Nearly three dozen states fail to meet conditions of 2006 federal sex offending tracking law

Nearly three dozen states have failed to meet conditions of a 2006 federal law that requires them to join a nationwide program to track sex offenders, including five states that have completely given up on the effort because of persistent doubts about how it works and how much it costs.

The states, including Texas, stand to lose millions of dollars in government grants for law enforcement, but some have concluded that honoring the law would be far more expensive than simply living without the money.

“The requirements would have been a huge expense,” said Doris Smith, who oversees grant programs at the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration.

The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, named after a boy kidnapped from a Florida mall and killed in 1981, was supposed to create a uniform system for registering and tracking sex offenders that would link all 50 states, plus U.S. territories and tribal lands. When President George W. Bush signed it into law, many states quickly realized they would have to overhaul their sex offender registration systems to comply.

Some lawmakers determined that the program would cost more to implement than to ignore. Others resisted the burden it placed on offenders, especially certain juveniles who would have to be registered for life.

The deadline to comply with the law was July 2011. Thirty-four states have still been unable to meet the full requirements, and five of those have decided they won’t even try. Arizona, Arkansas, California, Nebraska and Texas will instead forfeit 10 percent of the law-enforcement funding made available through the Justice Department.

In Texas, a Senate committee conducted two years of hearings and recommended that the state disregard the law, citing concerns about juvenile offenders and other new mandates. The committee’s report acknowledged the loss of an estimated $1.4 million. But that figure paled when compared with the cost to implement the changes, which could top $38 million.