Repeat sexual offenders could face lifetime parole under a bill that passed out of the state House's Judiciary Committee yesterday.

The bill was one of three on the agenda aimed at sexual offenders and the only one to pass.

One that was deferred would have required life imprisonment without parole for a sexual assault against a child age 10 or younger.

Another would have allowed judges discretion to require offenders to wear global positioning system transmitters for up to 10 years after release from prison.

The GPS proposal received little testimony and less support, from those who deemed it unnecessary or even draconian.

State Rep. Jon Riki Karamatsu, who introduced the measure to track released offenders, said that even if the law is passed, he doesn't expect many offenders would end up wearing the GPS devices, but that he wants judges to have the option to require them at sentencing.

"This is only a last resort, in my opinion," he said.

GPS tracking of sex offenders, which Karamatsu said is already used in 23 states, would help police confirm or disprove an offender's alibi at the time of an assault.

It could also help dissuade some offenders from committing other crimes. "In his mind, the convict's mind, he knows he's being tracked," Karamatsu said.

However, several people wonder whether GPS tracking would be necessary in a state like Hawai'i, where a sex-offender treatment program has led to a very low recidivism rate. Since Jan. 1, 1996, only three of the 527 sex offenders released from prison have been reconvicted of another sex crime.

State public defender Jack Tonaki opposed the bill.

"Sex offenders are already monitored pretty closely through the registry law and they've got their pictures posted on the Internet and there are all kinds of regulations that already apply to them," he said. "I'm not sure it's necessary to have a GPS locator. I'm not sure what the purpose would be."

Such a law would intrude on what little privacy convicted sex offenders have left, he said. "They are entitled to live their lives if they are doing so in a law-abiding manner," he said.

Meda Chesney-Lind, a criminology professor at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa, said she was ambivalent about "these more draconian approaches to post-sentence punishments."

Nationally, a study of almost 10,000 sex offenders found that 5.3 percent were arrested for another crime within three years, she said. Looked at another way, she noted, "That means over 90 percent didn't. That's actually a fairly encouraging statistic."

Chesney-Lind credits the state's sex-offender treatment program for Hawai'i's even lower recidivism rate.

Barry Coyne, who heads the treatment program within the Department of Public Safety, said that in the 19 years since it was created, 1.4 percent of treated offenders have been convicted of another sex crime and none of them were child molesters.

The treatment program teaches convicts to recognize the patterns of behavior, thought and feeling that led them to commit the sexual offense, Coyne said. Once they get out of prison, they have a therapist and a field officer to help spot when they're about to relapse.

While Coyne was not familiar with this particular bill, he said that GPS would be good in a state like Florida, California or Texas, where there are no treatment programs and a problem with repeat offenders, but said that in Hawai'i, "We don't have that problem."

Reach Treena Shapiro at tshapiro@honoluluadvertiser.com.