NSOPW FAQs 
 
 -- Select One -- More information about a sex offender… Varied amounts of details… Accept offender updates… A mistake in the listed information… Will deceased offenders appear… What are “Jurisdictions”… More than one registered Jurisdiction. Many different registries… Single national search… Provide information to private companies… A Web service or API availability Linking to NSOPW… Conditions of Use… Search needs alphanumeric code… Ways to search for offenders Indian country data included… Cannot find a match… I cannot find a sex offender … Determining a Jurisdiction… No Address Radius Search… Error: “Too many matching offenders” Search result says “not available”… Why named Dru Sjodin… Who manages NSOPW… How is NSOPW free… Compare NSOPW to FBI’s site… ||||| I suppose in this case I am the offender. I got things confused and showed up a day early, but my hosts were more than forgiving. They've got their own little colony out in the cane fields. Down here in Pahokee, Florida. They call it City of Refuge. 
 
 As everybody now knows, sex offenders have a rough time of it after they get out of prison. Because of the registry. Because the state says they can't live within a thousand feet of a school or a playground or a bus stop. Because they can't live anywhere children assemble, etc. So they end up living out of their cars, under highway overpasses, or in the woods, like fearful animals, like homeless lepers. You could say they're lucky to be here, even if it is four miles from anything resembling a town, not much of a resemblance at that, and the "city" (really more of a village) being just a lonely former barracks built by U.S. Sugar for migrant workers in the '60s. Sixty-one concrete bungalows on twenty-four acres, with 120 resident offenders at any given time, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of acres of sweet, sugary nothing. A couple of dozen older Jamaicans still live here, too, but the sex offenders arrived six and a half years ago when Pat Powers, an offender himself, came and claimed the place in the name of Jesus Christ. They live in this exile, of course, because there is nothing lower than their kind. 
 
 Considering how welcoming they are, however, I'm inclined to resist the urge to assume the worst—and anyway, I don't particularly want to know the specifics of any of their crimes. Society has already exacted its debt, is my thinking. 
 
 I arrived on a Sunday and found my new friends just finishing up a game of touch football. Everyone was all sweaty and out of breath and still laughing about how one of the guys, Glenn, had been running a fake reverse and collided with a clothesline pole. 
 
 I apologized profusely for showing up early and offered to find a motel for the night, but one of the guys, Ted, said it wasn't a problem, not at all, we're happy to have you, we'll fix you up in our guest room. Then he introduced me to his wife, Rose. He did it very formal, like: Jay, I'd like you to meet my wife, Rose. Rose, who isn't the only woman in the village but who is the only registered female sex offender. I apologized some more to Rose, who has faded green tattoos on her fleshy arms and the oblique demeanor of a log-truck dispatcher, but she shrugged and made a joke that I was welcome so long as I didn't snore. 
 
 Since most of the guys were in shorts and flip-flops, it was easy to notice their ankle monitors, including one on a thuggish-looking kid with a shaved head and messed-up teeth who greets me, "Hey, Random Dude." 
 
 Another guy, a fratty blond with a brohawk who's spitting into a water bottle, turns out to be Glenn, the one who collided with the clothesline pole. He wants to tell me about his real home. 
 
 "I can't live there," he says. "I have a house in Palm Beach Gardens I can't go to." He shows me pictures on his phone. "A swimming pool. Jacuzzi. Banana trees." 
 
 Glenn looks and sounds like Matt Damon except for some pretty heavy-duty scarification on the inside of his arm. He's otherwise very clean-cut, bright, originally from L.A. He flips through more pictures. "I mean, that's the master bedroom." 
 
 The place is 5,700 square feet. Three and a half acres. His dad bought it. Glenn was going to live there rent-free when he got out, but the statute for the city of Palm Beach Gardens says sex offenders can't live within 2,500 feet of anywhere minors might conceivably convene. They confuse the hell out of you, he says, since the distance varies. The state of Florida says 1,000 feet, but other municipalities, even within the same county, have different statutes. So it's 2,000 feet here, who knows what there. The sheriff, probation officers, nobody can keep it straight. You start to feel like they're just making it up as they go along. That's one thing that makes life at City of Refuge easier: You're not within 2,500 feet of anything. 
 
 "But where are we supposed to go? How are we supposed to get a job?" Glenn pauses to spit in his water bottle. "I spoke to my probation officer this morning. I had a job lined up, I was going to work in the fast-food industry just to make ends meet. But because there was gonna be minors working with me, I couldn't." 
 
 He said the reason he'd gone to prison was the same for a bunch of the younger guys here: the statutory boyfriend-girlfriend thing. It wasn't that they were all child molesters. They'd had 15- or 16-year-old girlfriends when they themselves were 18 or 19. Yes, the laws are that draconian. And yes, it's shitty that they can end up doing fifteen years in prison and then get put on the registry as sex offenders for the rest of their lives. Also shitty that there doesn't seem to be much distinction in the eyes of the law between their crimes and the crimes committed by the least equivocal and unmitigated of sexual predators, a number of whom I will get to meet over the following days. 
 
 That is, a sex offender is a sex offender, and you're branded for decades or even life. In the eyes of society, as sex offenders, they are all equally guilty. All treated with equal abhorrence. If it weren't for City of Refuge, they'd be out there on their own. Here is exile that is also asylum from the larger, unforgiving world. Here is, weirdly enough, real community. And when I say community, I don't mean that bourgeois civic vagueness you always hear the co-op crowd chattering about. I mean the kind of community that would protect you from vigilantes intent on dragging you out of bed in the middle of the night to take turns kicking your teeth down your throat. 
 
 · · · 
 
 Rush hour at City of Refuge 
 
 I wake the next morning to the rustle of cane outside my window and the smell of bacon frying. I lie here awhile, ensconced like a spoiled cherub in piles of gold and red throw pillows and a downy gold bedspread, looking out the window at a pitiless geometry of cane fields. They grid out as far as the eye can measure. In the distance is an enormous plume of black smoke above an orange plinth of flame. I have no idea what it means. 
 
 In the living room, the whole house is as fragrant as an ice cream shop on a warm summer day. Rose is still in her nightie on the couch where I left her last night, playing a game on her cell phone with a mini stylus, feet on the glass coffee table between a vase of white roses and a burning vanilla candle. 
 
 When she pours me a mug of coffee, I comment on the huge letters eat hanging on the kitchen wall. Rose smiles and says the sign was a Christmas present from a neighbor. Then she waits a beat and says how, when he gave it to her, she went, Am I supposed to put that in the kitchen or in the bedroom? Another beat. She goes: I'd prefer the bedroom. 
 
 That's when a freshly showered Ted enters, chuckling in his smoky, affable way, to join me at the table. "It's very much just a regular community here," he says. There are several married couples and a few with kids. They've even got one stay-at-home dad who's a registered predator. A really sweet guy named Andy. 
 
 Ted and Rose themselves got married three years ago, in September, just after Ted was re-released for a probation violation. They met in the village. Rose says how her probation officer, Officer Cox, wouldn't let her go on a honeymoon. That's because Rose had a 10 P.M. curfew then. Officer Cox is like that, a real hacksaw. She'll hit you with a parole violation for a hangnail. Like, for instance, Rose has got a big soft spot for Winnie the Pooh, as I've already gleaned from the couple's video collection. But one day Officer Cox shows up unannounced, barges in, and wags her finger at all the Winnie the Pooh dolls and the pictures of Rose's children, who, per terms and conditions of probation, Rose was barred from seeing, and she goes: I want all this shit out of here or you're gettin' violated. Just like that. All this shit. 
 
 Over breakfast, Ted tells me that if I want, I can sit in on an intake call, which is a conference call they're having with a possible new resident. The man's getting released from prison in a month, and he'll need somewhere to live. Ted says they've got the vacancy now because of Earl, the current black eye on the village. Earl just got sent back to prison for twenty-three years for trying to contact his victim on Facebook. Big mistake. Ted tells me how he and Pat had gone to Earl's hearings. Then he tells me that when Earl's victim testified, it made Ted remember that he had created a victim, too, and by the way he looks me in the eye, I can truly sense that some kinds of regret must have a longer half-life than others: "Earl was delusional. He thought his victim really liked him. So Earl never saw the pain he caused. That's just a reminder to me of the very real pain that we've caused people. If there's any one thing that prevents me from ever re-offending..." 
 
 He falls silent, holding his breakfast sandwich mid-air, a pained wonder testing his eyes. 
 
 "I never, ever want to bring harm to another person. Believe me. Going to Earl's hearing—" he sets down his drippy sandwich as if suddenly repulsed—"it was more disgust with knowing that I caused a similar pain. That's where my disgust was, not with Earl. It was with myself." 
 
 When it's time for the intake meeting, Ted gives Rose a peck on the cheek and we walk over to Pat's, two houses down, where, on the porch, Pat's dog naps in the shadow of a ratty bench press. 
 
 "Good morning!" 
 
 "Good morning!" 
 
 The men are gathered around the kitchen table: Pat and their intake manager, Jerry, and Chad, a younger guy with peroxide bangs who's rubbing his shoulders and moaning a bit from their football game yesterday. 
 
 The offenders: (From left) Douglas Ryan (with his dog, Goldy) and Richard Sears 
 
 All of the men are offenders themselves, employed by Matthew 25 Ministries, the nonprofit started by a man named Dick Witherow twenty-six years ago. Witherow, a kindly and selfless man by all accounts, knew the hardships offenders went through in the outside world and felt they needed their own place to start over. Especially since many of them ended up homeless, which so often led to reincarceration. So he searched Florida top to bottom, looking for a neighborhood that would comply with state and local ordinances, until he and Pat Powers found the site in 2008. City of Refuge leases about a quarter of the rentals from a property-management company, and a small percentage of the money from sublets goes toward paying the staff. When Witherow died, in 2012, Pat became the Grand Pooh-Bah of the place, with a nominally involved board of directors. 
 
 I take a seat between Chad and the wall and flip through a picture book, Rooster's Off to See the World. Pat, who sits at the end with his restless thick fingers interlaced on the table before him, says it belongs to his 8-year-old granddaughter. 
 
 "Mommy and Daddy got all messed up on drugs," Pat says by way of explanation, so his granddaughter had to come here for a spell. Pat took her to school every day, and Rose would come down to give her baths and fix her pancakes, because sometimes it really does take a village. (By that time, Rose was off probation, so she was able to help.) It worked out great, Pat says, since all the guys who aren't supposed to have contact with kids knew to amscray if they saw her coming. His granddaughter even got to where she'd ask if a guy was on probation. "I can't talk to you," she'd say, and that was that. 
 
 I size up Pat as just your standard pugnacious fireplug who's maybe a little more pushy than actually charismatic. This is the man who says he started City of Refuge after God dragged him and Dick Witherow kicking and screaming through a staggering number of divine coincidences, wrong turns, pratfalls, and theological booby traps. He launches into a story about how the place had been a maximal den of iniquity: drug dealers, shootings, car thieves, murders, etc., with giant piles of ghetto trash in the middle of the road, and how when he'd first moved in, the pipes were burst and he'd had to sleep on a couple of lawn chairs, and how in the middle of the night he'd slain half a dozen rats with a shovel, and, honest to Pete, how he didn't want to have anything to do with the place at first, but he didn't have a choice, since God had commanded him to come here to deliver his people out of exile. 
 
 It all seems like a pretty steep story, especially the bit about how the migrant workers were so afraid of the drug dealers that they hid inside their homes until the sex offenders arrived, but otherwise Pat is pretty likable and grandfatherly in his generic red baseball cap, and every bit as welcoming as the others.
– Convicted sex offenders are legally required to live far from children, so they often reside in cars, under overpasses, in the woods—or in the City of Refuge. More like a village, Refuge houses 120 offenders in 61 concrete bungalows amid the cane fields of Pahokee, Fla. "Here is exile that is also asylum from the larger, unforgiving world," writes Jay Kirk in GQ. "Here is, weirdly enough, real community." Told that many residents did "the statutory boyfriend-girlfriend thing" rather than child molestation, Kirk finds them warm and welcoming. He also sees the founding nonprofit, Matthew 25 Ministries, carefully vet potential new members. And the residents (mostly men wearing ankle monitors) help each other with life's problems. "If it weren't for City of Refuge, they'd be out there on their own," Kirk writes. Sex-offender support groups like one reported in the Edmonton Journal seem to pale by comparison. Yet there's a dark side: When Ministries moved into this village, once used by migrant cane workers, remaining ex-workers saw their children forced out. "They got to go," says one. "Because of the sex offenders." And when Kirk looks up Refuge's offenders on the National Sex Offender Registry, he sees crimes including minors and forced acts: "My skin grows colder with each click," he writes. This makes their identity as "undeniably over-punished" victims (even comparing themselves to Jews in Nazi Germany) harder for Kirk to accept. Short of conclusions, he visits Refuge's small chapel, where Kirk says the choir sings "as if to expunge their names" from the sex registry. "You are wor-thy!" they sing. "You are wor-thy!" Click for the full article, or read about a couple on trial for having sex on a beach.