It used to be that only sex offenders and the most dangerous felons — such as rapists, murderers and child molesters — were required to submit to DNA testing in Kansas.

Today, however, the state is amassing a much broader inventory of criminals’ genetic information.

All Kansas felons, regardless of whether their crimes were violent, must suffer the needle prick of a DNA blood sample upon conviction. Even people convicted of some misdemeanors — including cruelty to animals or patronizing a prostitute — must submit to testing based on a law passed last year by the Legislature.

But the state’s ever-growing DNA dragnet is raising questions of public policy as well as personal privacy.

The database that houses information from the samples has expanded so much in recent years that the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, which processes and stores the samples, is struggling to keep up with the workload. A DNA analysis costs about $50, and each time the law broadens, the hit to the state goes up.

“We’ve had a very difficult time paying for the expansion to all felons,” said Kyle Smith, a KBI spokesman.

About a year ago, a scene that could be likened to a DNA-gathering fair for criminals unfolded in the basement of the Douglas County Judicial & Law Enforcement Center, 111 E. 11th St.

An estimated 80 to 100 people, mostly convicted offenders who were on probation, passed through a line in a basement conference room to have their blood drawn for DNA sampling, said Michelle Roberts, the county’s chief court-services officer.

“We had people lined up in the hallways waiting,” she said.

Blood samples now are required of every convicted felon in Kansas so that authorities can add to a national DNA database.

The event and others like it around the state were in response to the passage of House Bill 2880, which, as of May 2002, required a much broader group of offenders to have DNA samples drawn and sent to the KBI.

The law, introduced by State Rep. Larry Campbell, R-Olathe, for the first time required all Kansas felons to give DNA. It applied to juveniles as well as adults, and it included people who still were serving sentences, not just those sentenced after the law went into effect.

The law also singled out for testing certain misdemeanor offenders, including those convicted of lewd and lascivious behavior, patronizing a prostitute — when one of the parties is under age 18 — and “criminal sodomy,” defined as the act of intercourse between members of the same sex or between a person and animal.

KBI spokesman Smith said his agency had requested adding some of the crimes, such as cruelty to animals, which he said often served as a precursor to sex offenses. Other crimes were added at the request of legislators, he said. Campbell couldn’t be reached by telephone for comment.

Like fingerprinting, DNA analysis is based on a simple idea: that incontrovertible, identifying physical evidence solves crimes and keeps the community safer. It also has the potential to exonerate wrongly convicted criminals.

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“It’s so hard to argue with DNA,” Smith said.

Privacy concerns

But unlike fingerprints, DNA carries the potential to reveal yet-untold amounts of detailed personal information. That’s what makes centralized DNA databases a controversial subject.

“If they are moving to the direction of greater collection, one of the concerns would be that there would be a parallel effort to secure your privacy rights around the distribution of that information,” said Steven Maynard-Moody, director of Kansas University’s Policy Research Institute. “The legal protections around these sorts of things are far behind the technological advances.”

State law says the DNA records taken from criminals must be confidential and can be released only to authorized criminal-justice agencies. Smith said the type of analysis the KBI performed could only identify people — not reveal information such as family history or predisposition to health conditions.

But some federal lawmakers are pushing for more detailed privacy assurances. Bills introduced earlier this year in both the U.S. House and Senate would have directed Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft to establish regulations that limited access to criminals’ DNA samples and protected their privacy rights. Those bills never got out of committee, according to online records.

At last year’s mass DNA gathering in Douglas County, people seemed more worried about being stuck by a needle than about their privacy rights, said Roberts, the court-services officer.

Jeff Hahn, a DNA Database scientist for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, does lab work on DNA samples sent to the lab from agencies around the state.

“We haven’t really had that much resistance from it,” she said. “By the time they hit us, it’s a done deal.”

How it’s done

Blood samples from Douglas County criminals usually are drawn by the Lawrence-Douglas County Health Department and are sent to the KBI lab in Topeka for preliminary processing.

The KBI then sends the samples to federally approved, private out-of-state labs, which treat them with enzymes and chemicals that react with the DNA to reveal a unique pattern that can be expressed numerically, Smith said. The sample returns to the KBI, where a scientist examines it to make sure it’s been properly processed. The data from the sample then goes into the KBI’s database, which is part of a nationwide FBI effort called the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS.

The nationwide database now contains information from about 16,000 Kansas offenders along with offenders from all other states except Rhode Island and Mississippi. CODIS also contains unidentified samples of DNA taken from scenes of unsolved crimes.

Since Kansas’ new law took effect last year, however, thousands of the samples have been sitting around because the state hasn’t had the money to process them.

Where the law once said the KBI “may” participate in the federal system, it now says the state “shall” participate in the system. But the Legislature appropriated no new state general-fund money to accommodate the increase of samples produced each year, though that number grew from 2,000 to roughly 10,000, Smith said.

“We kind of created our own nightmare there,” Smith said.

As of last week, the KBI had about 22,000 samples it had taken from criminals but had not yet sent for testing. That number will dwindle greatly in the weeks ahead because the state just received a $337,000 federal grant to analyze them.

The state received a similar federal grant for $369,900 three years ago, which officials said at the time would ease a backlog of 7,398 samples.

Kansas’ approach to DNA sampling stands in contrast to Iowa’s. That state’s Legislature decided two years ago to expand DNA testing from a limited number of criminals — such as murderers and kidnappers — to all felons.

But the law contained a clause that said the change only would take effect when the state’s Department of Public Safety could show that it had the money to pay for the increased lab fees. So far, the Iowa changes have yet to take effect.

“People here don’t like to have laws on the books that they can’t comply with,” said Doug Marek, a deputy attorney general in Iowa.