Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control

Diana Rickard

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780813578293
• eBook ISBN: 9780813578316
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The 1990s witnessed a flurry of legislative initiatives—most notably, “Megan’s Law”—designed to control a population of sex offenders (child abusers) widely reviled as sick, evil, and incurable. In Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control, Diana Rickard provides the reader with an in-depth view of six such men, exploring how they manage to cope with their highly stigmatized role as social outcasts.    The six men discussed in the book are typical convicted sex offenders—neither serial pedophiles nor individuals convicted of the type of brutal act that looms large in public perceptions about sex crimes. Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control explores how these individuals, who have been cast as social pariahs, construct their sense of self. How does being labeled in this way and controlled by measures such as Megan’s Law affect one’s identity and sense of social being?  Unlike traditional criminological and psychological studies of this population, this book frames their experiences in concepts of both deviance and identity, asking how men so highly stigmatized cope with the most extreme form of social marginality. Placing their stories within the context of the current culture of mass incarceration and zero-tolerance, Rickard provides a deeper understanding of the complex relationship between public policy and lived experience, as well as an understanding of the social challenges faced by this population, whose re-integration into society is far from simple or assured.     Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control makes a significant contribution to our understanding of sex offenders, offering a unique window into how individuals make meaning out of their experiences and present a viable—not monstrous—social self to themselves and others.   

Chapter 1

Toward a Sociology of Sexual Offense

Sex Offender Policies: A Sociopolitical Context

Current sex offender policies are an important aspect of what critical criminologists have identified as the “new penology”—a new era of punishment characterized by the decline of the rehabilitative ideal, the reemergence of expressive and retributive justice practices, an expansion of punitive methods of social control, and the management of ever larger segments of the population by the social control apparatus (Feeley & Simon, 1992; Garland, 2001a; Simon, 2000; Zimring, 2001).

The sex offender legislation that began in the 1990s evolved in the midst of the nation’s exploding incarceration rate. Since the 1970s the US rate of imprisonment has been steadily increasing and is now eight times higher than during that decade. No other country imprisons as high a percentage of its population (Jacobson, 2005, p. 5). During the last quarter of the twentieth century crime emerged as a central feature of electoral politics, both nationally and locally (Beckett, 1997; Simon, 2000), and the United States has witnessed a transformation of criminal justice practices that include the blurring of the line between inside and outside of the system through an expansion of punitive methods of social control into the community (Feeley & Simon, 1992; Wacquant, 2001). This “carceral state” is characterized by a form of governance where “surveillance becomes routine, and a crime-centered approach shapes the activities of functionaries working in offices unrelated to the penitentiary” (Lancaster, 2011, p. 141). With a continually increasing proportion of the population “being directly managed by the criminal justice system” (Simon, 2000) in their lives outside of an institution (on probation and/or parole and/or subject to registration/notification policies), the noninstitutional world for many begins to take on characteristics of the “total institution” (Goffman, 1990).

The new penology coexists within a climate of populist punitiveness that emphasizes zero-sum rhetoric and expressive and retributive forms of punishment (ibid.). In this framework, punishment practices are less driven by the practical need to manage classes of deviants, and more driven by the emotional need to express communities’ moral outrage. Megan’s Law “is premised on the futility” of attempting to treat sex offenders. It employs a symbolic “cordon sanitaire” (Young, 1999) and marks the offender as an outsider in a way that creates a “negative symbolic capital that cannot be shed and will therefore weigh on its bearer for life” (Wacquant, 2001, p. 100).

The new sex offender policies can be seen as part of a larger sociopolitical movement toward “governance through crime” (Simon, 2000; Zimring, 2001, p. 146) that includes the transformation of punishment practices (Simon, 2000). Like crime in general, child sexual abuse has been described as a “valence issue” (Beckett, 1996) in that there is no pro-crime or pro–sex offender lobby. There is no space in public discourse for alternative perspectives. The movement toward governing through crime is accompanied by new forms of political subjectivity. The new rhetoric of criminal issues in general and the sex offender rhetoric in particular locate all salient forms of threat in the deviant individual, and obscure other forms of social, cultural, and political conflict and victimization (Janus, 2006, p. 22). The new era of “punitive justice” mobilizes “anger, resentment or vindictiveness, in contrast to preventative, reformative, or restorative ideals” (Lancaster, 2011, p. 147). Expressing exasperation with the state’s ability to prevent serious violent crimes in high-profile cases, Megan’s Law places increasing numbers of community-dwelling people under greater civil control, monitored by the state and living under conditions that mark them as a dangerous outsider. Many convicted sex offenders have become “life without form and value, stripped of political and legal rights accorded to the normal citizen” (Spencer, 2009, p. 220).

An in-depth look at the lives of several typical convicted sex offenders—those whose victims were minors and who thus bear the added stigma of “child molester”—allows us to see how larger structural conditions bear down on lived experience, and how this in turn relates to identity maintenance and deviance. The analysis presented here explores the new subjectivity that has emerged as part of this political landscape. The narratives of the men depict crimes that are representative of the larger population of convicted offenders—these are not the dramatically heinous crimes that receive so much media attention.

A Brief Introduction to Study Participants

I felt like maybe . . . I’m not even human any more. . . . I didn’t want to go look for a job, I didn’t want to leave the house. I just wanted to stay in one place. From there I couldn’t wait to get home, like a storm was coming. I couldn’t wait to get in the house, lock the door, dim the lights, and just, I felt safe.

Reggie looked down at the table in front of us as he described the feelings of shame and paranoia that overcame him after his arrest. Over the course of two in-depth interviews he discussed his social and professional isolation, and his sense of being marked and stigmatized as an outsider. Because of his criminal conviction, Reggie would have extreme difficulty ever finding legitimate work. In addition to the loss of his means of income and professional status, Reggie also struggled with an internalized sense of profound difference from those around him, doubting that he was “even human anymore.” He stated that for two years his self-esteem was so low and his sense of shame so great that he was literally unable to walk around in public with his head held up.

Reggie’s offense was different from many other crimes and carried with it the stigma of monstrousness. He was convicted for a sexual offense. A forty-year-old African American man, Reggie had been carrying on a flirtation with a fifteen-year-old girl in his neighborhood, asserting that he had been pursued by her. One day they ended up briefly “fooling around” (kissing and petting with clothes on) before he ended the interaction, saying it was “wrong” because of her age and his marital status. A fight with the girl’s father ensued, and when the police were called Reggie was arrested for forcible touching of a minor. He spent ten days in jail, was sentenced to six years on probation, and was required to register with law enforcement as a sex offender for twenty years. He met weekly with his probation officer, who subjected Reggie to random home visits. He was also not allowed to have any pornographic material in his apartment or on his computer.

Reggie was one of six convicted sex offenders I interviewed, hoping to understand the effects of stigma related to criminal justice policies on this growing population. Others in the sample included Terry and Karl, a gay white man in his mid-thirties who worked in the arts. He described an escalating flirtation between himself and a fourteen-year-old openly gay boy. At one point when they were alone together they became intimate and Karl performed oral sex on him. When this information spread to the school’s principal, Karl was immediately dismissed from his job as a teacher. He spent a night in jail, was sentenced to six years of probation, and had to register for twenty years. Because he had a complex professional life that required traveling for projects, the conditions of his probation were a continual source of tension for Karl. His experiences with registration were fraught with conflict, exacerbated by the fact that he lived and worked in separate states. He was not allowed to leave the city without permission unless the travel was work-related. He was not allowed to be in any professional relationship or be alone with a person under the age of eighteen.

Reggie and Karl were arrested for first-time offenses, and for incidents that could be classified as statutory—in that the victims were reportedly consenting participants in the interaction (the issues surrounding minors and consent will be more fully explored in Chapter 6). Unlike them, Terry, a white man in his early fifties, had a long history of sexual offending: flashing, public masturbation, frottage (rubbing up against people for sexual gratification), and groping strangers. Terry had thirteen criminal convictions for sex offenses, but stated that “they say that for every arrest there are about a hundred other incidents,” indicating that he engaged in these behaviors far more frequently than reflected in his official record (he was asked not to discuss unlawful behavior not already on record). His victims were females between twelve and forty years old. He asserted that he had gotten away with “slaps on the wrist” in the past because the offenses were not taken very seriously. His most recent act, groping the breasts of a twelve-year-old girl, was caught on a video surveillance monitor and released to the local news stations and papers. Because the victim was a minor and the case received so much publicity, the authorities took this last conviction more seriously. When the news spread to his community he was immediately dismissed from his job, excommunicated from his church, and kicked off his sports teams. He was forced to wear a GPS monitoring device and placed under house arrest. He had not yet been sentenced for this last offense at the time of my interview with him.

In addition to these three men, I interviewed an intrafamilial offender, whose victim was his thirteen-year-old stepdaughter, an Internet-based offender who made a date with someone claiming to be a fourteen-year-old girl (and who turned out to be a law enforcement agent), and another statutory offender, a man who had a brief affair with a sixteen-year-old stripper he met at a bachelor party. The term “sex offender” refers to a broad legal category covering a range of offenses from “rape, sexual assault, child molestation, lewd and lascivious acts upon a child, public nudity or exhibitionism, or the possession of certain types of pornography” (Scott & del Busto, 2009). The types of sex offenders in this sample are consistent with the population other researchers have studied. For instance, in one study the sample of twenty-nine interview respondents included 41 percent who were on probation for offenses against minors and an additional 17 percent for “statutory” charges (Meloy, 2006, pp. 73–74). Of this sample, 25 percent included men with “convictions for ‘hands off’ offenses such as possession of child pornography, public indecency, and Internet solicitation of a minor” (ibid., pp. 73–74). The offenses presented in this larger sample are similar to those reported by the men I interviewed. As in my study, the Meloy research did not include a serial pedophile or someone convicted of the types of brutally violent acts that loom large in public perceptions about sex crimes. Violent offenders and those who commit forcible penetration are more likely to be behind bars. This study examines community-dwelling men who have offended against minors. It is particularly focused on the issues of residing within the community while bearing the stigma of having offended against a minor. This study provides a unique opportunity to consider this form of deviance from the perspective of offenders. The stories of a few men, closely analyzed from a sociological perspective, can offer a deeper understanding of the complex relationship between public policy and lived experience.

Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control provides an analysis of the life histories of six men, exploring the impact of stigma and the ways marginalized social actors make meaning of their experiences. It grew out of a critique of current policies directed against sex offenders, particularly Megan’s Law. As I began to explore these policies, my awareness of them as “symbolic gestures” (Meloy, 2006, p. 113) intended to “exclude and banish” (Simon, 2000) led me to consider the possible meanings they have for offenders themselves. Specifically, I wanted to know how individuals who have been cast as monsters and social pariahs construct their sense of self. How does being labeled in this way and controlled by these measures affect one’s identity and sense of social being? What impact does it have on identity? This study examines the intersection of mass incarceration, sex offender policy, and the emergence and maintenance of the deviant self.

Policy Impacts on Offenders

Criminologists refer to some consequences of criminal convictions as “collateral” in that they are not formally intended as punishment or necessarily part of criminal statutes. These “invisible” punishments (Travis, 2002) accompany all felonies, and those convicted can lose their rights to public housing, welfare, child support, and education and their parental rights (ibid.). The extreme difficulty and sometimes impossibility of reintegrating into the community after a felony conviction has been described as a form of “civil death” (Chin, 2012), a state in which the offender exists with a degraded social status. Exclusion from civil society can include consequences of social control similar to those described by Goffman in his work on “total institutions” (Asylums will be more fully discussed in Chapter 4) (Goffman, 1990). The conditions of felons in the United States, during mass incarceration, are increasingly becoming a crisis of democracy and citizenship. As felons, sex offenders are subject to these sanctions in addition to those imposed on them as sex offenders.

Marking the sex offender as outsider, policies and public opinion can be seen as reflecting a general societal view that this population is considered the most deviant of deviants. In total, sanctions against sex offenders represent “degradation ceremonies” taking place within the courts and the media that ritualize “the destruction of the person denounced,” transforming identities through “the destruction of one social object and the constitution of another” (Garfinkel, 1956, p. 421). The new social identity is that of an outcast.

The ways in which this new outcast is affected by social control policies have been studied by numerous researchers. In a survey study of the impact of Megan’s Law on 239 sex offenders, negative consequences included “job loss, threats and harassment, property damage, and suffering of household members. A minority of sex offenders reported housing disruption or physical violence following community notification. The majority experienced psychosocial distress such as depression, shame and hopelessness” (Levenson et al., 2007, p. 587). A study of the collateral consequences of current policies found that the most common difficulties involved employment (Tewksbury & Lees, 2006). Other research has shown that offenders report lower levels of self-esteem because of their label (Meloy, 2006, p. 89) and increased feelings of alienation and isolation (ibid., p. 108). These studies have also identified relationship difficulties, stigmatization, acute feelings of vulnerability, and instances of harassment, with approximately half of the respondents reporting verbal harassment (Tewksbury & Lees, 2006). Furthermore, “a smattering of vigilante cases have occurred across the country” with research suggesting that about one-quarter of offenders report being the victim of some sort of vigilante justice (Bedarf, 1995), and approximately 40 percent worry about being the victim of harassment (Meloy, 2006)—indicating that the threat has an effect on offenders’ inner worlds. A recent double murder of a sex offender and his partner in South Carolina underscores the serious potential for violent retaliation faced by these men (Blinder, 2013). Today’s convicted sex offenders living in the community face a number of serious barriers to reintegration as a result of community notification practices. The social consequences of these policies are exacerbated by residency restriction laws that push offenders toward marginal communities such as the “shantytown” under the Julia Tuttle Causeway in Miami (Skipp & Campo-Flores, 2009) and that could prevent an offender from moving in with a supportive family member (Zilney & Zilney, 2009, p. 131). Families have had to relocate because of these restrictions (ibid.). Critiques of the policies and their consequences are addressed in this analysis of the stories of six men, providing individual perspectives on the ways people are impacted and how they grapple with the changes to their lives. Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control looks at the stories of individuals grappling with these issues and offers a sociological perspective on their experiences that provides a deeper look into these critiques.

The Social Construction of Sex Offenders: A Moral Panic Perspective

Current sex offender policies—the punitive measures that became cemented in the 1990s—have been described by Philip Jenkins as one of several waves of “moral panics” around child molesters (1998). This phenomenon can be defined “as any mass movement that emerges in response to a false, exaggerated, or ill-defined moral threat to society and proposes to address this threat through punitive measures: tougher enforcement, ‘zero tolerance,’ new laws, communal vigilance, violent purges” (Lancaster, 2011, p. 23). These dynamics describe the legislation cycles around sex offenses, which have been marked by swift public responses to atypical high-profile sex crimes.

In Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America (1998), Jenkins argues that the United States has witnessed several distinct waves of “panic” around sex crimes, each encompassing a proliferation of fictional media depicting horrible sex crimes (the television crime drama Law & Order: SVU being just one contemporary example) as well as heightened public concern generated and represented by sensational news media stories. Addressing contemporary legislation, Jenkins identifies the rise of the child protection movement from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s as a significant precursor. This movement generated fears about children’s well-being that culminated in a panic regarding child pornography, Internet stalking, child care abuse, and ritual abuse. This era laid the foundation for the panic of the 1990s surrounding sex offenders. National concern about child sexual abuse grew out of growing worries with child abuse in general. Sexual abuse of children was easily enfolded into a morality issue for conservative politicians taking family values stances against pornography (ibid., p. 121). As the feminist movement mobilized, it brought national attention to rape, framing the crime as a pervasive issue in patriarchal culture. It raised awareness of women’s harassment and victimization and ushered in the establishment of national rape shield laws (ibid., p. 125). Child sexual abuse then gained momentum as a social problem in the media and was often referred to as an “epidemic” (ibid., p. 138). Moving away from the incestuous perpetrator who was the focus of many feminist critiques, the media eventually refocused on the threats posed by the stranger, who was once again portrayed as a compulsive predator (ibid., p. 189).

The 1990s heralded a number of legislative initiatives pertaining to sex offenders in the community that can be seen as attempts to make visible their “otherness.” In addition to stricter monitoring of offenders on probation and parole, these initiatives are particularly distinctive in that they mandate monitoring beyond the length of the criminal sentence in the form of registration and community notification.

Current Sex Offender Policies

The first action in the spate of legislation passed during the 1990s was in Washington State in 1990 and affected all sex offenders, regardless of whether they are on probation or parole, or whether they have completed their criminal sentences. The Washington Community Protection Act was a legislative initiative created in response to the depraved sexual assaults, mutilations, and murders of young boys committed by repeat offender Earl Shriner (Janus, 2006, p. 14; Jenkins, 1998, p. 183; Terry, 2006, p. 183; Zilney & Zilney, 2009, p. 84). Although Shriner had verbalized his plans to commit atrocious crimes upon his release from a decadelong prison sentence, the community had no way to contain or manage him or to protect themselves. The Community Protection Act contains provisions for law enforcement agencies to provide information about released sexual offenders to members of the community, punishing them “as much for their predicted future dangerousness as for the specific act that brought them into contact with the criminal justice system” (Jenkins, 1998, p. 191). Within five years similar laws were adopted in five states and ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Toward a Sociology of Sexual Offense
• Chapter 2. Constructing the Offense
• Chapter 3. Community Bonds
• Chapter 4. Severed Bonds
• Chapter 5. Strategies to Reestablish Social Bonds
• Chapter 6. Personal Stories and Public Policy
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author
• Read More in the Series