Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act: A Sketch (CRS Report for Congress)
| Release Date |
April 17, 2007 |
| Report Number |
RS22646 |
| Report Type |
Report |
| Authors |
Charles Doyle, American Law Division |
| Source Agency |
Congressional Research Service |
Summary:
The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, P.L. 109-248 (H.R. 4472), serves four purposes. It reformulates the federal standards for sex offender registration in state, territorial and tribal sexual offender registries, and does so in a manner designed to make the system more uniform, more inclusive, more informative and more readily available to the public online. It amends federal criminal law and procedure, featuring a federal procedure for the civil commitment of sex offenders, random search authority over sex offenders on probation or supervised release, a number of new federal crimes, and sentencing enhancements for existing federal offenses. It creates, amends, or revives several grant programs designed to reinforce private, state, local, tribal and territorial prevention; law enforcement; and treatment efforts in the case of crimes committed against children. It calls for a variety of administrative or regulatory initiatives in the interest of child safety, such as the creation of the National Child Abuse Registry.
This is an abridged version of CRS Report RL33967, Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act: A Legal Analysis, by Charles Doyle, without the footnotes and citations to authority found in the longer report.
