How do states register sex offenders under Megan's Law?
Its been a piece meal process, and since it's a new concept of taking a criminal justice database and making it available to the public so the public can protect itself, it has not been implemented as well as it should have been in many communities. For instance, in California they've been registering sex offenders since 1946 and they made the law retroactive so that the entire list of individuals has to be made available to the public. Well we're talking, at this point, about something like a hundred thousand registered offenders in the state of California, and number one, they had to figure out how to classify them. Had they exposed themselves to young girls walking to school? Were they guys that'd been busted at two o'clock in the morning? So, they created a voluntary system and basically left it up to the offenders to come in to the law enforcement agency and register, and then subject themselves to the judgement of the public. What has happened is that a good twenty to twenty-five percent of those individuals, and often times the worst ones, have failed to comply with that law, and the penalties for failure to comply have really been nothing more than a slap on the wrist in most jurisdictions within the country. So, changes have been made in that law recently so that across the country it's going to be mandated that they register before they get out of prison; they'll be registered on a three-tiered system, making the third tier the absolute worst of the worst, and they'll have to comply with the law or go back to prison. The state or the government, governments I should say, then have found that the best way to impart that information is via the internet. So, any citizen can go onto any state's Megan's Law website, and then they are able to find out that information; they're able to search using a variety of criteria. They can do it by name or alias, they can do it by physical characteristics, they can do it by race, they can do it by zip code, they can do it by address, and it's really a very good system. Now, if one doesn't want to go search for all of the states' Megan's Laws websites, they can log onto the Klaas Kids Foundation website, klaaskids.org, and go onto our Megan's Law page and we have that entire list.
