Indiana was rated the best state in providing information about sex offenders on the internet while Hawaii, Nebraska and South Dakota were rated the least forthcoming by the Marion Brechner Citizen Access Project in UF’s College of Journalism and Communications. Florida was rated 35th.

“Parents can look at the project’s Web site and say ‘this is a state that provides more information than anyone else’ or ‘these states don’t provide information,” says Bill Chamberlin, director of the Citizen Access Project and Joseph Brechner Eminent Scholar of Freedom of Information. “We tracked distribution of sex offender information because it was the subject of a recent Supreme Court opinion and we knew it was a topic a lot of citizens are interested in.”

The UF project is the first to systematically rate state laws on the accessibility to information about sex offenders, Chamberlin says.