Sex Offender Management Discretionary Grant Program, FY 2003

About the Sex Offender Management Discretionary Grant Program

OJP has a longstanding commitment to assist policymakers and practitioners in developing and enhancing effective approaches to managing sex offenders. This commitment has been expressed in numerous ways, including the sponsorship of a variety of research, training and technical assistance, and programmatic efforts. In addition, over the past 4 fiscal years, OJP has sponsored a grant program to support state, local, and tribal jurisdictions as they enhance their sex offender management practices. In fiscal year (FY) 1999, OJP awarded 28 jurisdictions a total of $3.2 million in grant funding under the Sex Offender Management Discretionary Grant Program (authorized by 42 U.S.C. § 13941). In FY 2000, 12 jurisdictions received $1.3 million in funding. In FY 2001, an additional 21 jurisdictions received $2.96 million in funding through this grant program, and in FY 2002, $2.5 million in grant funds were awarded to an additional 11 jurisdictions. During FY 2002, BJA assumed administration of the Sex Offender Management Discretionary Grant Program.

Understanding the Problem

Managing sex offenders to protect the public and reduce victimization is of great concern and interest to the nation. As of February 2001, 386,000 registered sex offenders were in our communities,⁽¹⁾ and approximately 18,000 sex offenders are released each year from state and federal prisons.⁽²⁾ Careful consideration of how to transition incarcerated offenders and effectively manage others sentenced directly to a period of community supervision is of critical importance to the safety of our communities.

In recent years, considerable attention has been paid to the community management of sex offenders. Jurisdictions across the country have worked diligently to ensure that specialized approaches have been established that promote accountability for these offenders, coupled with providing interventions that are designed to decrease the likelihood of recidivism. A continuum of services—from presentence investigation to institutional programming and postrelease community supervision and treatment that is tailored to the risk and needs of each offender—is vital to the safety of victims and the community.

The criminal justice system responds to public safety and offender needs less like a system and more as a series of minisystems. Jurisdictions with strong, institutionally based treatment regimens that are designed to confront and ameliorate the risk factors that have led to incarceration may release into the community an offender who lacks a network of essential aftercare services or specialized supervision. Likewise, a jurisdiction with a sex offender-specific strategy for community supervision—including specialized monitoring and accountability measures and sex offender-specific treatment services—may provide these management strategies without comparing them to those offered in correctional institutions or without taking full advantage of other essential components of community reintegration, such as employment, housing, family support, and other community-based affiliations.

The extraordinary harm these offenders perpetrate, compounded by the public's fear and the media's attention to these cases, demand deliberate crafting of a continuum of management strategies to address the circumstances of each phase of the sanctioning process. Management strategies must provide for specialized monitoring, sound accountability measures, treatment interventions that have been demonstrated to be effective in reducing recidivism with sex offenders, and the building of responsible partnerships among correctional institutions, the communities to which offenders will return, and the offenders themselves.

To be as effective as possible, this continuum of sex offender management strategies must integrate the knowledge developed to date from empirically based research on adult and juvenile sex offenders as well as relevant research conducted on the broader offender population. Where gaps in the research remain, policymakers and practitioners must rely on their experience and the practices of others to implement a comprehensive array of sex offender management strategies.

A comprehensive approach to this issue addresses all of the phases of offender management, including the:

• Investigation, pretrial management, prosecution, and adjudication of these offenders.
  
  
• Thorough, ongoing assessments of an offender's level of risk and correctional needs.
  
  
• Design and delivery of effective sex offender-specific treatment services in institutions and the community.
  
  
• Reentry of offenders from institutions to communities.
  
  
• Community supervision of adult and juvenile sex offenders under correctional supervision.
  
  
• Use of registration and community notification where appropriate.

Furthermore, to be as effective as possible, emerging practice suggests that these phases of management are best developed and delivered in a jurisdiction-specific, multidisciplinary, collaborative context that values victim safety, public education, specialized knowledge, and program monitoring and evaluation to ensure the ongoing integrity of management and programming efforts.

FY 2003 Sex Offender Management Discretionary Grant Program

To facilitate the prevention of further victimization, BJA has identified several critical need areas in sex offender management. They include the following:

• The need to encourage jurisdictions to focus their attention on the full continuum of activities and services necessary to address this population, including the investigation, prosecution, adjudication, assessment, confinement, treatment, reentry, and community supervision of sex offenders.
  
  
• The need to assist jurisdictions as they critically assess their current sex offender management practices by providing the information, tools, and resources necessary for them to undertake a deliberate process to evaluate and develop strategies to improve their practices.
  
  
• The need to add continually to the knowledge base on the effectiveness of these approaches.

To assist jurisdictions in their efforts to prevent further victimization through more effective management of sex offenders, the Sex Offender Management Discretionary Grant Program is designed to:

• Support jurisdictions as they forge new relationships among the local agencies involved in this work.
  
  
• Encourage jurisdictions to focus on the effective management of adult and juvenile sex offenders by engaging key stakeholders in a process that will build the knowledge base of practices currently employed by the jurisdiction.
  
  
• Encourage jurisdictions to focus their attention on the full continuum of activities and services needed to address this population across the sanctioning continuum, including investigation, prosecution, adjudication, assessment, confinement, treatment, reentry, and community supervision.
  
  
• Support jurisdictions by providing information and tools they can use to inventory and assess their current practice of managing sex offenders and work to expand and improve their existing array of sex offender management strategies.
  
  
• Aid jurisdictions as they collect information to document and evaluate the effectiveness of these approaches and their outcomes.

Grant Program Goals

The goal of the FY 2003 grant program is to identify a select number of jurisdictions that are interested in reducing crimes committed by sex offenders by engaging in a collaborative process with BJA via the Center for Sex Offender Management (CSOM) to better manage this population through effective strategies. In so doing, it is expected that participating jurisdictions will:

• Undergo a deliberate, structured, cross-system analysis of their current sex offender management strategies and practices and determine their strengths and areas that need enhancement.
  
  
• Following this critical assessment, develop and implement a set of strategies to improve the management of sex offenders.
  
  
• Achieve some reductions in crimes committed by sex offenders.

Grant Process and Activities

This grant program will be administered in two phases.

Phase I of the grant program (months 1 to 6 of the 24-month program) will involve the following activities:

• Finalizing a multidisciplinary collaborative team that comprise all of the policymakers whose agencies affect or are affected by the management of sex offenders in the jurisdiction.
  
  
• Establishing a structure—including staff support and an information collection and analysis capacity—that will support the work of the collaborative policy team.
  
  
• Establishing a set of team operating norms—including a regular meeting schedule and an agreement to participate fully in an information-based assessment and analysis process that will examine critically all of the policies and practices currently in place that pertain to the management of sex offenders in the participating jurisdiction.
  
  
• Establishing a close working relationship with BJA.
  
  
• Collecting data and information that address issues specifically relating to the strategy.
  
  
• Developing a strategy that addresses specifically the jurisdiction's most significant needs with respect to improving sex offender management practices as evidenced through the assessment and analysis process. A narrative explaining and justifying this strategy, along with an accompanying budget, work plan, and timeline, will be submitted to BJA as the final Phase I product of the grant program.

Phase II of the grant program (months 7 to 24 of the 24-month program) will involve the following activities:

• Implementing the proposed strategy (following approval from BJA) under the direct oversight of the multidisciplinary collaborative policy team.
  
  
• Communicating regularly with BJA.
  
  
• Participating in and receiving technical assistance, as needed, to support the implementation phase.
  
  
• Designing and implementing a monitoring and evaluation plan that will document the strategies implemented and their outcomes, as well as developing a base for ongoing information collection and analysis beyond the grant period.
  
  
• Supporting BJA's efforts to refine tools and other resource materials for other jurisdictions that may engage in a similar process.

Requirements for All Applicants

All grantees must be willing to participate in an open, collaborative process throughout the grant period. This requires the full commitment of all policymakers who oversee agencies that affect or are affected by sex offender management. These individuals and the agencies and systems they represent must be willing to engage in a process of critically assessing the effectiveness of current sex offender management strategies and be willing to identify areas of improvement and implement strategies that are likely to result in more positive outcomes that will achieve the goals of community management and maximize victim safety and support. Thus, to develop and maintain a comprehensive approach to sex offender management, it is essential that a policy-level team be established to examine a jurisdiction's current practices, consider how those practices can be improved, and provide oversight in the implementation of those improvements.

All grantees will be required to convene a multidisciplinary collaborative team for this project. All activities will be conducted within the context of that team. If no collaborative team that addresses sex offender management is currently in place, applicants will be required to list the names and agency affiliations of team members who will participate on such a team. Where such teams are already in place, applicants will be required to describe these teams in detail and the role of each member and discuss the addition of new members (if their inclusion is necessary) to meet the requirements noted below.

Collaborative teams typically include law enforcement, prosecution, defense, the judiciary, corrections, treatment, victim advocacy, and others who can contribute to monitoring, supervising, or providing services to these offenders, including polygraph examiners, school officials, community- and faith-based organizations, employers, mentors, family, and friends.

Applicants are required to submit a copy of the memorandum of understanding among agencies involved in the collaborative team as part of attachment 3 of the application. At a minimum, teams should comprise all of the disciplines involved in sex offender management across the sanctioning continuum, including the following:

• Community corrections.
• Institutional corrections.
• Release decisionmaking authority (i.e., parole board member).
• Law enforcement.
• Judiciary.
• Prosecution.
• Criminal defense bar.
• Sex offender-specific treatment providers (institutional and community based).
• Nongovernmental victim advocacy.

In addition to the required collaborators noted above, jurisdictions should include others on the collaborative team that can assist in the achievement of the program's goals or that have a stake in its outcome. For example, jurisdictions are strongly encouraged to include:

• Noncriminal justice service providers who represent community-based and faith-based organizations.
  
  
• Polygraph examiners.
  
  
• School and social service representatives (particularly for those jurisdictions working with juvenile sex offenders).
  
  
• Members of the medical community and others who influence, enhance, or are affected by the jurisdictions' sex offender management practices.
  
  
• Other individuals who can assist the team in developing or incorporating strategies for sexual abuse prevention.

Team members should be those with the authority and responsibility for developing policy and influencing practice within their organizations. Team members must be willing to create an environment for change, examine the jurisdiction's current approach to sex offender management, consider how that approach can be improved, commit to following the recommendations of the team, and provide oversight in carrying out those recommendations.

Each selected jurisdiction is expected to convene regular meetings of its collaborative team. Applicants who demonstrate the active participation and commitment of these individuals will receive preference in the review process. In addition, members of the collaborative team will attend offsite technical assistance and training events. To the extent possible, the team membership is expected to remain constant throughout the duration of the grant period.

Grantees also must create a work plan that addresses the two phases of this project.

Phase I (months 1 to 6)

The work plan shall address the process to:

• Establish and/or convene the multidisciplinary team.
• Identify who will attend the project workshop.
• Conduct the inventory and assessment of current practice.
• Develop and prioritize approaches to improve current practice.
• Create a strategic plan (work plan, Phase II).

Applicants are encouraged to go to the CSOM web site to see an overview of tools that will be used to conduct their systemwide assessment of sex offender management practices.

Phase II (months 7 to 24)

The work plan shall address:

• The team's implementation approaches to improve current practice.
• How the approaches to be implemented will accomplish its stated goals.
• The team's plan for monitoring the implementation of these approaches.
• The process to be used to identify performance measures.
• How to identify what data to collect.
• The process to determine the methods to be used to collect data.
• The person or organization responsible for data collection.
• The process to be used to provide the team with results of the monitoring information for near-term review and possible midcourse correction.

All applicants are required to include work plans in their application. A sample work plan is attached in appendix B. Work plans must be agreed on by all members of the collaborative team and must detail those team members responsible for each task. Also, work plans should be referenced in the memorandum of understanding as a statement of work that participating agencies have agreed on.

1 Adams, D. 2002. Summary of State Sex Offender Registries, 2001. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics.

2 Greenfeld, L. 1997. Sex Offenses and Offenders: An Analysis of Data on Rape and Sexual Assault. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics.