Geography and Public Safety: A Quarterly Bulletin of Applied Geography for the Study of Crime & Public Safety, Volume 2, Issue 1

In the first article, the crime analyst for the San Diego County District Attorney's Office describes her work with experts in geographic information systems (GISs) in using mapping and spatial analysis as means of determining the effects of sex offender residency restrictions if California's Proposition 83, called Jessica's Law, was to pass. The second article describes how sex offenders are managed in the community under Florida's laws, and a case study is presented to show how this management system can work for the benefit of sex offenders in the community who may be suspected of reoffending, but are innocent. The third article reports on a Minnesota study and other studies that have examined whether laws that specify residency requirements for sex offenders living in the community are effective in reducing sex-offender recidivism. The fourth article describes the tools that can be used to process data from a global positioning system (GPS) that tracks the location of sex offenders. The fifth article reports on geographic research that indicates sex offender residency restriction laws may not be effective in preventing sexual recidivism. In addition to these five articles, this issue reports on recent news regarding research on the effectiveness of residency restriction laws; California budget cuts for the funding of sex offender housing; legal threats to sex offenders' civil rights; the defeat of a residency restriction proposal in Manitowoc, WI; and the impact on sex offenders' behavior of Tulsa's (Oklahoma) 2005 residency restriction law.