Well, it is not summer camp but it is all year long.  The Julia Tuttle Bridge covers a make-shift place for "living" for the unwanted in Florida.  The people who live in thrown together shacks are on public property but far away from where children live.  That makes it O.K. due to Florida laws which prevent ex- offenders of molestation of children from living in most places for children live all over.  There are no children under the Julia Tuttle Bridge.  There are a few women there but there are men who have paid their debt to society and are free of jail but are jailed by indifference of the public and officials to live in such a place without the common services due each of us.

I have no good things to say about anyone, male or female who would molest a child.  This is universally proscribed by all societies.  But, what do we do with someone who has a record although a sentence has been served.  Does a thief have it on his record that he will steal after he was caught, tried, convicted and served a sentence?  I do not think so.  In fact, the idea of prison where one is simply incarcerated or a reformatory where it is hoped to teach one to be better - each has not worked.  We send them away and they come back better educated in the ways to prey on their fellow humans.

There is one boy, just found out who it is alleged likes to kill and dissect cats.  Where is there a place where he can be helped - not just punished by removal from human companionship of the kind that will give him examples of acceptable behavior?  I do not know and wonder what it is in our complex society that makes opportunities for deviance and yet has no answers on how to make things better. Under the Julia Tuttle Bridge is no place to correct (as in correctional institutions) behavior.

It has been observed that prisons and such are descriptive of dysfunctional societies.  The "crime of punishment" is the mark of societies that depend on putting a convict away from public sight as though that will make him or her better after a sentence is served.

Has anyone come up to you and told you that he or she is a convict or is now free of jail and also free of the crime for which they served a sentence?  I doubt this because it is not a mark of achievement but the crime sticks to that individual even after a period of being shut out of human sight.

There is a camp, summer and all year around for Floridians.