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| Tracking sex offenders |
| By chicagotribune.com |
| Published: 09/06/2011 |
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Thousands of people in Illinois have been convicted of sex offenses, have completed their sentences and are free. Want to know if any of them live near you? It's easy. A state website (isp.state.il.us/sor/) can be searched by town and ZIP code and has the names of 25,000 convicted offenders. Most of the listings include their home addresses and a brief description of their offenses. Congress wants the states to do more. The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, signed into law five years ago, requires states to expand their registries to include more sex-related crimes. The Illinois General Assembly started work on that this spring. Bills passed the House and Senate, but in different forms. Efforts to reconcile the differences stalled and lawmakers left Springfield without completing their work on this. The registry bills that are pending would add thousands more criminals to the online list. That's in keeping with the federal requirements. But Illinois should use this legislation to go one better: Deliver stepped-up supervision of the riskiest offenders after they're released. As is, the state's supervision of sex offenders once their prison time concludes has become less effective in recent years, even as the registry has expanded. One reason: Under state law, no more than one sex offender on parole may live in a single-family home or apartment. That restriction goes away after parole is completed, although other prohibitions about where sex offenders can live, work and visit continue to apply. In part because of that restriction, many offenders eligible for parole cannot find a suitable place to live. So they stay behind bars during the period when they would be making the transition from prison back into the community. More than 1,000 offenders are serving their parole time in prison right now. Read More. |
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