Miracle Village: the sleepy Florida town for sex offenders
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Version 0 of 1. “A walk through the village on a summer’s day is a great way to relax. Big puffy clouds dot the soft blue sky as far as the eye can see. The sunshine is warm. There’s usually a dog or two walking someone up or down the street. Sometimes there’s a jogger. It is an intimate community.” So writes Joseph Steinberg of Miracle Village, where he is one of over 100 residents living quietly amid vast sugar cane fields in rural south Florida. The bungalows once exclusively housed migrant cane cutters from the West Indies, some of whom still live here. But Miracle Village’s current population predominantly consists of sex offenders. This is their sanctuary, a place to go when they finish their prison sentences and find they are not welcome where they once lived. Sofia Valiente, a quietly spoken 24-year-old photographer who lives one hour’s drive from Miracle Village, came upon the community when she was photographing the small towns of south Florida. Intrigued, she started visiting the community and, having gained their trust, began documenting this enclosed world in portraits, landscapes and still lives. She even lived there for a time during the three months it took her to complete the project that has now become an intriguing photobook. “People, including the residents, were often shocked I had this interest in them,” says Valiente, who is in London for the opening of a show of her work at Daniel Blau gallery. “But it is just too easy to label them as monsters and then not have to deal with them at all.” Comprising her tenderly observed pictures and often painful first-person testimonies, Miracle Village is a beautifully made book about a taboo subject. In one image, a man hides his face under his T-shirt; in another, an older resident sits alone in his room, the outline of his GPS ankle bracelet visible under his sock, his surroundings as spartan as a hospital room. Valiente also includes found photographs – one man posing with two youths, possibly his sons, their faces covered – and ephemera – censored letters, personal belongings, religious icons. The end result is considered, and the sense of isolation is palpable throughout. It is not just a documentary record of a shunned community, but an argument for understanding, rehabilitation, even forgiveness. “My mother freaked out when I first told her I was doing a project there,” says Valiente. “She kept asking – ‘why these people?’ and I guess that is the question most people will ask. But I felt compelled as an artist to tell their stories. I was terrified at first, to be honest, but I’m pretty tough. I wanted to look into this enclosed world where there is a certain camaraderie and a shared history, but also this shared sense of exclusion from society ...” The Miracle Village community was founded in 2009 by an evangelical Christian pastor, Dick Witherow, head of Matthew 25 Ministries. Witherow refers to sex offenders as “modern-day lepers” and sees it as his Christian duty to help rehabilitate them. (His commitment is based, to a degree, on his own experience. At 18, he made his 14-year-old future wife pregnant. “If that would have happened in today’s society,” he told the NPR broadcasting company, “I would have been charged with sexual battery of a minor, given anywhere from 10 to 25 years in prison, plus extended probation time after that, then been labeled a sex offender.” ) Valiente’s book begins with a version of a Biblical quote from Paul 103 – “There is no judging, for we who are here have the same name.” She describes herself as “a storyteller” and, contrary to the thrust of most contemporary documentary work where detachment is all, she insists that the camera is a tool “to get close to and help understand her subjects.” But in this case, did she not consider that detachment may have been wiser? “It’s just not the way I work,” she says, “but I did set boundaries as a photographer and as a woman. Some people I connected with, some I didn’t. There are quite a range of offenders in Miracle Village, from guys who looked at child pornography to an 18-year-old man who had sex with his 16-year-old girlfriend. I wanted the book to reflect all those aspects, but also touch on the wider issues – what society thinks, what the victims think, what the offenders think and what I think. It’s complex because many people, understandably, don’t want to have to think about these guys at all. There is a sense that we don’t know what to do with them once they have served their time.” Florida has some of the strictest laws governing the sentencing and subsequent monitoring of sex offenders. Many residents of Miracle Village are tagged with ankle monitors, must obey a 7pm curfew and cannot own a laptop or mobile phone. The community is geographically isolated because it has to be: paroled sex offenders are not allowed within 1,000 feet of any building where children gather. Unsurprisingly, many of them see the village as a safe haven. Among their number is one female, Rose, who tells Valiente: “All these guys look at me as a sister.” In one of several handwritten testimonies, Rose writes: “The course of events that led up to me being arrested is very painful for me to speak about in detail.” It is also very painful to read: an abused woman charged with molesting her own children and maintaining her innocence. Like some of the testimonies, it is hard to know where the truth lies, while others are brutally honest about their transgressions. It is hard, too, to align the words with the portraits of the men and woman who wrote them – but that is another of the tensions at play in this brave, almost impossible, project. Miracle Village is ultimately a document of a profoundly Christian place, where the shunned are offered some chance of belonging – if only among their own. It forces us to ask hard questions of ourselves, not the least being: can we, should we, forgive the most reviled of transgressors? • This article was amended on 21 January 2015 to remove a reference to the village accommodating people who have had sex with children. Miracle Village has told the Guardian: “We do not offer housing to criminals with a background as a serial rapist nor do we accept medically diagnosed paedophiles.” |