The Illinois House today approved legislation that would require registered sex offenders who work at or attend a college or university to register with security personnel at that school as well as with the state.
The bill (HB295) is the latest in an annual crop of bills toughening the rules for the roughly 25,000 people listed on the state's on-line sex-offender registry. It passed 107-3 without debate, and now moves to the Senate.
Other bills in wings this year would prohibit sex offenders from working at local fairs (HB1556), and automatically revoke the license of any health care worker on the sex-offender registry (HB1271). Another bill would apply retroactively to sex offenders who were convicted before there was a sex-offender registry, making them go back now and register (HB1253).
Proponents of such laws point out that sex offenders have among the highest rates of repeat offenses of any type of crime, and that many experts believe they can't ever be reliably reformed.