When a convicted juvenile sex offender moved recently with his family from Alabama to Georgia, all supervision of him by court and law enforcement authorities ceased.
He was no longer tracked, even though the boy was far from completing his Alabama sentence, and Georgia could not require the youth to attend programs for sex offenders.
That’s because Georgia, for several years, has not been part of an interstate agreement that ensures juvenile offenders remain monitored when they cross jurisdictional lines. Georgia, in fact, is the only state that’s not a member of the Interstate Compact for Juveniles.
The Georgia Legislature passed a bill this year to join the compact, which pertains to youths who’ve been convicted of all sorts of crimes, not just sexual offences. The measure is now in the hands of Gov. Nathan Deal, who has until the end of this month to decide whether to sign House Bill 898 into law.
A spokesman for Deal said the governor will discuss the compact once he has acted on the bill.
In the meantime, there is no legal mechanism to require Georgia to work with other states or to require other states to work with Georgia in supervising juvenile offenders.
“We don’t know when juveniles are coming because they (other states) aren’t telling us. The only time we know is if they re-offend,” said state Rep. B.J. Pak, R-Lilburn, who sponsored HB 898.
An interstate compact for juvenile offenders was first drafted in 1955, and every state, including Georgia, was a member. A change in federal law gave the compact legal teeth once at least 35 states had signed, and beginning in 2008 it mandated the obligations for each state that was a part of it.
But Georgia never joined the new pact. Former Gov. Sonny Perdue, who was in office when the question of signing the revised contract arose, said through a spokesman he could not remember why Georgia abstained.
When the grace period to join expired on June 30, 2011, most states stopped notifying Georgia when juvenile offenders relocated to this state. And even when Georgia was notified, there was no legal means for transferring supervision responsibilities.
The main issue is public safety. If Georgia authorities don’t know an out-of-state juvenile offender is here, they can’t watch him. Even if that youth has violated probation by crossing into Georgia, there is no legal mechanism to send him back without first being a member of the interstate compact.
“Georgia is considered an asylum state,” Michael Brennan, administrator of probation services for the Lucas County Juvenile Court in Ohio, wrote in an email. “When our kids end up there, we have no recourse through interstate compact to get them back; likewise, kids from Georgia that end up in our state provide us the same dilemma.”
But there are also financial consequences. It costs $247 per day to incarcerate one youthful offender, according to the Georgia Department of Juvenile Justice. If Georgia were a member of the compact, and an out-of-state juvenile offender ended up behind bars here, the state that originally sentenced the youth would pay Georgia for the cost of detention — something that’s especially true with runaways. As it stands now, Georgia taxpayers are simply stuck with the tab.
In the case of the Alabama juvenile sex offender who moved with his family to Troup County, Alabama authorities and the Troup juvenile court judge tried to find a way to transfer supervision of the boy to Georgia.
They hit a legal brick wall.
"He was a serious child molester, a child who was a child molester," said Troup County Judge Michael Key. "I desperately tried to find a way to supervise that child. We did have this serial offender and I could not require him to do anything."
The boy — who Key recalls was 12 or 13 when he arrived in Georgia — is now on probation for a crime he later committed in Troup, although it was not a sex offense.
Members of the Interstate Compact for Juveniles have access to a database that tracks where juvenile offenders are and what their legal status is.
At the time the grace period for joining the compact ended in June 2011, Georgia was supervising about 1,200 youthful offenders from other states, said Phyllis Hall of the Georgia Department of Juvenile Justice.
“That’s a huge responsibility to make sure anybody who is here is being governed,” Hall said.
Without membership in the compact, “it’s hard to gauge how many kids are going back and forth from state to state,” said Clayton County Juvenile Court Judge Steven Teske.
States that border Georgia “have worried about kids coming and going,” said Ashley Lippert, executive director of the Interstate Commission for Juveniles.
“I can’t tell you how happy Florida is” at the prospect of Georgia rejoining the compact, Lippert said.
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