In Pursuit of the Pervert: Sexual Dangerousness and the Creep of the Carceral State

Abstract

This dissertation examines the growth and development of contemporary sex offense laws, including the sex offense registry and civil commitment for people who have been deemed “sexually violent predators.” As a whole, this project finds that sexuality has been an understudied site for understanding the expansion of punitive state power, and in particular, the development of the carceral state. When it comes to sex, the United States has demonstrated a willingness to push the legal and social boundaries of acceptable punishment. To better understand the causes and consequences of this willingness, my dissertation centralizes the role that the punishment and regulation of sexuality has played in the building of the American state, the expansion of its punitive powers, and the development of the carceral state. Drawing on three original datasets, I argue fears of people deemed to be sexually dangerous, or what I call specters of perversion, have driven important expansions to the carceral state—each building on the institutional and policy calcifications of the last. In this way, the state has used the specter of perversion and conversely, the innocent white victim, to justify massive state building efforts that allow government reach to extend well beyond previously articulated boundaries at the expense of fundamental civil liberties protections. Indeed, these expansions are often the frontiers of developments in state surveillance and control—testing the legal waters for the surveillance and control of other groups. Yet, these expansions, at every stage, have had little return in actually preventing sexual harm.