SACRAMENTO -- Hundreds of California sex offenders who are supposed to be monitored for life under an initiative approved by voters last year are now unsupervised because the law does not detail who is responsible for tracking them or how to pay for enforcement.
The ambiguity in the measure, Proposition 83, commonly known as Jessica's law, could affect thousands of sex offenders returning to local communities.
State corrections officials are warning local sheriffs and police that 553 convicted sex offenders who they believe fall under Proposition 83 have already been dismissed from parole and are not being monitored. Therefore, there is no way to check whether they are complying with the law's requirement that they live more than 2,000 feet from schools and parks, and they are not being tracked by satellite for life. An additional 98 are expected to leave parole by year's end.
California Corrections Secretary James Tilton on Thursday began notifying local law enforcement agencies that the state would no longer take responsibility for placing tracking devices on the ankles of sex offenders once they leave parole.
But few if any local agencies around the state are equipped to handle the expensive and intensive satellite monitoring the law requires. And the law is not clear on whether they should have to do so.
"They may determine that they have responsibility and step up and put GPS on them, or they may determine, 'Nope, I don't need to do anything,' " Tilton said in an interview. "All I know is I no longer have jurisdiction over this population."
Last week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and corrections officials began returning hundreds of freed sex offenders to prison for violating the law's strict residency requirements.
The problems are surfacing in part because the initiative, approved by 70% of voters last November, does not specify many basic details of implementation, including which sex offenders require supervision, who should monitor them, how to define the restrictions on living near places where children congregate and how to pay for satellite tracking, which could ultimately cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
"It was a very badly written bill," said Tom Tobin, a Bay Area psychologist who treats sex offenders and is on a state board overseeing the law's implementation. "It's too easy to make these [initiatives] up. But to make them fit the way the world actually works is much harder."
