SPRINGFIELD - Every year, Illinois' list of registered sex offenders grows. And every year, the legislature introduces a new crop of bills to restrict where they can live, where they can walk or stand, what they can drive, even what they can wear. | Monitoring local sex offenders can be a chore

New bills would crack down on sex offenders who try to sign up for Internet dating sites, would prohibit them from driving ice cream trucks or donning Santa costumes and would prevent them from visiting nursing homes. One bill mandates that their movements be monitored for life by satellite.

Those bills, if ultimately passed into law, would join a long list of boundaries already encircling the state's roughly 23,400 (and counting) registered sex offenders. Currently on the books in Illinois are laws prohibiting more than one sex offender from living in the same household while on parole; requiring that they have their names and images posted online, generally for life; and barring them from living within 500 feet of schools, from loitering near playgrounds, or from working in youth programs.

Similar restrictions have been proposed in Missouri. For example, in 2006 the egislature increased mandatory sentences for sex offenders and increased the number of offenders who would be electronically monitored. But a measure pushed last year by then-Gov. Matt Blunt calling for the death penalty for child rapists did not get to a vote.

Lawmakers in Illinois say the special nature of sex crimes makes tighter restrictions on them necessary.

"If you look at the recidivism rate of sex offenders, it's over 50 percent," said state Rep. Jack Franks, D-Woodstock, sponsor of the new satellite monitoring legislation. "These people can't be cured."

Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union have argued that restrictions that extend past a convict's prison sentence and parole time - extending in many cases to a lifetime - are unconstitutional.

Courts have ruled otherwise, and even the Chicago ACLU today acknowledges that debate is over. But they and others say there are still legitimate concerns that the proliferation of sex-offender restrictions could become unmanageable for the state, and so onerous for the offenders that some will attempt to evade the registration system altogether.

"At a very pragmatic level, if you create so many harsh rules that there is literally no place for this person to live … they'll try to live 'off the books'," said Chicago ACLU spokesman Ed Yohnka. "Then whatever value that system had goes out the window."

Another side of the issue is state enforcement complications when so many restrictions are in place.

Franks, the legislator, ran into that problem when he filed his bill (HB327) to require that sex offenders wear electronic monitoring devices for life so their movements can be tracked by a global positioning system. The state Department of Corrections told him they simply can't afford the cost of such a system.

"Say you have a person who is released when he's 45 years old. It could be 30 years of monitoring," said Franks. Given the state's budgetary problems, he said, he is planning to scale back the legislation to require GPS monitoring only while the person is on parole.

An official with the Illinois Department of Corrections, which is in charge of much of the monitoring and other requirements for released sex offenders, said there are concerns about the annual influx of proposed new mandates.

"It does get difficult," said Alyssa Williams-Schafer, who handles sex-offender issues for the Department of Corrections. "Every legislative session, the restrictions change. … Some of the restrictions make it difficult to even find housing for them."

The proliferation of restrictions concerns even some of lawmakers filing the bills. Rep. Bill Black, R-Danville, has sponsored a measure (HB637) that would prohibit sex offenders from visiting nursing homes. He said he agreed to file the bill at the behest of a constituent who was distressed to learn that a registered sex offender was visiting a relative in a nursing home where his own relative lived.

"I told him I'd file it and we'll see where it goes … but I'm not particularly comfortable with this bill," said Black. "You want to take all prudent precautions, but how far can you go (with new restrictions)? At some point, I don't know how much further we can go."

Franks acknowledged that there are some concerns about whether lawmakers are "piling on" with new restrictions on sex offenders year after year, to the point that it could become difficult to enforce the laws.

"But we keep hearing more and more sinister aspects of (sex offenders') behavior that we hadn't thought of before," he said. "That's why you see additional legislation."

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Legislative response

The following is a summary of new bills that would impose further restrictions on registered sex offenders in Illinois. The state's sex-offender registry is at isp.state.il.us/sor/

- HB249: Would create the "Internet Dating Disclosure and Safety Awareness Act," requiring that Internet dating services tell their Illinois customers whether they screen clients through sex-offender registries.

- HB435: Would prohibit sex offenders from participating in holiday events involving minors, and from being employed as a department store Santa Claus or wearing an Easter Bunny costume near Easter.

- HB463: Would require that sex offenders whose crimes involved computers submit to restrictions on Internet usage, electronic monitoring of their computers, and random searches of their computers.

- HB550: Would bar sex offenders from using any computer "scrub" software designed to hide what Web sites have been visited.

- SB62: Makes it a Class 4 felony for a convicted child sex offender to operate an emergency vehicle or ice cream truck "for the purpose of attracting or enticing a person under 18 years of age to be in the presence of the offender."

- SB1294: Bars convicted sex offenders from entering any part of a public library that has been designated as a children's area.