The Washington Post’s Jerry Markon has an unsettling piece about law enforcement officer’s failure to stop sex offenders from repeating their crimes even with the recent proliferation of state sex offender registries and tracking devices.  These problems derive from the astonishing rise in federal resources to prosecute sex offenders:

The nationwide crackdown on child pornography and other sex offenses has created severe manpower shortages and technology challenges for probation officers, police and federal agents struggling to track offenders who are jumping online with cellphones and portable game systems and flocking to social networking and other sites, where children or pornography can easily be found.

There are more than 716,000 registered sex offenders nationwide, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, a 78 percent increase since 2001, and that does not include all offenders because some crimes do not require registration. Sex-offender registries have grown even faster in the Washington area, with more than 24,000 people listed. Not all receive the scrutiny given to such offenders as Shelton.

The focus on crimes against children that began in the Bush administration shows no sign of abating under President Obama. Federal child sexual exploitation prosecutions are up 147 percent since 2002, and the Justice Department is hiring 81 more prosecutors for these cases. Funding for task forces that bring charges in state courts rose this year from $16 million to $75 million.

There have perhaps been far more prosecutable sex offender crimes in the last ten years, thanks to the internet. But 147 percent more? During an era when the Justice Department cut down on prosecutions in case areas like corporate and environmental fraud? The Bush administration, under attorney generals John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, quietly staged a transformation of how the U.S. justice system deals with sex offenders

Just because Bush ran a bad Justice Department doesn’t mean this rise in prosecutions is bad. But as Markon reports, it’s not clear if this outpouring of resources is so far stemming the threat of sex offenders.

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