Let 'em fry -- or freeze?

City prosecutors are making a good call in rethinking their decision to bar a sexual offender from a homeless shelter because it is within 1,000 feet of a school.

Larry Winslow, homeless for five years and suffering from walking pneumonia, feared he could die in the cold if he couldn't stay at the Drop Inn Center in Over-the-Rhine. He sued in federal court and initially city prosecutors appeared unwilling to budge. Now they're letting Winslow spend nights at the shelter temporarily and say they'll try to find a longer term solution.

It's not coddling sex offenders to offer them the simple human decency of a place to come in out of the cold.

Winslow deserved to be punished for his crime and to be labeled a sexual offender -- he was convicted of the sexual battery of two adult prostitutes in the 1990s. But his crimes were not committed against children, and denying him a night's stay at a shelter -- when students aren't in school -- hardly keeps children safer. Winslow's presence in a supervised shelter is a more secure arrangement than forcing him to sleep on the streets.

At some point communities across this nation are going to have to get real about dealing with sexual offenders. The bans and boundaries and fantasy "1,000-foot limits" are gut-reaction solutions to a complex problem that most policymakers and most of us really know little about. Much as we all hate this issue, somebody's going to have to get close enough to it to figure out what really works -- or what responsible, long-term solutions to put in place if nothing works.

Meanwhile, by treating offenders in flagrantly inhumane ways and labeling them as monsters, we run the danger of becoming one ourselves.