It's often a needle-in-a-haystack search - and the main reason the state is more than a year behind in holding hearings for violent offenders, many who've served long prison terms and eligible for parole.

These include people convicted of robbery, rape, assault, manslaughter and some burglaries.

"We have 2,500 cases backlogged because of the difficulty notifying victims," said Cynthia Dillard, assistant executive director of the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles.

Youngblood once was assigned to find victims in a fast-food restaurant robbery. The only name she had was the cashier's. "Our department wanted to know who the other people were who were present who maybe were threatened. And there were no names. ... but I was supposed to find all of the unnamed customers who might have been terrorized," Youngblood said.

"I try hard to find these victims, but sometimes it's not possible," she said.

Board officials are hoping a bill passes in the Legislature's final meeting day next week that would ease victim notification requirements. One version has passed the House. A slightly different version has passed a Senate committee and is pending before the full Senate.

However, an amendment added in the Senate Judiciary committee troubles victim's advocate Miriam Shehane, which could spell trouble for the bill.

Shehane said that victims groups, the parole board and the Alabama Sentencing Commission originally came to a consensus, and she agreed not to fight the bill as long as the board was still required to exercise due diligence in its initial attempt to find victims for parole hearings. Then, if a victim could not be found, the board would not have to repeat the extensive search process for subsequent hearings, if parole was not approved the first time.

However, an amendment added to the bill in the Senate Judiciary Committee requires the board only to send notices to the last known address of the victim, as most states do.

"In 1984, we worked very diligently to get this bill passed, and to be able to strip it that radically in one session is unacceptable," said Shehane, executive director of VOCAL (Victims of Crime and Leniency).

The problem, Shehane said, is that many victims in old cases never knew to provide an address to the parole board. That's because before 1984, the board did not have to notify victims that their attackers were about to go free.

Overcrowded prisons:

Concern over the backlog of 2,500 prisoners eligible for parole is intensified because of Alabama's prison crowding crisis.

State prisons hold 26,148 prisoners, down from a high of 28,440 a year ago. The drop came in part because of Gov. Bob Riley's plan to double the size of the parole board and speed parole for non-violent offenders.

Recently, the board is approving fewer and fewer non-violent cases, with a low of 24 approved last week, Dillard said.

Prisons remain packed.

"The governor and the parole board deserve credit for attempting to address this problem, and while our overall population has been reduced, we're still operating at 188 percent of designed capacity," said Department of Corrections spokesman Brian Corbett.

He said DOC supports easing the victim-notification rules.

Dillard said that either version of the bill would greatly help overwhelmed parole authorities.

The House version would also:

Allow the board to contact employees at a last known address, not unnamed customers, in robberies that occur in businesses.

Allow the board not to contact a victim, once the victim has been notified once and requests no further calls.

Relieve the board of the requirement to contact next-of-kin in all cases where the victim is deceased - even when the crime had nothing to do with the victims' death.

The current law creates situations where parole officers must contact victims who do not want to hear from the state.

Dillard reeled off delicate situations in which victims of old sex-assault cases were horrified to be contacted, because their families never knew about their past. In one case, a man who had been molested as a small child never knew he'd been victimized - until the parole board called, she said.

"We get victims who are angry with us, who don't want us to contact them," Dillard said.

The backlog intensified in 2001, after the board came under fire for agreeing to parole two brothers in the high-profile "Baby Doe" rape case, in which a woman was abducted from a Birmingham restaurant and gang-raped.

Before that controversy, the board had a two-tiered screening system. In preliminary meetings, it would look over all eligible cases, and begin the process. Cases on criminals with no chance for parole would be discarded without notifying victims, Dillard said.

Only in cases where the offender had a shot at parole, would victims be notified for the second hearing. At that point, the rape victim, who was living out of the country, was notified.

But the board had already made its decision to free the rapists, alarming the victim and many advocates. The case wound up in court.

After that uproar, the board began notifying the victims in every parole-eligible case, even ones in which the prisoners would never be freed.

"We're looking for victims we never, ever would have looked for before," Dillard said.

"It's very, very time-consuming and it's not a good use of taxpayers' money or parole officers' time."