At first, Understein panicked and stopped letting her three kids, then ages 11, 8 and 3, play outside unsupervised. Then she got organized. Eager for information, Understein called other parents in Southern Village, The Chapel Hill News and the offender's employers.
Turns out he had pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge of accosting a minor for immoral purposes in Michigan in 2001. The Michigan Department of State Police said he had given an inappropriate back rub to his stepdaughter, a high school sophomore. Though Understein thought the crime was icky, she felt a little relieved that at least the guy wasn't likely to be lurking behind trash cans to snatch away her children.
Empowering and informing people such as Understein and her neighbors are what state lawmakers had in mind when they began giving the public online access to the registry in 1998, two years after they started requiring sex offenders to register. But today, as the General Assembly considers measures to strengthen the oversight of sex offenders, some wonder whether the registry has made anyone safer.
Many of the approximately 10,000 offenders on the state's list are like Understein's neighbor: people who were convicted once of taking indecent liberties with a child or a similar offense involving relatives and acquaintances.
"There are very few strangers in the park with candy luring children away," said Kathleen Holbrook, president of the N.C. Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers. "It typically is an uncle, a brother, a stepbrother."
Some experts say that such people are unlikely to re-offend and that the best way to protect the public would be to focus on identifying, punishing and treating the relatively small number of dangerous sexual predators.
John Q. La Fond, a retired law professor at the University of Kansas-Missouri, said sex offender registries might have popular appeal, but they aren't necessarily sound public policy. "This is a question of political expediency," he said.
Politicians "are using sex offenders to get the sound bites, the headlines and votes, and I think this is a gross failure to serve the public interest," said La Fond, author of "Preventing Sexual Violence: How Society Should Cope with Sex Offenders," published by the American Psychological Association.
Instead, La Fond said, states should adopt systems like the one in Colorado, where the most threatening sex offenders are identified and set up with a team of supervisors. The team includes a polygraph expert, a treatment provider and a specially trained parole officer who tailor a "containment" plan for each offender.
North Carolina does have a similar "sex offender control program," and as of last year, the state Department of Correction reported that 744 offenders were being supervised through it.
Who Lives Where?
One frequently cited deficiency of the registry is that authorities have trouble keeping track of offenders, who don't always register or who move without notifying anyone. As of Friday, 219 offenders had failed to register, and 312 had moved without updating their addresses.
The state relies on offenders to tell the truth about their addresses each year by signing and returning a verification card to the local sheriff's office. Some local sheriff's offices try to check offenders' addresses, but this is not required, and no state funds are set aside for tracking offenders.
About a year ago, Investigator Chris Upchurch of the Orange County Sheriff's Office began knocking on offenders' doors to make sure they lived at their registered addresses. The second person he tried to check on, a convicted rapist, had moved out of the county to Durham two years earlier, Upchurch said. The offender's mother had been intercepting the sheriff's annual letter, taking it to her son to sign and then mailing it back.
The public should not have to rely on convicted offenders' verifying their addresses, Chatham County Sheriff Richard Webster said.
"That's the wrong person," he said.
To make it easier to keep tabs on offenders, the General Assembly is considering legislation that would require them to register in person within 48 hours of moving and to appear in person every six months at the sheriff's office for updated photos. Offenders also would have to pay $100 every year to the sheriff's office to offset registration costs.
Another proposal would keep offenders on the registry for life unless a judge approves removal. Other measures would prohibit offenders from working or living within 1,000 feet of a school, day-care center or swimming pool, require them to register in the counties where they work as well as where they live, and start an electronic tracking system for the most serious offenders.
Very Little Data
But it's not clear whether such laws would prevent sex crimes, said Michele Longe, program manager for the Minnesota-based Jacob Wetterling Foundation, which focuses on protecting children from exploitation.
Creating a perimeter around schools won't stop an offender from going there, Longe said. And a global positioning ankle bracelet does nothing more than track a person's movements.
"What's the GPS going to do?" she asked. "You pay a whole lot of money just to see where someone is standing, not what they are doing."
In May, a registered sex offender wearing an ankle bracelet was caught at a Chuck E. Cheese in Massachusetts taking photographs of children. An anonymous caller, not the bracelet, alerted authorities.
Nationwide, no comprehensive studies have examined whether registries and related measures have made people safer from sex offenders, said Scott Matson, a research associate for the Washington-based Center for Sex Offender Management, funded by the Department of Justice.
In fact, sex offenders may not pose a special danger to their own neighborhoods. "Sex offenders generally have cars and can get around," Matson said.
When state legislators approved North Carolina's registry, they presumed that sex offenders have an especially high risk of repeating their crimes. But that assumption also may be incorrect, Matson said.
"People have always looked to really high recidivism rates that aren't backed up by literature," he said.
Reliable statistics on sex offenses can be hard to find. In 2005, North Carolina authorities filed 16,693 sex offense charges, up 33 percent from five years earlier. Experts believe that many incidents of sex crimes are simply never reported.
Studies cited by the Center for Sex Offender Management show that 13 percent of child molesters nationwide were convicted of another sex offense within five years of getting out of prison. Rapists had a 19 percent reconviction rate, and 35 percent of sex offenders who targeted males were repeaters.
That was lower than the recidivism rate for those convicted of other types of crimes, according to one study cited by the Center for Sex Offender Management. It found that 47 percent of those released from prison for nonsexual crimes were reconvicted within three years. And of those who committed sex crimes, 46 percent were convicted of a subsequent, nonsexual offense within five years.
'One of the Best Things'
There are plenty of people who find the registry a helpful tool.
"The sex offender registry is one of the best things the legislature has ever passed, as far as I'm concerned," said Orange County Sheriff Lindy Pendergrass, who said he had no way of knowing before who might be living in his jurisdiction.
"It gives society notice so they can take protective action," said retired state Sen. Fountain Odom, a Charlotte Democrat and a sponsor of the bill that led to the online registry.
Those who support the registry say it can help prevent abuse by allowing people to check out potential baby sitters, Sunday school teachers or others who might have contact with children.
Sabrina Garcia, a domestic violence and sexual assault specialist at the Chapel Hill Police Department, contends that the registry deters would-be offenders. Because the consequence of a sex crime would be the public exposure and shame of being on the registry, some potential offenders might think twice, she said.
"A sex offender does not like anyone else to have knowledge or control of their actions," Garcia said. With the registry, "there is a certain degree of internal check."
Being on the registry did have an effect on the sex offender in Southern Village. After claiming that complaints by some of his neighbors made his life difficult, he left North Carolina for Florida. He is now listed on that state's sex offender registry.
Understein said his departure didn't make her feel safer.
"The unknown is what scares me the most," she said.
Staff writer Jessica Rocha can be reached at 932-2008 or jessica.rocha@newsoberver.com.
