With Congress entering its August recess, Senators Schumer and Clinton held dueling press events in the New York area yesterday to tout pending legislation aimed at creating a nationwide public database of convicted sex offenders.

From the steps of the Richmond County Courthouse at St. George on Staten Island, Mr. Schumer stumped for a bill that would standardize registration rules, require more frequent registration by convicts, and make it a federal crime to fail to register or update one’s registration.

At about the same time, Mrs. Clinton was appearing with Rep. Nita Lowey at the Clarkstown Town Hall on Long Island to urge the House of Representatives to approve a somewhat narrower measure that the Senate passed on Thursday, the Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Database Act. It would allow the public to search sex offender databases across state lines and would require states to “intensively monitor” certain high-risk inmates for at least a year, even if they are not on probation or parole.

“Convicted sex offenders shouldn’t be able to escape the letter of the law just by moving across state lines,” Mr. Schumer, a Democrat, said in a statement.

Mrs. Clinton, a Democrat, said the law the Senate approved Thursday, by unanimous consent, would help parents fulfill their most basic responsibilities. “Parents – and all concerned citizens – should have the ability to access information to see if a convicted sex offender is living in their neighborhood or near other places where their children spend time,” the senator said.

Ms. Lowey, a Democrat of New York, said the measure was a step toward preventing sex offenders from committing further crimes. “Because of high recidivism rates, Congress can and must do more to see that offenders who could strike again are not roaming our streets,” she said.

The Dru Sjodin bill that Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Lowey highlighted yesterday is named for a 22-year-old college student who was abducted from a Grand Forks, N.D., shopping mall in November 2003 and found dead several months later. A man released without supervision from a Minnesota prison in May 2003 after serving a 23-year jail term for rape, Alfonso Rodriguez Jr., was charged with Sjodin’s kidnapping and murder. He could face the death penalty and has pleaded not guilty.

The episode led to a public outcry about the failure to monitor Rodriguez after his release, and to calls for greater coordination among law enforcement officials in various states.

Mrs. Clinton is also a co-sponsor of the broader offender registration measure that Mr. Schumer was promoting yesterday. That bill is pending before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

An advocate for closer tracking of sex offenders said the biggest gaps in the current system are not due to lack of coordination, but lack of funds. “The laws we have now are fairly good, with a little bit of tightening up. Where we run into challenges is not having funding,” the executive director of the Jacob Wetterling Foundation, Nancy Sabin, said.

The bill Mr. Schumer touted requires offenders to notify their state within three days of a change of address, employment, or school, but Ms. Sabin said that will be of little significance if the paperwork sits on a desk for months. “In many of the states, because of budgetary cuts, the data entry on sex offender registry information is backlogged a year,” said Ms. Sabin, whose foundation is named for an 11-year-old Minnesota boy abducted in 1989 and never found.

Mrs. Clinton noted that the federal database of sex offenders was created during the administration of her husband, President Clinton. The new legislation would make that federal compilation available to the general public.

Last month, the Justice Department took a step in that direction as it rolled out a Web site that allows users to search the already-public databases of multiple states at one time. At the moment, the site, www.nsopr.gov, provides data from only 21 states and the District of Columbia.

Data about New York is not yet available through the federal Web site, though the state does maintain its own online registry. Officials said they hope to bring all states on to the federal site by year’s end.

Critics of laws requiring public notification about sex offenders in the community say there is no evidence that such measures actually prevent crimes. The critics also argue that by encouraging the ostracism of sex offenders, the laws could increase recidivism.

“I’ve never heard of a case of public notification preventing a crime,” a Massachusetts psychologist who treats sex offenders, Barbara Schwartz, said. “I’m just waiting for the first offense I can attribute directly to public notification. I have had patients kill themselves over public notification.” She said she expects little sympathy. “I know the public would say, ‘So be it. Better off without them.'”

A psychologist who works with Ms. Schwartz and searches for patterns in sex offenses, Robert Prentky, said episodes where released sex offenders have been forced to move from community to community and have been unable to find work demonstrate a danger of public notification. “There may be an unintended, inadvertent consequence of compelling those people to find it so stressful to live in society, to return back to the relative lack of stress of the prison environment,” he said.

Asked if the notification measures are effective, Mr. Prentky said, “They may be effective at getting politicians re-elected.”

All of the pending bills delve into criminal justice issues that have traditionally been resolved by states. If mandatory, the federal legislation would be vulnerable to constitutional challenges. The new measures would be enforced by taking away a portion of federal crime-related grant money from states that failed to comply, a mechanism the courts have generally upheld.