These proposed guidelines detail the minimum national standards and offer key guidance to the states, the District of Columbia, territories, and federally recognized Indian tribes, as they implement their sex offender registration and notification policies. By providing an effective and comprehensive national system, the proposed guidelines will strengthen law enforcement's ability to track and monitor sex offenders. Complementing the release of the proposed guidelines, the Attorney General also announced $25 million in assistance for communities to implement these proposed Guidelines and take other steps to guard against sex offenders.
"Too often, sex offenders continue to harm children even after a previous conviction," said Attorney General Gonzales. "By establishing minimum national standards, these proposed guidelines will assist all levels of government in working together to more effectively monitor sex offenders, and will equip parents to better protect their children from unwittingly interacting with sex offenders."
Yesterday's announcement comes as the DOJ marks the one-year anniversary of the launch of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative designed to protect children from online sexual exploitation and abuse. Led by U.S. Attorneys Offices, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state, and local resources to better locate, apprehend, and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the Internet, as well as identify and rescue victims. Created in February 2006, the Project Safe Childhood Initiative was officially launched on May 17, 2006, and has led to a substantially increased number of prosecutions.
Today's proposed guidelines will be yet another tool in the efforts to protect children against predators by enhancing the effectiveness of those programs already in practice by making the information gathered immediately available to all jurisdictions and by ensuring that all jurisdictions have confidence that known sex offenders living in the United States have been subject to common, minimum registration requirements. To this end, the proposed guidelines contain explanations and implementation strategies designed to help registration jurisdictions understand minimum standards for who must register, how long they must register, the type of information they must disclose, how frequently and under what circumstances they must update that information, and how these requirements should be enforced. As a general matter, these minimum national standards are only a starting point for the implementation of guidelines. Jurisdictions remain free to protect their children with more demanding registration and notification requirements.
The public will have until Aug. 1, 2007, to comment on the proposed guidelines.
