Apropos to the discussion of former state Rep. Tom Armstrong’s halfway house for sex offenders, and the hullaballoo which followed it from Conestoga to Marietta.

Florida, like Pennsylvania, has laws about where sex offenders can live. Local communities passed their own laws:

Florida, like many states, barred offenders from living within 1,000 feet of schools, parks, playgrounds, public-school-bus stops, or other places where children congregate. Then in 2005, when a 9-year-old girl named Jessica Lunsford was murdered by a 47-year-old drifter in Homosassa, Florida, communities across the state and country converted their outrage into more legislation. Miami Beach expanded its restricted areas to 2,500 feet—effectively banishing every offender in town. The situation escalated: County commissioners, nervously watching as the displaced spilled eastward into their districts, extended Miami Beach’s local limits to the whole county. Other counties followed suit. There are now 128 local ordinances in Florida that limit where a sex offender can live. Critics say these laws are only making it harder for authorities to keep track of offenders. Some are just disappearing—meaning that they can show up in other towns, where no one knows their history, and face no monitoring from authorities. Since 2005, the number of absconders has tripled in Florida—in Miami-Dade, the increase is tenfold. Nationwide, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, at least 100,000 sex offenders have become noncompliant. No one knows where they are.

The Details’ piece finds 14 of them - living beneath a bridge in Miami.

“It’s a ticking time bomb,” says Florida state senator Dave Aronberg, who represents the Fort Myers area. “You have homeless sex offenders roaming the streets. And once you’re off probation, no more curfew. You can spend all day and all night sitting in a park and looking at kids. This is a scandal that the politicians created. Now the public is in danger because these well-intentioned laws have backfired.”

Sure, but it’s easy to blame this on the politicians - when they might say, correctly, that they were merely responding to the concerns of their constituents, the same concerns expressed in Marietta last week. I’ve no doubt people in that borough, in Conestoga, and in virtually every other municipality in this county, would very much like their politicians to adopt Miami Beach’s laws. Whether that would actually make kids in Lancaster County safer is the question.