Social Control of Sex Offenders: A Cultural History

✍ Scribed by D. Richard Laws (auth.)

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 242
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book surveys the history, current status, and critical issues regarding the various mechanisms designed to control sex offenders. It shows that the social problem of sex offending is not apparently resolvable by any of the means currently employed.
A large array of procedures are used in the attempt to control the difficult population of sex offenders, including: imprisonment, institutional and community treatment, community monitoring by probation and parole, electronic monitoring, registration as a sex offender, community notification of an offender’s status, strict limits on behavioral movement in the community, and residence restrictions. However, these constraints on behavior are almost completely the result of public outrage regarding sensational sex crimes, overreaction of media coverage that produce inaccurate statements of potential community risk, and the efforts of the legal profession and politicians to quell this anger and foreboding by enacting legislation that supposedly confronts the risk. This book demonstrates that we have constructed a massive edifice of community control that is socially and politically driven and which has largely failed to contain sex crime.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-x
Introduction: What This Book Is About....Pages 1-10
Moral Panic: Threat to the Social Order....Pages 11-22
Early Historical Treatment of Social Deviance....Pages 23-36
The Medicalization of Deviance: Sex Offender as Mental Patient....Pages 37-50
The Sexual Psychopath/Predator Laws: Legal Construction of Deviance....Pages 51-71
Assessment of Risk to Reoffend: Historical Background....Pages 73-90
Assessment of Risk to Reoffend: Actuarial Versus Risk Formulation....Pages 91-119
Sex Offender Registration and Community Notification....Pages 121-139
Community Restrictions on Sex Offender Behavior....Pages 141-155
The International Picture of Social Control....Pages 157-171
Psychological Treatment: Risk Reducer or Life Enhancer?....Pages 173-199
Conclusions and Future Outlook....Pages 201-216
Back Matter....Pages 217-238

✦ Subjects

Crime and Society;Youth Offending and Juvenile Justice;Prison and Punishment;Sexual Behavior;Forensic Psychology;Social Work and Community Development