Sex Offender Tracking In Massachusetts Hit By Cuts
When convicted child rapist Paul Nolin murdered 20-year-old Jonathan Wessner in 2003, Nolin was one of thousands of unregistered sex offenders who had failed to provide his address to police.
There were more than 6,000 unclassified sex offenders statewide five years ago, but Wessner’s murder prompted dramatic action at the state and local levels to better track sex offenders, including the 302 registered Level 2 and Level 3 sex offenders on the Cape today. The state classifies sex offenders on a scale of 1 to 3, with Level 3 convicts considered at highest risk to commit another sexual assault. There are now 2,000 unregistered sex offenders in Massachusetts, a 65 percent drop in five years …
Wessner’s murder put a spotlight on public safety officials’ inability to track down and classify the more than 6,000 sex offenders present in the state at the time. Before the murder exposed the state’s deficiencies in tracking sex offenders, the biggest problem was the sheer number of convicts ignoring the law that required them to register their address, said Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O’Keefe. “As people were released from prison, they were expected to comply voluntarily,” O’Keefe said. “But these were the people violating the laws in the first place, so what would give us any hope to believe they would voluntarily obey the notification provision?”
To help remedy the problem, O’Keefe and Barnstable County Sheriff James Cummings used $275,000 in state money in 2004 to start a sex offender management pilot program. Under the program, sex offenders in prison are classified as Level 1, Level 2 or Level 3 convicts before leaving prison, O’Keefe said. Although it remains the convicts’ responsibility to notify local police officials if they move to a new town, O’Keefe said it gives law enforcement officials a head start when convicts leave prison already classified and registered. Earlier this month, Gov. Deval Patrick announced $1 billion in emergency budget cuts, including $80,000 trimmed from Barnstable County’s sex offender management program. The figure represents half of the program’s funding. Officers have been making more than 100 visits a year to the reported homes and work places of registered sex offenders to make sure they actually live and work there, Cummings said. “We will only be able to do about half of that now,” he said.
The full article at the Cape Cod Times contains a great deal more operational data.