Questions arise on monitoring of sex offenders

Sept. 2, 2009— -- Every April 5 for the past 10 years, Phillip Garrido registered on his birthday with the Contra Costa Sheriff's Office as a convicted sex offender.

Two to three times a month, he met his parole officer at the parole office or his Antioch, Calif., home. Since at least January, the state monitored him with a global positioning device strapped to his ankle.

Yet police say he managed to conceal Jaycee Lee Dugard, whom he is accused of kidnapping and sexually abusing, in a squalid backyard encampment for 18 years.

The charges are causing authorities to rethink their procedures as they question how a registered sex offender could lead a secret life while under their supervision.

Some legal scholars and people who work with missing children say police are overwhelmed by the number of registered offenders they have to monitor. They say tough laws that require all sex offenders to register, no matter how small the offense, are counterproductive.

"It's causing the workload to be such that you can't keep up with the problem people," says Jeffery Walker, a criminal justice professor at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock, who has studied sex offender laws. "The question is how do you separate those who do not appear to be a problem and those who are hiding something?"

There are more than 500,000 registered sex offenders nationwide, says Nancy Sabin, executive director of the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center, named after an 11-year-old Minnesota boy who has been missing since 1989 when he was kidnapped at gunpoint. She says the registries should be used to monitor violent repeat adult offenders. It is unclear how many of those registered are considered violent repeat offenders.

Instead, Sabin says, states are requiring anyone convicted of a sex offense to register. She sees little value in registering "Romeo and Juliet" offenders, for example — 18-year-olds convicted of having sex with underage boyfriends or girlfriends a year or two younger.

In Garrido's case, a parole officer did not see the compound of sheds, tents and outhouses because they were hidden by a 6-foot-high fence, trees and debris that appeared to be at the end of the yard, says Gordon Hinkle, a spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.