8 little 8x8 rooms (none of which BTW had closets) and turning the “carport master” into a kitchen for the entire house. $650 x 8 = $5200/month, net $4800, BUT to get to this level of real estate debauchery required not just re-framing the entire inside of the house and moving the kitchen, but also completely re-wiring the whole place and reconfiguring the AC/heating system (which didn’t work anyway) based on the new floor plan. Oh — and if he later decided to sell this butcher job it was way too much work to be undone, so he’d be selling either a sex offender dump or a tear-down.
It goes without saying that this amount of butchery is an expensive and time-consuming exercise that Brown County would never give you permits for, so all this work was being done on the sly and wasn’t nearly complete by October when the sex offender rental agent called J.D. to say he had a truly desperate pervert fresh out of prison that needed someplace today. Of course by that time J.D.’s little project was bleeding red ink, so he was more than happy to accommodate me in one of his half-built 8x8 rooms while work continued in fits & starts elsewhere in the house. The good news for me was that for the first couple of weeks I had the entire place to myself — I had no roommates and really, the only time I was required to be there was during my nightly 10 pm — 6 am curfew. Each morning I got up, ate breakfast (the only meal I ever ate there) and commuted to my life 8–12 miles away in Reevestown.
The bad news was that I had to go the very next morning to re-register at the sheriff’s office and update my driver’s license at the DMV with my new address — just two days after the last time I’d done that — which again took most of the day and meant that I could not do any of the other “must do immediately” items on my list.
The Other “Must Do Immediately” Items …
Meanwhile I had, as they say, “a whole lotta shit to do,” and it all had to be done immediately. First was to get back in that long line at the Social Security office to get myself re-instated. This turned out to be pretty easy, except that (a) you do not get Social Security for any month of which you have spent part incarcerated, so October was shot, and (b) if you know anything about Social Security you know that they pay for the previous month, meaning that I wasn’t going to get my first (November) check until the 3rd week of December! Merry Christmas!
While I was at the Social Security office I also set up Medicare — I had just turned 65 — happy birthday!) — which turned out to have been mostly done automatically about a month before my birthday. The more humiliating part of my health care arrangements was having to go to my former employer’s Employee Benefits office and set up United Health Care as my secondary insurance. They smiled and were helpful but I found out that behind my back the gossip about me was flying all around the building the whole time.
What was I gonna live on for those first two months?! Fortunately it turned out I had $1300 in my checking account, but that was already gone — flushed down the toilet of first, last, security & finder’s fee for the Dump, and other must-pay-immediately items like my first quarterly Medicare premium. Luckily there were two places I could go to get some quick cash, as loathe as I was to go to either of them. First was to my property management account, where a truly pitiful amount of “net rental income” had been accumulating during my 20 1/2 months in prison. I really didn’t want to touch that because one of my plans for my probation was to get all my rental properties fixed up and that’s what I wanted to spend that account money on — nevertheless I was desperate and took out $1000.
The second source of money was my retirement account. I didn’t want to raid that either but I called my financial advisor and told him I needed $1000. Also, since my ex-wife was still insisting that she “never wanted” the monthly retirement pay-outs I had set up for her before going to prison (see Book 1, Chapter 1, subheading Getting my life in order and Chapter 24). I told my financial advisor I could sure use that money too. That was going to require some paperwork so we agreed to meet and set that up. The first payment coming to me would be in November, and hopefully all these short-term fixes would hold me over until December, when between Social Security and my retirement my monthly income would be about $2800/month — enough for one person living in a dumpy rooming house.
I also applied for SNAP. In my very conservative deep south state they don’t make that easy, and I was surprised at how complicated the application form was. They also don’t just hand you the SNAP debit card then and there either — you have to submit the application, come back a week later for a telephone interview, then wait for them to decide whether or not to approve you. Suppose you are totally broke & starving — what would you do in the meantime? Nevertheless in about two weeks I got my debit card in the mail activated with $192/month for October & November. After that my monthly income would exceed $1350/month and they’d cut me off, but hey — $384 is $384!
I was fortunate to have one of my brothers with me as I did all this and subsequent running around. My oldest brother had to leave after a few days but my other brother — the one who’d written and visited me the whole time I was in prison — stayed with me for a week and a half to help me get started. It was a big help and a great comfort.
The next must-do-immediately item was to get cell phone service set up. For the first few days out of prison I was able to use my brother’s cell phone but as you can imagine that got old real fast for both of us. I was not allowed to have a phone plan with internet access which meant there was no reason for me to get a smart phone, so I just got the cheapest flip-phone service I could get which was unlimited nationwide calls & texts for $25+tax if you set up auto-pay (which I did).
Next stop was my accountant, who I learned had not yet gotten around to filing my previous year’s tax return (remember, it was October now) which I needed copies of for such things as Social Security, Medicare & SNAP applications to substantiate my lack of income while in prison. Fortunately once I was breathing down his neck he got motivated, had it ready for my signature in a few days and e-filed it. I was due a substantial refund which I could’ve sure used right about then but wouldn’t arrive for about 3–4 weeks …
Then there were the “not necessarily must do immediately but I really wanted to do as soon as I could get to them” items. Setting up appointments to see my primary care doctor (my health was good), dentist (after 2 years of no dental care at all I had only one cavity but it was under one of my caps so I got scheduled for a cap replacement), eye exam (“Sorry! Next available appointment isn’t for a month & a half!”) and yes, dermatologist. Remember back in Book 1, Chapter 20, subheading Doctor Pinhead how I fumed over the SSRC prison doctor’s refusal to treat my actinic keratosis or even renew my “no sun exposure” pass? Well now I had a chance to go to my real dermatologist and have Medicare & United Health Care pay for it.
Why did it take 2 whole days for me to think of this?
I could’ve kicked myself! It took me two whole days to realize that the answer to my sex offender housing problems was to BUY my own cheap but habitable house that met all of my state’s extremely harsh but not unusual distance & separation requirements, get it all nicely approved by my probation officer (prior to even making an offer, of course) and go into the sex offender roommating business myself! Except that I told myself I wouldn’t be greedy & sleazy like my landlord J.D. — I’d only bring in 2–3 roommates, everybody would live very comfortably in a house and neighborhood I wouldn’t mind living in, closer to town and my life. I’d undercut the competition’s rents and I’d still make a profit. I’d bought & sold property before — why couldn’t I do it again?
There are, of course, a few hurdles to jump over on your way to buying a house — little things like, oh, you have to have good credit and be able to verify your income so you can qualify for a loan. In my present situation those seemed like real problems! Had being in prison flushed my credit rating down the toilet? My accountant assured me that no, all the credit agencies care about is that all your bills are getting paid on time, and because my property management agency had been paying my mortgages, utilities, insurance etc. right on time every month I still had great credit! He even pulled up one of those “free credit report” sites on his computer to prove that to me.
Verifying my income was another matter, since at that moment I didn’t have any! But by December I would have income to the tune of about $2800/month (before taxes) and that would in theory qualify me for the kind of cheap but habitable house I wanted.
Immediately I started hitting up my new sleazy landlord/realtor for property listings in the low-end price range I was looking for. Then I went house-hunting to see what kind of houses & neighborhoods I might be able to choose from. I didn’t go inside any of them, but I did walk around the vacant ones & peek in the windows to seek how bad off they were. I wanted to be familiar enough with the marketplace to know what a good deal looked like and be ready to pounce on it by about January.
However, as I was doing this and talking about it with people I knew, I began to hear some words of caution. For one thing, although my state had required a minimum 1000 ft. separation from schools, parks, day care centers, etc. etc. and Brown County was still using that for its unincorporated areas, many local towns & cities had adopted more restrictive standards. For example, Reevestown required 1500 feet which would make finding someplace in-town much more difficult, and several other towns had gone to 2500 feet, effectively “zoning out” all sex offender ghettos. Pond County had not only adopted 2500 feet but outlawed sex offender room-mating. And while I personally believe these kind of restrictions are unconstitutional, who’s gonna take them to court? In fact if you are a “normal” person you probably see nothing wrong with these restrictions and will be calling your city hall tomorrow morning to find out how they can zone sex offenders out of you town — so much for my constitutional rights! And does Donald Trump’s Supreme Court give a rat’s ass about the rights of sex offenders?
A man I’d known for quite a while who’d been thru 7 years of sex offender probation warned me that in my house search I should stay away from certain parts of town where he said he’d faced harassment from neighbors or local gangs. The truly bad news was that the areas he mentioned were some of the same neighborhoods where there were houses in my price range. Would I have to change my price range and/or be more picky about location? At this early stage I didn’t know.
Also, it turned out that houses “in my price range” (i.e. really cheap ones) were becoming quite scarce in Brown County because the damage done by Hurricane Zelda had put a squeeze on the housing market — even in the crappy west side neighborhoods that I was trying to escape from. There was next to nothing on the east side where I really wanted to be. By the time I got my finances in order in December or January, would there be any left at all?
But Rising Prices Were Also Good News …
This housing squeeze was a double-edged sword for me, because I also had a condominium to sell. I owned this condo jointly with my daughter and we’d both been anxious to sell it for a while, but at the time I went to prison it was “under water” — i.e. we owed more on the mortgage than we could sell it for. The monthly costs for mortgage, association dues & miscellaneous expenses were also more than we were getting for rent, so we were doubly screwed! But I had calculated that by the time I got out the mortgage balance would’ve gone down and the selling price would’ve gone up enough that we could at least sell without a loss. Now, with the post-hurricane housing squeeze it seemed like we could even make some money on the sale — money I could use for the down payment on the cheap house I wanted to buy!
Oh — PS — No, I couldn’t live in this condo because, like the other three properties I owned, it was “too close to something,” in this case a day care center.
Conveniently enough, the tenant was scheduled to leave at the end of October. I had always planned to do a quickie renovation on the place to help it sell faster and higher — specifically putting new granite counter tops on the existing kitchen cabinetry, replacing the bathroom vanities and a few interior doors, and of course a fresh coat of paint throughout. Everything would go on my credit card and I’d pay it off as soon as the condo was sold. So within a few days of my release I was at the local Lowes store picking from among the cheapest granite counter tops they had. About a week later the estimators came to the condo to get final measurements, and before the end of October I was standing in the granite yard “choosing my slab.”
If you liked this article or any in this series, or if it spoke to you, or if you think others could benefit from it please recommend it or comment on it, or both.
