Now think of being barred from all of these opportunities. Yes, they committed a crime, and yes, it may not a good idea to allow them to mingle with other people sharing these facilities (especially if these people are children) but...where else does one go to improve oneself? You'd think, especially after being charged with a heinous crime, anyone who truly wishes to reform themselves would benefit from these places. But it is those exact people who are barred from doing just that, and the cycle repeats, because there is no way out.
I'm not saying there's an easy answer here, and it wouldn't be feasible to rebuild these places for criminals only. But these restrictions absolutely make it difficult to integrate and become a productive member of society again.
But justice isn't served by making someone homeless and then preventing them visiting a library.
Importantly, that also doesn't help with rehabilitation or with preventing reoffending.
If you have a sex offender at risk of re-offending you want to know where they are and what jobs they have. That's made much harder if they're homeless.
bold added.
This comment about sex offender lists being full of people who had a single piss in public, but whenever I've asked for evidence people post maybe three or four examples.
Feel free to show me research that these public urinators aren't people flashing to children.
The most egregious misapplication (in my opinion) is "public urination", that is, being caught doing it by the wrong person, or if they consider you an unperson. Used to brand the homeless and turn them into national criminals by following them around with a camera.
Or human traditions under attack. A mixed group of adults and minors caught skinny dipping in the wild by the Wrong Deputy is another example. They'll nail the oldest and fill the younger with crushing guilt, if they are friends.
Consensual sex between teenagers is another. It's the ultimate glass-house throw stone legal abomination. And one or both gets the Scarlet Letter into their young adult years. Talk about a suicide trigger!
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https://www.hrw.org/report/2007/09/11/no-easy-answers/sex-of...
"Most people assume that a registered sex offender is someone who has sexually abused a child or engaged in a violent sexual assault of an adult. A review of state sex offender registration laws by Human Rights Watch reveals that states require individuals to register as sex offenders even when their conduct did not involve coercion or violence, and may have had little or no connection to sex. For example:
"At least five states require registration for adult prostitution-related offenses;[108]*
"At least 13 states require registration for public urination; of those, two limit registration to those who committed the act in view of a minor;[109]
"At least 29 states require registration for consensual sex between teenagers;[110] and
"At least 32 states require registration for exposing genitals in public;[111] of those, seven states require the victim to be a minor.[112]
Going meta - your comments are all along the lines of crime and punishment and whether they "deserve" it etc. The replies to you are all along pragmatic lines - what we should do to make society behave the way we want. These approaches are incompatible - when the pragmatic approach disagrees with the fire-and-brimstone approach, ignoring pragmatism will by definition get a worse outcome. Your own feeling of righteous anger is not a good thing to optimize society around.
The notion of justice and punishment is a subsidiary mechanism to pragmatism - one of many ways to achieve a peaceful, stable society.
(One that does not appear to scale especially well beyond groups where everyone knows each other, or into deeply complicated and partially enforced rule sets. Don't kill your tribe member or the tribe will cast you out = effective. Don't exceed the speed limit or you might possibly receive a fine of some constant amount plus a proportional factor to the amount you exceeded it by = ineffective.)