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SPECIAL OPERATIONS
DIVISION
Special Victims Unit -
SORT Section
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The Sex Offender Registration and
Tracking Section (SORT) was created to take a pro-active step towards
protecting Clayton County's women and children. This section is
tasked with creating and maintaining a sex offender registry for
Clayton County. This section will track different types of crimes
such as statutory rape, child molestation, and sexual battery.
The SORT Unit also confirms the location of these offenders and
makes sure they are not in prohibited locations. |
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History
Prior to 1994,
only five states required convicted sex offenders to register their
addresses with local law enforcement. As recognition of the
severity of this problem grew, Congress passed the
Jacob Wetterling
Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Act, 42 U.S.C.
§
14071, et seq. (the "Wetterling Act"). This requires
state implementation of a sex offender registration program or a ten
percent (10%) forfeiture of federal funds for state and local law
enforcement under the Byrne Grant Program of the U. S. Department of
Justice. Today, all fifty states have sex offender registries. |
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The Challenge
There are
currently over 670,000 registered sex offenders in the United
States. Sex offenders pose an enormous challenge for policy
makers: they evoke unparalleled fear among constituents; their
offenses are associated with a great risk of psychological harm; and
most of their victims are children and youth. As policy makers
address the issue of sex offenders, they are confronted with some
basic realities:
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Most sex offenders are not in
prison, and those who are tend to serve limited sentences.
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Most sex offenders are largely
unknown to people in the community.
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Sex offenders have a high risk of
re-offending.
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While community supervision and
oversight is widely recognized as essential, the system for
providing such supervision is overwhelmed.
The increased
mobility of our society has led us to "lost"
sex offenders, those who fail to comply with registration duties yet
remain undetected due to law enforcement's inability to track their
whereabouts. A conservative estimate of the number of "lost"
sex offenders is at least 100,000
nationwide. The wide disparity among the state programs in
both registration and notification procedures permits sex offenders
to "forum-shop," research which states have the least stringent
laws, in order to live in communities with relative anonymity. |
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O. C. G. A.
§ 42-1-12
After July 1, 1996, a person
convicted of a criminal offense against a victim who is a minor or
who is convicted of a sexually violent offense shall register as a
sex offender within ten days after his/her release from prison or
placement on parole, supervised release or probation. Also,
his/her name, current address, place of employment and the name and
address of places of education, and the crime for which they have
been convicted of shall be registered with the sheriff's office of
the county in which they reside in as well.
It shall be the
duty of the Sheriff of each
county within this state to maintain a register of the names and
addresses of all registered offenders within the sheriff's
jurisdiction whose names have been provided by the Georgia Bureau of
Investigation to the sheriff under this code section. |
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Resources
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