Sex offender list has limit

There's one decided advantage to joining a national sex offender registry, as Utah is doing: It makes looking up a single offender across several states' databases easy. For law enforcement, this could be a highly useful tool.

But the information on any state database is limited by its accuracy. Many states depend upon convicted sex offenders themselves to provide up-to-date and accurate information regarding their whereabouts, employment and the vehicles they own. Thus, the entries run the gamut of being highly accurate — more so when offenders are under the supervision of parole agents — to practically worthless. On some state databases, photographs of some sex offenders are of such poor quality they are unrecognizable. Some states matter-of-factly state that the inmate failed to register his or her whereabouts, therefore the state doesn't know where the offender may be residing.

One advantage of giving the public access to sex offender databases is that relatives, or even victims, of certain offenders may have information about a person's whereabouts when states don't. Some people may discover the address they recently moved to is on the registry because the previous owner was a sex offender. Those folks have an extra incentive to contact the Department of Corrections with updated information.

As much as states want to keep tabs on convicted sex offenders, many lack the funding to frequently verify the information provided to them by offenders. For instance, there are 6,500 people on Utah's sex offender database. Among them, about half are under the supervision of the Department of Corrections, whether they are in prison, on probation or on parole. The rest are on their honor to provide accurate information to the state.

Under Utah's law, convicted sex offenders have 10 days in which to notify corrections officials each time they relocate. Failure to do so is a Class A misdemeanor and carries a 90-day prison sentence, although registered sex offenders are rarely, if ever, picked up for this violation. This again is due to a lack of resources.

Absent a stick for noncompliance and the obvious downside of being identified as a sex offender on an public-access Web site, it's understandable how the information on these Web sites can become inaccurate.

This poses many interesting public policy issues. If accuracy is a high priority, states need the resources to better track convicted sex offenders.