Alaska FFY23 SORNA

The Alaska Department of Public Safety (DPS) applies for the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA) reallocation funding for federal fiscal year 2023 (FFY23). Reallocation funding received for prior years has allowed DPS to make progress supporting the national initiative to make records more readily available to other jurisdictions. Additionally, DPS has installed digital storage systems capable of handling the volume of sex offender registration records and developed a software package to support quick, accurate, and easily retrievable digital records. The DPS programming staff also developed a document archive system to maintain the digital records to store both historical and active records for easy retrieval in a centralized location.

Prior year grant and reallocation funding has enabled DPS to employ a full time Office Assistant  to prepare, index, and digitize SOR records. There are approximately 3,400 offenders on the sex offender registry. To date, the grant funded Office Assistant position has digitized all of the active case files and continues to digitize historical files. It is anticipated this project will be completed in calendar year 2023. 

The SOR office has experienced challenges in workflow during the pandemic due to the limited ability to work remotely.  Desktop computer workstations prevent SOR employees from working offsite for court hearings or when traveling to other locations.  In some cases, training laptops were repurposed with limited functionality for SOR staff.  Additionally, document scanners utilized by the SOR office are aging and approaching end of life.  Lastly, digital cameras for the SOR office are at end of life and need to be replaced.  The DPS utilizes these cameras to take photos of registrants and publishes those photos on the State of Alaska SOR website.   

The DPS has been awarded funds through the FFY22 Support for Adam Walsh Act Implementation Grant Program (SAWG) to replace the current SOR module that resides on a legacy mainframe system.  The DPS is currently under contract with Computer Projects of Illinois (CPI) to replace the SOR module.  The DPS is requesting to send to two employees to the annual CPI conference to network with other states currently utilizing the CPI SOR module to better prepare the DPS for when the new SOR module is tested and in production.   

DPS is seeking funding for three laptop workstations, four document scanners, two digital cameras, travel to the CPI annual conference.