SORNA Reallocation Legal Review and Data Element Updates

Although progress has been made toward achieving substantial compliance with the Sex Offender Registration and Notification ACT (SORNA), the Kentucky Justice and Public Safety Cabinet (JPSC) has not yet achieved full compliance. 

As such, for this year’s potential reallocation the Justice and Public Safety Cabinet proposes to fund four specific areas: 1) Legal review within the Cabinet; 2) Purchase of Records (Court and Death); 3) Overtime; 4) Department of Kentucky State Police (KSP) Sex Offender Information Technology System (ITS) enhancements.

The JPSC will conduct a legal review of Kentucky Administrative Regulations (KAR) and Kentucky Revised Statues (KRS) to determine where the Commonwealth continues to be out of compliance, and in coordination with KSP and the Department of Corrections (DOC), will hold multiple meetings to identify specific field requirements and any barriers preventing software enhancements.  The meetings are critical to any future information technology upgrades.

A portion of an attorney’s time to research and recommend changes to the current regulations will be allocated to SORNA funds. The attorney duties would include, but not limited to, conducting reviews of the current regulations, coordinating draft regulations, leading stakeholder review meetings, drafting regulations, tracking regulations through the executive and legislative process, and conducting training for newly enacted regulations. The attorney would certify any contracts related to becoming substantially compliant.

A portion of the funding will be carved out for the purchase of court and death records to complete the offender files.  Several states and most government agencies charge for these documents whether in electronic or paper form. This funding would be used to pay for agreements necessary to establish electronic filing relationships with high volume use agencies within the Commonwealth and contiguous states.  Funding will also be used for direct payment of individual paper document purchases.

As system requirements are identified and technological advances are made, it’s anticipated that a large influx of data may occur which would require overtime for staff.  The JPSC would authorize overtime for existing staff to assist in updating the ITS and offender files as needed. 

The final and most critical stage of the project would entail working directly with the software contractor to implement the ITS with agreed up components to accept new data and perform regular interfaces with systems for which the JPSC has information technology agreements.