Nearly a decade into an effort to reduce the glut of sex offenders on the state registry to allow more intense focus on the most dangerous, a bureaucratic morass has nearly doubled the registry instead.
The Oregon parole board remains bogged down in state-mandated assessments to gauge the risk of each offender to commit new crimes.
Of 32,523 people on the sex offender registry, almost two-thirds, or 20,575, are waiting to be classified into one of the state’s three notification levels: Level 1 for low risk, Level 2 for medium risk and Level 3 for high risk.
The backlog has kept hundreds of low-level sex offenders in limbo. Those who stay crime-free for years can petition to no longer register. But they must wait until the state gets around to reclassifying their risk level to petition for relief.
State lawmakers have twice extended a 2016 deadline to complete the risk assessments and set aside more than $6 million for the work. The deadline now is December 2026, but state officials tasked with the job aren’t confident they can meet even that date.
Last year, the state parole board’s executive director, Dylan Arthur, told a legislative committee that it would take two more decades with the current funding and staff to finish.
The reclassifications began in 2014 after the Legislature passed a bill the year before that was touted as a public safety measure to allow the state to focus resources on those at highest risk to commit new sex crimes.
The law was supposed to create uniformity in assigning risk levels based on a single assessment tool instead of the discretion of trial judges based on criminal charges and convictions.
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