You'd think that the supervision and discipline and therapy and strict curfews and drug testing and spiritual guidance and actual beds offered by the St. Francis Mission might be preferable to having jobless, homeless sex offenders prowl the streets and sleep under bridges.

Apparently not.

The Florida Department of Corrections has warned the last 10 sex offenders enrolled in the treatment program that they must be gone in six weeks.

Stripped of those clients, the mission will almost certainly fall into bankruptcy. St. Francis has become collateral damage, ruined by uncompromising laws limiting where sex offenders can reside.

DECADES OF SERVICE

The mission, located in Fort Lauderdale a few blocks south of the Broward County Courthouse, has been salvaging outcasts since 1969.

For the first 35 years, St. Francis, in a converted house with an Alamo facade under a mission bell, provided treatment and shelter for alcoholics and drug addicts. Five years ago, the Florida Department of Corrections approached St. Francis and asked the mission to take on another kind of client.

Ultimately, the DOC request would prove both ironic and probably fatal to the mission. St. Francis agreed to provide beds for sex offenders.

The killer blow came Jan. 10, when the city opened a kiddie playground several blocks away but close enough to trigger the residency ban. The DOC, the very agency that referred their parolees to St. Francis, now said they had to go. Or face parole violations and prison. (DOC gave the mission residents a list of possible residences, all hundreds of miles north of Fort Lauderdale.)

OUT OF TIME

Chris Mancini, the Fort Lauderdale attorney who has taken on the money-losing proposition of representing the mission, went to court and asked for an injunction.

DOC agreed to give the parolees another 60 days before enforcing the evictions. The reprieve ends Oct. 21.

Mancini thinks he could eventually prevail in the courts, challenging the evictions on constitutional grounds. But the trial and the appeals would take years to resolve. St. Francis is down to its last few weeks.

The mission, staffed by volunteers, takes no government money and gets by on charitable donations and the $200 weekly fees paid by each client. St. Francis needs at least 14 of its 20 beds filled with paying clients just to break even. It's already losing money. And with 10 clients forced to evacuate before the end of next month, St. Francis is facing a fiscal disaster. The mission just doesn't have the money and the time it would need to revert back to treating alcoholics and drug addicts.

AN ILLUSION

Bad enough that our politicians passed state, county and city laws banning sex offenders without contemplating that offenders would be forced into homelessness, but no one thought to include an exception for supervised treatment programs like St. Francis.

Residency bans create the illusion of protecting children. St. Francis provides actual protection, keeping the men employed, supervised, in therapy, drug- and alcohol- free and away from kids.

But we'd rather have that illusion. Just toss the men into the street.

Meanwhile, St. Francis, after so many years of good work, probably won't survive to celebrate next month's 40th anniversary. Just collateral damage.

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