By Maggie Clark, Stateline Staff Writer, Pew Center on the States

Six years ago, Congress passed what is known as the Adam Walsh Act, aimed at protecting children from predators by collecting sex offender data in a national public registry and requiring those people listed in it to report their movements to law enforcement. Adam’s law required states to place convicted sex offenders in one of three tiers, based on the severity of their crimes. The act, named for a 6-year-old boy who was kidnapped and murdered in Florida in 1981, gave the states five years to comply. 

The vast majority of states did not comply on time. As the five-year deadline of July 2011 was approaching, only four had met the terms of the law. The Obama administration issued new guidelines earlier in 2011 that gave states more discretion in implementing the act and clarified how to share information, and in the past year, 12 more states have become compliant. But most still are not, even though they will lose 10 percent of their justice assistance grants from the federal government in fiscal year 2012 as a penalty for inaction. 

It’s not that states are uninformed about the law;  it’s that they have substantial objections to it. Many see it as an unfunded mandate requiring them to spend millions of dollars collecting information and placing it in the national registry. They are reluctant to bear the cost of updating their own technology to register digital fingerprints, palm prints and DNA, and of paying for the additional time that law enforcement officers would spend processing sex offenders who appear before them in person. 

Advocates for juveniles also complain about what would be a lifetime listing for some juvenile sex offenders, which they say goes against any commitment to rehabilitate juveniles, rather than punishing them for long periods of time. 

Last month, Pennsylvania became the 16th state to sign on to the act, just barely averting the federal aid penalty. Pennsylvania changed its previous law to add juveniles to its registry and require out-of-state and homeless people convicted of sexual offenses to register with law enforcement. “We can hope that by making our laws tougher,” Governor Tom Corbett said in signing the bill, “we can spare others the pain and grief that has visited too many families.” Pennsylvania had about 11,000 registered sex offenders as of June 2011. 

But many other states are continuing to voice their objections to what the federal law expects of them. Susan Frederick, senior federal affairs counsel at the National Conference of State Legislatures, expects states to continue to press Congress for more discretion about which offenders to place on the three-tiered national registry, and for how long. Currently the law requires that convicted sex offenders, including juvenile offenders, remain in the registry for anywhere from 15 years to life, depending on the severity of their crime.

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