Seen from a distance, perhaps from a low-flying helicopter, or standing a few hundred feet away on a road that cuts through the green sugarcane surrounding it, Miracle Village, in Central Florida outside of Pahokee, looks like it could be a modest retirement community. Perhaps a modern-day off-the-grid commune, carved from a little spot of remote farmland. Miracle Village, though, is neither. It is a community devoted entirely to housing convicted sex offenders.



Barred from living within 2,500 feet of schools, bus stops or any other places that children might reasonably congregate, sex offenders in many parts of Florida—and many other jurisdictions throughout the country that have similar restrictions—have limited options when it comes to housing. Dick Witherow, an evangelical Christian pastor, founded the community in 2009, in part, he said because offenders were treated like “ modern-day lepers.” But his interest in providing a sanctuary for sex offenders had something to do with personal experience, too, he told NPR. He had met his wife when he was 18 and she was 14. The judge who married them told Witherow he could have been charged with statutory rape.



Photographer Charles Ommanney lived at Miracle Village for a week with the residents and tried to capture what it was like to live on the other side of America's sex offender laws, which come as close to creating a sequestered class of people as any other punishment except prison. “Many of the younger people seemed desperate to get out of there,” Ommanney recalls. “But there were some people who—in a way, this was their home now. They had resigned to it.”



(Text by Katelyn Fossett.)

(c) Charles Ommanney/Contact Press Images