In Hillsborough County, Fla., local officials voted unanimously in June to ban convicted sex offenders from public hurricane shelters. In Ohio, prosecutors have begun moving to evict sex offenders who live too close to a school. And in towns and counties across the country, including Binghamton, N.Y., and Brick, N.J., local officials have passed laws in recent months that effectively banish anyone convicted of a sex crime against a minor.

Banishment laws are a short-sighted non-solution to the potential risk posed by sex offenders who have already been punished for their crimes.

"When you push offenders out of the more populated areas, they can lose access to jobs and treatment, and it makes them harder to track," said Jill S. Levenson, a researcher on sexual violence at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla., who published a study of sex offender zoning laws this year.

Some jurisdictions have resisted the knee-jerk approval of banishment laws after realizing that they aren�t effective:

Minnesota and Colorado considered passing versions of the law, and decided against it after commissioning studies. Minnesota's study, published by the State Department of Corrections in 2003, showed no relationship between offenders' proximity to schools and their risk of committing new crimes. It concluded that new restrictions would make it harder to track offenders and would "not enhance community safety."

"Get out of town" laws (as distinguished from more narrowly-drawn "stay away from schools" laws) may also be subject to legal challenges.

[T]hey often bar sex offenders from working or even being in the restricted areas - a modern-day sentence of exile. They are therefore vulnerable to the argument that they violate the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment, said Robert A. Perry, the legislative director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which has filed a supporting brief for the plaintiff in a suit filed against the new law in Binghamton.

Yet "tough on crime" politicians continue to propose banishment, particularly at the local level, as a way to shuttle the "undesirables" out of their community and into someone else's town.

Making exiles out of ex-offenders is bad policy. It�s a trend that needs to stop.