“Nearly one in four addresses for high-risk offenders listed on the Iowa Sex Offender Registry are incorrect, according to an investigation by The Gazette… There are numerous reasons for the inaccuracies, the newspaper reported. Offenders fill out criminal background forms that are posted, in some counties, without being checked. State workers processing sex offender assessments are behind in their work with a backlog of about 2,000 cases. And warrants for sex offenders fleeing from justice aren’t considered public documents. So even if state officials know an address is wrong, the registry may not reflect that… ‘If you really stop to think about it, how are we going to ensure that 5,568 people are at that address 365 days of the year?’ said Steve Conlon, who oversees the registry.” — Quad City Times (US)

Online registries for sex offenders may sound like a promising idea, and yet — to say it once again — the odds of them actually being practical or useful are pretty slim. Except for the few odd people who probably visit the registries to laugh at the ugly mugs of local sex offenders, people don’t really visit the sites. Moreoever, their efficacy can be marred by bad or obsolete data — such as pictures that don’t resemble the sex offenders anymore, or now the revelation that at least one in every four entries in this Iowa database is incorrect. That’s twenty-five percent — you think FedEx would tolerate it if they couldn’t keep track of twenty-five percent of their packages? How can a state government put up with such a high error rate in their supposedly important sex offender registry?

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