Law & Social Inquiry

Volume ••, Issue ••, ••–••, •• 2016

Punishing Sex: Sex Offenders and the

Missing Punitive Turn in Sexuality
Studies
Trevor Hoppe

At precisely the same time that gay and lesbian activists were securing marriage
rights for same-sex couples nationwide, courts and “tough on crime” state legislatures
were devising new ways to regulate sex. Despite recent estimates that over 750,000
Americans are registered sex offenders, few sexuality scholars have examined the growth
of punitive policies regulating sex offenders. In this article, I draw on a unique set of data
on the population of sex offenders in the United States to analyze: (1) whether recent
trends in sex offender registration mirror those of corrections more generally, and (2)
whether these policies disproportionally impact racial minorities. Findings reveal that sex
offender registries grew dramatically between 2005 and 2013; that this growth is out of
step with concurrent trends in corrections; and that black communities are
disproportionately impacted. I conclude by considering whether these data reveal a new
mode of “governing through crime” specifically targeting sex.

It might as well be admitted that sex is a disgrace.

Michael Warner (1999)
There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it.
Leo Bersani (1987)

INTRODUCTION

Through its social regulation and policing, anthropologist Gayle Rubin (1984)
argues that sex operates as its own axis of inequality and social organization and
thus deserves its own unique analysis. Despite her call for a new analysis of sex
three decades ago, social scientists remain squeamish when it comes to studying sex
(Irvine 2014). When social scientists have attended to the social regulation of sex,
they have generally focused on sexuality minority identities, communities, and poli-
tics (see, e.g., McIntosh 1968; Armstrong 2002).

Trevor Hoppe is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at University

at Albany, SUNY. He may be contacted at Department of Sociology, 1400 Washington Ave., 314
Arts and Sciences Bldg., Albany, NY 12222; thoppe@albany.edu. This article would not have been
possible without the dataset analyzed in the second half of this article. Alissa Ackerman not only very
generously offered to share this dataset with me, but also spent considerable time in helping me to
understand it and think about it—efforts for which I am extremely grateful. I also thank David Hal-
perin, Simon Cole, Amin Ghaziani, Bryan Sykes, Carroll Seron, David John Frank, Jay Borchert, Scott
De Orio, and the participants in the UC-Irvine Socio Legal Workshop for their extremely helpful
input. I would particularly like to express my gratitude to the three blind peer reviewers for their hard
work in helping me to improve this article.

C 2016 American Bar Foundation.

V 1
2 LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY

Of course, the attention to the construction of gay and lesbian communities,

cultures, and civil rights movements is warranted; their rise represents a seismic
social change. The Supreme Court of the United States first legally recognized this
shift in its landmark decision in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which many observers
interpreted as overturning state sodomy laws that criminalized nonprocreative sex.
In Justice Antonin Scalia’s now-infamous Lawrence dissent, he warned that the
Court’s decision would pave the way for same-sex marriage—a comment that has
proven impressively prescient as same-sex marriage is now the law of the land (see
Obergefell v. Hodges). While incomplete, the resignification of the homosexual from
pedophile to picket fences is, indeed, a dramatic social transformation.
But while this powerful progressive narrative is appealing, it does not provide a
complete picture of how the state regulates sexuality—or even the legacy of Law-
rence. At precisely the same time that activists were securing rights for same-sex
couples, courts and “tough on crime” legislatures nationwide were devising new
ways to punish sex (for a useful social history, see Leon 2011). As it turns out, anti-
sodomy laws supposedly struck down by Lawrence are, in fact, still on the books;
police continue to invoke them against the very same kinds of people they did
before Lawrence—namely, women sex workers and men caught having sex with
other men in public venues (Agathocleous 2011). While AIDS activists successfully
resisted punitive control measures such as quarantine and extreme proposals such as
tattooing those infected with HIV, they were unable in many states to prevent
legislatures from enacting new criminal laws that made it a crime for HIV-infected
individuals to have sex without disclosing their status (see Hoppe 2013, 2014). In
more recent years, a concern over sex trafficking has sparked a resurgence in puni-
tive policies aimed at controlling sexual labor (Bernstein 2010). Although these
policies are sold as a way to punish tyrannical slave-traders who move disadvan-
taged women across international borders, they are often written in such a way as
to regulate a much wider set of phenomena, including garden-variety prostitution.
But the most glaring expansion of the carceral state aimed at regulating sex
has been the invention of publicly accessible sex offender registries. Borne out of
the mid-century sex crime panic (Chauncey 1993; De Orio forthcoming), registries
were first concocted in California in 1947, but were not widely adopted until the
1990s. Recent estimates suggest that more than 750,000 Americans are registered
sex offenders. Their ranks include individuals convicted of a broad range of
offenses, from statutory rape to indecent exposure to sexual assault; many are first-
time offenders locked up for nonviolent offenses (Lancaster 2013). Yet, despite the
massive scale of these registries, the social science literature examining their appli-
cation is vastly underdeveloped. I contribute to our understanding of sex offender
registries by grappling with two questions.
First, what is the relationship between the larger carceral state and sex offender
registries? At first glance, the recent spike in the number of Americans registered as
sex offenders would seem to reflect a more general trend toward using handcuffs
and prisons as a response to social problems. Indeed, a wealth of scholarship has
demonstrated that incarceration rates spiraled out of control in the 1980s, 1990s,
and 2000s (Garland 1990, 2001; Alexander 2010; Wacquant 2010; Rios 2011; Pet-
tit 2012). Leon (2011) draws on historical sex offender registration data to make
 Punishing Sex 3

this case, arguing that trends in sex offender registration between 1950 and 2006
have followed as a tailwind to general trends in corrections. To test whether more
recent data support this theory, I compare trends in rates of sex offender registration
from 2005–2013 against general trends in corrections during the same time period.
Second, who is being caught up in the net of sex offender registration? While
Levine (forthcoming) has noted that sex offenders are perceived to be white,
middle-aged men, few empirical studies have analyzed whether sex offenders are
more or less likely to be white than the general population. While Leon (2011)
argues that there are two tracks for white and nonwhite sex offenders, with harsher
punishment being meted out for sex offenders of color, less is known about broader
patterns in enforcement. In the longstanding tradition of law and social inquiry
into racial disparities of those incarcerated or otherwise controlled by the carceral
state (see, e.g., Baldus, Pulaski, and Woodworth 1983; Holcomb, Williams, and
Demuth 2004; Hoppe 2015), I compare US Census demographic data against a
unique cross-sectional dataset of currently registered sex offenders in forty-nine
states to examine racial disparities in sex offender registration rates.
Finally, looking toward a sociology of punishment that seeks to explicate “how
penal processes come to exist in their present form and with what kinds of con-
sequences” (Garland 1990, 3), I conclude by considering what it means that the
state has developed a free-moving arm of the carceral state that is specifically tai-
lored to punishing sex. These specific regulations would seem to be motivated by
the perception that sexual offenders are more likely to reoffend and thus require
special control, but the empirical evidence does not bear this out (see, e.g., Sample
and Bray 2003, 2006; Tewksbury, Jennings, and Zgoba 2012). Instead, I argue that
sex offender registries may be becoming a new approach to what Simon (2007)
terms “governing through crime.”

THE SOCIAL CONTROL OF SEX: BEYOND

THE GAY/STRAIGHT BINARY

Despite Rubin’s (1984) call to treat sex as its own axis of inequality and social
organization, social scientists interested in human sexuality have often avoided the
more stigmatizing questions of erotic life and its regulation (Irvine 2014). Instead,
social scientists have taken up sexual orientation identity as the primary organizing
concept (much like race or gender), with numerous studies analyzing gay and les-
bian identities, activist movements, and communities (see, e.g., McIntosh 1968;
Armstrong 2002; Ghaziani 2014), as well as the development of the heterosexual
category (see, e.g., Halley 1993; Chauncey 1995; Canaday 2011).
Queer activists and scholars argued in the late 1990s and early 2000s for a shift
away from gay/straight and toward a more complex, queer view of sexual regulation
(see, e.g., McCreery 1999). This “postidentity” moment—originally termed queer
theory (for a critical review of the term’s history, see Halperin 2003)—promised a
re-visioning of how sexuality was socially organized by deconstructing and troubling
normative categories such as race, class, gender, and sexuality. Although the queer
moment in the humanities served as a platform for numerous queer readings of
4 LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY

various texts, social scientists treated queer with either skepticism or dismissal from
the start, in part due to its “refusal to name a subject” (Seidman 1993, 132; see also
Stein and Plummer 1994; Green 2007; Pfeffer 2014).
While queer may have proven too slippery a concept for social scientists, the
critique that gay/straight is only one mode of sexual regulation has not yet been
fully digested in the sociological literature. There are examples that help us move
beyond this binary framework, such as Green’s (2014) Bourdieusian work on sexual
fields, which helps us conceptualize how sexual life is produced through everyday
practice—a useful framework for social scientists interested in how individuals prac-
tice sex (for examples, see Carrillo 2002; Hoppe 2011). I instead draw on the soci-
ology of punishment to consider a form of state-sanctioned regulation—sex offender
registries—devised to control a broad range of sexual practices governed as crime.
The title of this article is an explicit play on those of Stein and Plummer (1994)
and Stacey and Thorne (1985), who both considered what new insights into gender
and sexuality could be gleaned from queer and feminist theoretical and conceptual
frameworks. In the next section, I consider what the literature on punitive social
control can help reveal about the social production of sexuality.

PUNISHMENT AND ITS DISCONTENTS

This article interfaces with a number of social science literatures on punish-

ment that crisscross sociolegal studies, sociology, and criminology. First, at the con-
ceptual level, this analysis draws on Garland’s seminal analysis of punishment as a
social institution in which he argues that “juridical punishment is not the transpar-
ent and rather self-evident institution of crime control that it is commonly taken
to be” (1990, 3). Simon builds on these insights to argue that crime has become
“central to the exercise of authority in America, by everyone from the president of
the United States to the classroom teacher” (2007, 4). The political elite foments a
culture of fear to legitimate the alleged war on crime, and, in doing so, they reshape
the ideal citizen as a crime victim (Simon 2000). Simon (2000) argues that sex
offender registration policies are archetypical of this shift, noting that the major
pieces of sex offender legislation are named after dead children.
Punishing sex, then, becomes a way to extend the authority of political leaders
and stoke the flames of fear that legitimate their authority—a punitive form of gov-
ernance. This is precisely the argument taken up by anthropologist Roger Lancaster,
who argues that:

Successive waves of sex panic have kept sensational crime stories in the
news, produced new victim (and villain) identities, legitimized the politi-
cal expression of rage, spun elaborate webs of legislation, eroded rights of
the accused and other norms of democratic law, and driven a culture of
fear deep into established institutions such as the family and the school
system. (2011, 231)

Social psychologist Mona Lynch (2002, 59) similarly argues that sex offender
policy making is driven by a “constellation of emotional expressions of disgust, fear
 Punishing Sex 5

of contagion, and pollution avoidance.” Sociologists have begun to take up these

lines of inquiry. Bernstein (2010) reveals how feminist discourse became interwoven
with punitive ideologies and how this marriage propelled a new movement to pun-
ish prostitution under the banner of sex trafficking. Leon’s (2011) critical history of
sex crime policies since the 1930s dissects policy and popular discourses that have
driven periodic expansions in the punishment of sex. However, although there is
specificity to the sex crime politics driving the implementation of these policies,
Leon finds that trends in sex offender registration historically have closely tracked
those of corrections more generally. In this article, I build on our understanding of
sex offender policies by testing whether more recent data support Leon’s tailwind
theory of sex offender policies.
Beyond the conceptual, this analysis builds on the long tradition in sociolegal
studies of analyzing disparate criminal justice outcomes between racial minorities
and whites. Approaches for evaluating discrimination under the law vary, ranging
from analyses of racial bias in criminal sentencing (see, e.g., Crawford, Chiricos,
and Kleck 2006; Kautt 2009; Doerner and Demuth 2010) to the disparate impact of
the war on drugs on racial minorities (for a review, see Provine 2011) to the con-
textual factors such as victim race and gender that moderate the increased burden
faced by racial minorities under the criminal justice enterprise (see, e.g., Baldus,
Pulaski, and Woodworth 1983; Holcomb, Williams, and Demuth 2004; Hoppe
2015). Collectively, sociolegal scholars argue that these factors contribute to a sys-
tem of mass incarceration that helps maintain and exacerbate racial inequality in
the United States (Garland 1990, 2001; Alexander 2010; Wacquant 2010; Rios
2011; Pettit 2012). By comparing sex offender registration data against US Census
figures to analyze whether racial minorities are disproportionately impacted by these
policies, this article brings these insights to bear on the study of sex offender regis-
tration policies.

BACKGROUND: THE RISE OF SEX OFFENDER REGISTRIES

California enacted the first sex offender registry in the United States in 1947.
Originally billed as a way to inform the police of the whereabouts of habitual sex
offenders, registries were not widely adopted for many years. Indeed, between 1947
and 1976, only four other states—Alabama, Arizona, Nevada, and Ohio—created
sex offender registries (De Orio forthcoming). States instead favored the so-called
sexual psychopath laws that facilitated the commitment of “persons with criminal
propensities to the commission of sex offenses” to mental institutions (Sutherland
1950, 543). Although Sutherland (1950) reports that these statutes were not widely
used, they had the effect of “expanding the criminalization of non-normative sex
and effectively mystifying that expansion by medicalizing sexual deviance” (Kunzel
forthcoming, 6).
By the 1970s, sexual psychopath laws had fallen out of favor, either being
repealed or widely ignored as ineffective and unjust policies (Freedman 1987). In
many ways, however, the sex offender registry laws that spread throughout the
United States in the 1990s and 2000s pick up where these laws left off. Sparked by
6 LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY

the rape and murder of a young girl, Megan Kanka, by a convicted sex offender,
New Jersey enacted the first in a wave of community notification acts regulating
sexual offenders in 1994 (Simon 2000). Under the banner of Megan’s Law, legisla-
tors in New Jersey enacted ten separate measures, “including extending terms,
making the murder of a child under fourteen an aggravating circumstance for pur-
poses of New Jersey’s death penalty, and introducing involuntary civil commit-
ment for ‘dangerous criminals,’ lifetime parole supervision, and mandatory DNA
sampling for identification procedures” (Simon 2000, 1134–35). The federal gov-
ernment quickly followed suit, enacting the Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against
Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act (1994), which required
that states develop registries of convicted sex offenders and to make public infor-
mation that was “necessary to protect the public.” The federal mandate to track
and regulate sex offenders was expanded further with the passage of the Adam
Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act (2006), which mandated the creation of a
national sex offender database and instituted postrelease civil commitment proce-
dures that facilitated keeping putatively dangerous sexual predators locked up for
life in alleged treatment.
Legal scholar Corey Yung (2009) argues that these policies amount to an
unnamed “war on sex offenders” that threatens to reap many of the same conse-
quences of the failed war on drugs–increased inequality, great financial expendi-
tures, and very little in the way of measurable benefit. Yet, despite the scale of sex
offender policies, the empirical literature systematically analyzing the application of
these policies remains thin. I contribute to our understanding of these policies by
analyzing: (1) their relationship to broader trends in corrections; and (2) how the
demographic characteristics of registered sex offenders compare to the US popula-
tion at large.

DATA AND METHODOLOGY

Despite the fact that all US states have now moved toward having publicly
available Internet sites that basically serve as databases of registered sex offenders,
finding comprehensive US data on sex offenders is exceedingly difficult. The only
longitudinal figures publicly available are from nongovernment organizations
(NGOs) such as Parents for Megan’s Law and the National Center for Missing and
Exploited Children (NCMEC). These organizations annually compile state-reported
figures on the number of reported sex offenders. They publish these figures as
annualized counts and rates, by state.
The validity of these NGO figures was unknown for many years. To assess
their validity, Ackerman et al. (2011) analyzed discrepancies between the figures
reported by NGOs and the data published online in state-run Internet sex offender
registries. To do this, the authors built an automated Web scraping application that
compiled the data for every person listed on a state-run sex offender registry
webiste; they then compared those figures against counts reported by NCMEC.
Although in many cases the total number of sex offenders reported by NCMEC was
similar to the total number of individuals whose information was published on
 Punishing Sex 7

state-run sex offender registries, these figures varied—sometimes wildly—in some

states.1
In this study, I assess variation in sex offender registration rates over time and
compare these figures against general correctional supervision rates during the same
period (2005–2013). I drew on annualized figures published by Parents for Megan’s
Law (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation 2014) on the num-
ber of sex offenders registered in every state as well as the District of Columbia
(DC).2 To ensure that any trend observed was not merely an artifact of the misre-
porting observed by Ackerman et al. (2011), I ran a separate analysis for only those
seventeen jurisdictions for which the discrepancy rate between NGO figures3 and
data scraped by Ackerman et al. was less than 10 percent (Connecticut, DC, Flor-
ida, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico,
Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia).
Next, to compare these figures longitudinally, I drew on annual US Census
Bureau adult (eighteen years and older) resident population estimates for July 1 of
each year to generate rates of sex offender registration per 100,000 adult residents.
For the seventeen-jurisdiction reliability sample, I relied on the corresponding cen-
sus adult resident population estimates for only those jurisdictions. To assess how
sex offender registration rates compare to correctional supervision rates generally, I
compared them against published annualized figures from the Bureau of Justice Sta-
tistics (Glaze 2010; Glaze and Herberman 2013) of the total adult corrections popu-
lation in the United States. These rates include those in prison and jails, as well as
those on probation or parole. To compare those figures longitudinally, I also gener-
ated rates of correctional supervision per 100,000 resident adults using the same,
aforementioned census adult resident population estimates.
In the next section, I analyze the most recent cross-sectional dataset scraped
by Ackerman (for a full description of this methodology, see Ackerman et al.
2011), which represents the population of sex offenders listed on online state-run
registries at the time the data were collected (around July 2012). For the purposes
of this analysis, duplicate entries were dropped. In addition, data from two jurisdic-
tions (Maine and the District of Columbia) for which no race data were reported
were dropped. The resulting dataset describes a population of 605,039 registered sex
offenders from forty-nine states. I then generated sex offender registration rates per
100,000 adult residents and compared these figures across racial subpopulations. For
the data from thirty-four states that did not report Hispanic origin, I compared sex

1. Ackerman et al. (2011) suggest that officials may have been inflating their numbers to NCMEC by
including anyone who has ever been registered as a sex offender—regardless of whether they are now
deceased, unregistered, or no longer living in the state. The numbers are also inflated in states where public
registration is not required for all sex offenders.
2. For the year 2012, figures from seven jurisdictions (Arizona, California, DC, Massachusetts, New
Hampshire, New Jersey, and Vermont) were not available. In these seven instances, I substituted an average
of 2011 and 2013 figures for each state. As a point of reference, the difference between the imputed 2012
mean and observed 2012 mean for the forty-four jurisdictions for which 2012 data were available is negligi-
ble (13,556.82 vs. 13,755.68, a 1.4 percent difference).
3. Although this analysis employs data from Parents from Megan’s Law rather than NCMEC (whose
data were analyzed by Ackerman et al. 2011), these two organizations rely on similar sources for their data
and their published estimates are nearly identical.
8 LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY

offender data against census population estimates of white, black, American Indian,
and Asian or Pacific Islander residents (regardless of Hispanic ethnicity) aged eight-
een years or older, by state. For the remaining fifteen states that reported Hispanic
offender data, I instead compared the sex offender data against census population
estimates of non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic black, non-Hispanic American
Indian, non-Hispanic Asian or Pacific Islander, and Hispanic (calculated by com-
bining anyone who reported their ethnicity as Hispanic, regardless of their reported
race) residents aged eighteen years or older, by state. In both analyses, I generated
the total sex offender registration rate for each state using the census total adult res-
ident population estimate in the state.4 The vast majority of figures presented in
this article are rounded to the nearest whole integer, for ease of review and
comparison.

SEX OFFENDER REGISTRATION RATES, 2005–2013

The number of registered sex offenders has ballooned in recent history. In

terms of raw numbers, whereas in 2005, NGOs that compile state-reported data
reported that 550,000 sex offenders were registered in the fifty US states as well as
the District of Columbia, that number swelled to nearly 750,000 in 2013—a 35 per-
cent increase. When that analysis is winnowed to the seventeen-jurisdiction reli-
ability sample, the increase is even more pronounced, with an increase of 63.7
percent in nine years from 154,387 to 252,777 registered offenders.
Even when those figures are transformed into rates per 100,000 adult residents,
the trend remains strong. NGO-compiled data suggest that there were 249 sex
offenders registered for every 100,000 American adults in 2005, compared to a rate
of 308 offenders per 100,000 adults in 2013 (see Table 1)—a 24 percent increase in
just nine years. That spike is even more exaggerated when I narrow the analysis to
the seventeen-jurisdiction reliability sample. In those jurisdictions, the sex offender
registration rate increased from 214 per 100,000 adults in 2005 to 317 in 2012—a
48.1 percent spike.
The consistent increases in rates and numbers observed in the seventeen-state
sample better represent most US states, as these analyses exclude California, where
the number of sex offenders reported varies considerably year to year. This may in
part be due to the state’s realignment programs instituted in 2011 (California
Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation 2014), but this instability was evi-
dent even before these programs were introduced. For example, the number of
offenders dropped from 87,706 in 2007 to 66,041 in 2008; then back to 86,912 in
2010. Due to the state’s large population, a dramatic drop in the number of sex
offenders reported in 2013 largely explains the slight decline observed in the
national figures. Excluding California, the total number and rate of sex offenders in
the United States increased every year; overall, numbers increased 48 percent while
rates increased 35.7 percent.

4. Because racial categories are not mutually exclusive, this estimate is not equivalent to the sum of
the race-based population estimates.
TABLE 1.
Trends in Sex Offender Registration and Correctional Supervision, 2005–2013
2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

Total no. SOs 50 states & DC* 551,987 540,846 614,006 601,676 636,472 687,193 741,974 752,757 746,015
Rate per 100,000 adult pop.*** 249 241 270 262 274 292 312 313 308
Total no. of SOs 16 state & DC sample 154,387 157,869 186,195 187,335 205,489 214,430 232,508 242,279 252,777
Rate per 100,000 adult pop.*** 214 216 252 251 272 279 299 307 317
Total no. US corrections** 7,045,100 7,176,000 7,267,500 7,274,600 7,225,800 7,079,500 6,978,500 6,937,600 6,899,000
Rate per 100,000 adult pop.*** 3,173 3,195 3,198 3,164 3,108 3,010 2,936 2,888 2,844
*Source: Data compiled by Parents for Megan’s Law (n.d.).
**Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics.
***Figures are rounded to the nearest whole number for ease of interpretation.
Punishing Sex
9
10 LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY

FIGURE 1.
Sex Offender Registration Versus Corrections Supervision Trends in the United
States, 2005–2013

As shown in Figure 1, these marked increases in sex offender registration fig-

ures are out of step with general correctional trends in the United States. In the
same period that sex offender registries ballooned as much as 63.7 percent, the
number of individuals under correctional supervision (including those in prisons
and jails, as well as those on probation and parole) fell from 7,045,100 to
6,899,000—a 2.1 percent decline. Although that is a modest decrease in raw num-
bers, the rate of corrections supervision dropped by 10.4 percent, from 3,173 US
adults under correction supervision per 100,000 residents in 2005 to 2,844 adults
under supervision in 2013.

SEX OFFENDER REGISTRATION RATES, BY RACE AND STATE

The preceding longitudinal analysis demonstrates that sex offender registration

rates have risen in recent years, at precisely the same time that general correctional
supervision rates have stabilized and even declined. Who is being impacted by this
expansion in sex offender registries? Is there evidence of racial disparities among
those forced to register as sex offenders? To answer this question, it is necessary to
turn to an original dataset compiled by Ackerman et al. (2011), who have compiled
the only known national sex offender dataset that includes offender demographic
characteristics.
On its face, the demographic snapshot of sex offenders in the United States
(see Table 2) would seem to confirm expectations: the average sex offender in the
population is a forty-five-year-old white male. More specifically, exactly two-thirds
of sex offenders in the population were white, almost one-fourth of the sample was
black, 6.8 percent were Hispanic, 1.2 percent were American Indian, and less than
1 percent were Asian or Pacific Islander or other. An overwhelming majority of sex
offenders—98 percent—are men.
 Punishing Sex 11

TABLE 2.
Demographic Snapshot of Sex Offender Population

Frequency Percent

Gender (n 5 605,038)
Male 590,988 98
Female 14,050 2
Race (n 5 598,697)
White 398,776 67
Black 145,055 24
Asian 5,735 <1
American Indian 7,371 <1
Hispanic 40,809 7
Other 951 <1
Age (n 5 584,602)
< 18 552 <1
18–24 25,631 4
25–44 262,027 45
45–64 248,344 42
651 48,048 8
Average age 45

But how do these proportions match up against the general population? In the
thirty-four states that did not report Hispanic offender data, the difference between
black and white sex offender registration rates is consistent: in every state but one
(Michigan), a higher sex offender registration rate was observed for blacks than for
whites. In fourteen states, blacks were observed to face a sex offender registration
rate at least twice as high as that of whites. In five states (Iowa, Massachusetts,
New Jersey, Oregon, and Wisconsin), blacks were registered at a rate at least three
times as high as whites.
While in most states American Indian communities faced low rates of sex
offender registration, in a handful of jurisdictions they faced dramatically higher
rates than other groups. In six states (Alaska, Arizona, Montana, North Dakota,
South Dakota, and Wisconsin), American Indians faced a sex offender registration
rate at least twice as high as their white counterparts. The difference between white
and American Indian registration rates was particularly severe in Alaska, where
American Indians were registered at a rate more than seven times that of whites.
Put differently, in Alaska, the data suggest that over 3 percent of the American
Indian population was registered as sex offenders at time of data collection.
But what about Hispanic offenders? Given that Hispanic Americans also face a
high rate of incarceration, we might expect them to have similarly disproportionate
sex offender registration rates. However, Hispanic communities were not observed
to have the highest sex offender registration rates among racial subpopulations in
any of the fifteen states reporting Hispanic offender data (see Table 4). Hispanic
offenders faced a rate higher than white offenders (but lower than black offenders)
in only two states: Connecticut and Rhode Island. The disparity in Rhode Island
12 LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY

was greatest, where they faced a rate more than twice as high as whites. However,
Hispanic offenders were observed to face a sex offender registration rate lower than
whites overall (181 vs. 214).
Notably, the black-white trends in the fifteen states reporting Hispanic
offenders are similar to those in the thirty-four jurisdictions that did not report His-
panic offender data. Observed black sex offender registration rates were higher in
all fifteen states and at least twice as high in nine of the fifteen states. In three
states5 (Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Washington), observed black sex offender
registration rates were at least three times as high as white rates. Among these fif-
teen states, American Indians faced a disproportionately higher sex offender regis-
tration rate only in New Mexico.
Overall, the sex offender registration rate observed for all forty-nine states was
251 sex offenders per 100,000 adult residents. If the two outliers (Florida at the high
end and Minnesota at the low end) are dropped, the estimated sex offender registra-
tion rate drops to 213 sex offenders per 100,000 adults. To put that figure in perspec-
tive, a sex offender registration rate of 213 per 100,000 adults roughly translates to
one in every 470 adults. Considering that 98 percent of sex offenders are men, these
findings suggest that one out of every 230 men in these forty-seven states (and one
in every 206 white men) were registered sex offenders at time of data collection.
The figures are even more troubling for black men. Overall, the sex offender
registration rate observed for black residents was more than twice that of whites
(501 vs. 238 sex offenders per 100,000 adults). Roughly one out of every 119 black
men living in the forty-nine states analyzed were registered sex offenders—nearly 1
percent of all black men.
The rate observed for Asian and Pacific Islanders was 80 percent less than
white rates (a trend that was consistent across states). In the main, American
Indian rates were more than 35 percent lower than whites, but this trend was not
consistent across states, as noted previously.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: GOVERNING THROUGH SEX

CRIME BEYOND THE “STRAIGHT STATE”

Some readers may be wondering, “Who cares what happens to the sex
offender?” There are many potential ethical and political responses to this norma-
tive line of argument, and they are important and necessary discussions. Although I
do not primarily grapple with these questions, I expect that they may prevent some
readers from being able to engage with the argument at all. My limited response for
these pages would be, in part, to point to the long tradition in sociolegal studies of
studying the uneven application of legal systems. Scholars critical of how the death
penalty has been unevenly applied are rarely critiqued by colleagues for defending
murderers or for making light of the crime of homicide. Although many registered
sex offenders are committed for nonviolent and questionably criminal offenses, I do
not wish to fall into the trap of defending some while condemning others. Surely

5. Observed Minnesota black sex offender registration rates are twelve times as high as white rates.
Because the numbers are so small, however, it is difficult to interpret them.
 Punishing Sex 13

TABLE 3.
Frequency and Rate of Sex Offender Registration per 100,000 Adult Residents,
Thirty-Four States Not Reporting Hispanic Offender Data

White Black Asian or Pac. Isl. American Indian Other Total

Frequency Frequency Frequency Frequency Frequency Frequency
State Rate Rate Rate Rate Rate Rate

Alabama 6,193 3,594 8 10 9,805

231 379 14 21 265
Alaska 1,070 119 67 1,653 2,909
492 874 316 3,595 534
Arizona 3,962 520 19 540 5,041
92 219 9 198 102
Arkansas 2,880 936 10 6 3,832
155 282 24 15 171
Colorado 7,567 772 83 109 8,531
210 415 54 113 216
Delaware 1,040 790 2 0 1,832
195 518 7 0 257
Florida 100,978 30,103 419 134 131,634
810 1,246 83 94 860
Georgia 10,090 8,319 47 17 18,473
207 366 15 22 249
Idaho 3,097 37 22 111 3,267
276 366 85 383 279
Illinois 15,217 8,160 142 131 23,650
194 570 26 137 241
Iowa 4,770 546 36 67 5,419
214 755 68 359 230
Kansas 4,381 859 41 60 5,341
225 615 61 134 247
Kentucky 5,947 984 13 13 6,957
195 364 25 50 207
Maryland 4,316 4,013 66 10 8,405
149 294 21 19 185
Massachusetts 2,642 764 18 15 3,439
58 181 5 32 66
Michigan 9,390 1,370 41 83 10,884
149 127 18 80 143
Mississippi 2,718 2,551 1 52 5,322
193 320 4 256 238
Missouri 11,537 2,663 35 24 14,259
289 502 34 42 309
Montana 1,782 35 5 299 2,121
244 606 53 564 271
Nebraska 2,938 394 28 63 3,423
228 598 84 282 246
Nevada 2,135 732 68 64 2,999
127 375 30 128 143
New Hampshire 2,144 55 5 6 2,210
213 347 19 72 211
New Jersey 1,905 1,591 21 1 322 3,840
14 LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY

Table 3. Continued
White Black Asian or Pac. Isl. American Indian Other Total
Frequency Frequency Frequency Frequency Frequency Frequency
State Rate Rate Rate Rate Rate Rate

37 157 3 1 56
North Carolina 10,604 6,341 74 266 17,285
190 389 35 176 232
North Dakota 371 17 2 91 481
73 202 24 320 88
Oregon 567 76 3 9 655
20 108 2 10 22
Pennsylvania 11,076 3,703 101 34 14,914
128 331 30 48 149
South Dakota 2,138 115 13 812 3,078
378 1,021 151 1,586 489
Tennessee 14,007 5,590 76 44 19,717
345 688 79 91 397
Vermont 1,128 24 5 2 1,159
231 395 59 35 231
Virginia 11,300 7,177 134 15 18,626
241 573 31 21 294
West Virginia 3,381 161 4 3 3,549
241 290 28 27 241
Wisconsin 8,930 1,942 138 316 11,326
223 724 124 496 257
Wyoming 1,406 32 4 33 1,475
335 400 65 245 335
34 State Total 273,606 95,084 1,751 5,093 322 375,858
251 495 32 251 281

many in this population deserve criminal sanction while others may not, but this is
not the question I wish to raise.
Instead, I wish to draw our attention to how the carceral state has constructed
an entirely separate arm dedicated to controlling sex. Trends in sex offender regis-
tration may have followed as a tailwind to trends in corrections historically, as
Leon (2011) argues. However, state and federal policies enacted in the 1990s and
2000s ratcheted up the scope and punitiveness of sex offender registries. The find-
ings in this article suggest that these policies have allowed registries to continue
growing even as rates in correctional supervision declined. As the findings in this
article demonstrate, that growth has been substantial: estimates in this article sug-
gest that the sex offender registration rate has spiked 25 percent between 2005 and
2013. Given that Bureau of Justice Statistics (2002) figures indicated that 263,166
sex offenders were registered in 1998, the number of registered sex offenders nearly
tripled between 1998 and 2013.6 Further, because many sex offenders are required

6. Even standardizing these figures by rates per 100,000 adult residents demonstrates a sizable increase
of 135 percent (from 131 to 308 sex offenders per 100,000 adults). Unfortunately, the Bureau of Justice Sta-
tistics has not released another report on sex offender registries since the 2002 report.
 Punishing Sex 15

TABLE 4.
Frequency and Rate of Sex Offender Registration per 100,000 Adult Residents,
Fifteen States Reporting Hispanic Offender Data

White Black Asian or Pac. Am. Indian

(Non-Hispanic) (N-H) Isl. (N-H) (N-H) Hispanic Other Total
Frequency Frequency Frequency Frequency Frequency Frequency Frequency
Rate Rate Rate Rate Rate Rate Rate

California 21,404 8,777 1,685 490 16,020 62 48,438

165 477 37 166 160 168
Connecticut 2,807 1,577 27 10 1,049 6 5,476
135 580 22 61 294 196
Hawaii 688 141 1,454 9 69 286 2,647
173 497 185 56 55 243
Indiana 9,334 1,674 29 27 186 60 11,310
224 380 29 85 72 229
Louisiana 5,511 5,016 31 61 97 9 10,725
251 470 45 167 63 308
Minnesota 153 111 5 14 5 288
4 54 3 23 3 7
New Mexico 2,012 100 8 492 149 1 2,762
282 300 26 364 22 176
New York 10,328 6,488 99 113 2,898 41 19,967
112 288 8 117 109 130
Ohio 12,958 4,454 50 36 357 14 17,869
174 418 27 59 145 201
Oklahoma 5,553 923 45 506 214 7,241
255 418 66 161 95 252
Rhode Island 393 108 6 3 87 597
59 227 20 39 91 72
South Carolina 6,994 4,721 23 41 111 44 11,934
285 485 37 142 67 328
Texas 37,195 14,851 300 52 18,650 72 71,120
805 1,385 70 76 282 373
Utah 5,661 229 94 207 690 23 6,904
346 1,013 121 775 293 351
Washington 4178 800 128 217 227 11 5561
102 371 25 176 44 105
15 State Total 125,169 49,970 3,984 2,278 40,809 629 222,839
214 512 47 173 181 213
49 State Total 398,776 145,055 5,735 5,093 598,697
238 501 41 152 251

to register for life, it is highly likely that this trend will continue for many years to
come. In short, while sex offender registries may have followed as a tailwind to
trends in corrections historically, these findings suggest trends in sex offender regis-
tration are now moving as a headwind—opposite to the trends in corrections more
generally.
16 LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY

Of course, this analysis has its own limitations, and is not intended to be an
exhaustive study of sex offender policies. First and foremost, because it relies on
public registries, this study excludes offenders convicted of sex crimes for which
their respective states do not require public registration. California, for example,
estimates that up to 25 percent of sex offenders are not documented in its online
registry because they are not required to register publicly (California Office of the
Attorney General 2014). As such, the findings in this article should be read as an
account of sex offenders forced to register publicly and not sex offenders more
broadly. However, as community notification is unique in many respects to sex,7
this study has unique insights into the punishment of sex.
As I argue, it is possible to envision a wider array of possibilities for the sexual-
ity studies by broadening our conceptualization of what counts as sexuality beyond
the gay/straight binary. Punishment provides one useful analytic lens for studying
how a particular set of social processes, institutions, and actors shape sexuality. Sex
has enabled the state to develop new forms of punishment that are not merely a
copy-paste of other carceral programs; sex brings its own social baggage and charac-
ter. For example, despite empirical evidence to the contrary, sex offenders are
viewed as particularly likely to reoffend and thus in need of special, more invasive
social control. The sociology of sexuality can help explain the persistence of this
inaccurate view in at least two ways. First, stigma and religious morality protects
this argument against criticism by painting sex as dirty and shameful. As such, con-
demning the sex offender as hopelessly unsalvageable aligns with dominant, reli-
giously informed worldviews that sex corrupts the body and mind. Second, sex
offender registries align with our medicalized understanding of sexuality as an
immutable, biologically determined characteristic. LGBT rights groups helped usher
in this modern understanding of sexuality by employing a “born this way” medical
discourse as a shield against morality. While framing same-sex desire as a benign
biological difference proved useful for securing social and legal recognition for
LGBT people, it may have inadvertently deepened the logic underpinning sex
offender registries: if sexuality cannot be changed, then sex offenders are guilty not
just of bad behaviors but of being a bad kind of person. Conventional modes of
punishment are not sufficient.
There are many avenues for exploring the punishment of sex in future studies.
For example, the role medicalization plays in the social control of sex offenders is
not well understood. Indefinite commitment policies developed to help control sex
offenders allow the state to keep individuals convicted of sex offenses locked up far
beyond their criminal sentence, perhaps for life, at the discretion of corrections offi-
cials. The Supreme Court ruled in Kansas v. Hendricks (1997) that such indefinite
detainment was not cruel and unusual punishment because it was not punishment at
all. In fact, the Court ruled, since the state is treating the sex offender under lock
and key and—since treatment is not a form of punishment—it can do so for as
long as it sees fit. These policies echo historian Regina Kunzel’s (forthcoming, 3)
account of early twentieth-century sexual psychopath laws: “Medical discourse . . .

7. Although many state departments of corrections do run online offender databases, these websites
are often restricted to those currently or recently incarcerated for felony offenses.
 Punishing Sex 17

mystified the laws’ criminalization of sexual difference in ways that made them diffi-
cult to challenge.” Although sexual psychopath laws fell out of favor in the 1970s,
their spirit appears to have been resurrected with the rise of sex offender policies in
the 1990s.
Future studies might also better explicate the historical relationship between
LGBT political projects and sex offender policies. Historian Scott De Orio (forth-
coming) demonstrates that early gay liberation activists in the 1970s organized
against California sex offender policies. Over time, however, the causes and strat-
egies mobilized under the banner of LGBT rights were increasingly winnowed to
focus on equal treatment under the law for gays and lesbians (Phelan 2001). This
shift may in part reflect what political scientist Cathy Cohen (1999, 9) terms
“secondary marginalization,” or the way elite group members purge more deviant
members and their issues from their ranks over time. By narrowing the scope and
vision of the LGBT movement to more sanitized equal rights issues and displacing
more stigmatized issues such as public sex, LGBT rights movements may have inad-
vertently emboldened the state to punish more severely other kinds of sex. Indeed,
the failure of Lawrence to resist the growth of new punishments targeting sex reveals
that its primary lasting impact may be to pave the way for same-sex marriage rights
(for a more robust version of this critique, see Franke 2004).
Beyond insights into the politics of sexuality, other studies might analyze how
the uneven application of sex offender registries contributes to racial inequality. As
I show, sex offender policies are disproportionately impacting black communities8
and, in several states, American Indian communities. Indeed, in four states—Flor-
ida, South Dakota, Texas, and Utah—it appears that more than 1 percent of black
residents were publicly registered as sex offenders at time of data collection. Consid-
ering that the vast majority of sex offenders are men—97.7 percent—the sex
offender rate for black men in these states is nearly double these figures. Given that
black male sexuality is frequently portrayed as hypersexual and dangerous (Entman
and Rojecki 2001; Cohen 2009), the fact that black men are more heavily regulated
under sex offender registries may not come as a surprise. That black men are already
so heavily entangled with the criminal justice enterprise also plays a central role, as
they are already funneled into the system through which sex offender registration
operates.
Yet, Hispanic men face similarly skewed popular media representations (see,
e.g., Mastro and Behm-Morawitz 2005), and although Hispanic overrepresentation
in the criminal justice system is not as exaggerated as it is for black Americans (1.8
times greater than white rates of incarceration vs. 5.6 for blacks, according to
Mauer and King 2007), it is nonetheless inflated nationally. However, at least in
the states that reported Hispanic offenders, they faced rates either similar to or
lower than whites. This puzzle may be in part explained by two issues. First, CDC

8. As I described earlier in the article, the fact that incarcerated individuals are undercounted in the
census figures used as a denominator in this analysis would dilute some of these disparities. Race-specific
counts of inmates from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and those published by others (Ewert, Sykes, and Pet-
tit 2014) would yield a sex offender rate of 485 per 100,000 black adults, a 3.2 percent difference from the
rate reported in this analysis (i.e., 501 sex offenders per 100,000). Therefore, these racial disparities are real
and may be larger if age, sex, and educational gradations are reflected in the estimation of crude rates.
18 LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY

data show that Hispanic women report experiencing rape and sexual assault at
lower rates than white and black women—33 percent lower than reported rape
rates for black women and 22 percent lower than reported rape rates for white
women (Black et al. 2011). As such, variations in reporting may play a small role
in shaping these differences.9 Second, Hispanic offenders who are not US citizens
face a great risk of deportation. Once deported, they are (obviously) not required to
register.
Beyond race, these policies also likely have important implications for class
inequality. For example, these policies likely contribute to patterned unemployment
between blacks and whites that has buttressed racialized class inequalities. Employ-
ment is not only jeopardized by community notification policies and public regis-
tries themselves, but also through a host of punitive policies such as driver’s
licenses stamped “sex offender” in red (as is required in Louisiana). Other states lit-
erally zone sex offenders out of the community by placing extensive restrictions on
where they can live, such as in the case made famous by The New York Times of
the “sex offender village” located in the middle of Florida farmland (Jackson and
Feige 2013).
Without an overarching theoretical and conceptual framework, however, it is
difficult to interpret this complex set of phenomena. Attempting to understand sex
offender policies through the conventional lens of sexuality studies—the gay/
straight binary—makes little sense. For example, Canaday (2011) persuasively
argues that state policies aimed at punishing homosexuality gave birth to a second-
class form of citizenship for gays and lesbians. But Canaday’s concept of the straight
state cannot account for the parallel rise of sex offender policies without the aid of
some serious academic gymnastics: while sex offender policies do govern same-sex
sexualities, they do so alongside a litany of other kinds of sex. To reduce all that
variation to homophobia or heterosexism does not make sense. This is not a flaw in
their account; it is simply not a conceptual apparatus built for understanding the
regulation of sex outside the gay/straight binary.
Sociolegal scholarship on punishment, such as Simon’s (2007) important work
on governing through crime, may prove useful for understanding these complex set
of phenomenon. For the many decades in which the war on drugs maintained its
legitimacy as an important social project, it proved to be a useful rallying cry for
legislators seeking to shore up their “tough on crime” persona and authority in gen-
eral. But the drug user has been rehabilitated in the public’s mind through dis-
courses of medicine (“medical marijuana”) at the same time that the war on drugs
has been revealed as grossly unjust (the new Jim Crow). The sex offender, on the
other hand, remains largely indefensible and most Americans know little of the pol-
icies used to control him (much less how those policies are administered). To

9. Of course, only a fraction of sex offenders are convicted of sexual assault—13 percent for rape and
16 percent for other forms of sexual assault, according to Ackerman et al. (2011). And although nearly 90
percent of rape is intraracial (Wheeler and Wheeler 2005), it is important to note that Hispanic Americans
report comparatively high rates of interracial relationships (37.5 percent vs. 14.8 percent among blacks and
7.3 percent among whites aged 22—25, according to Joyner and Kao 2005). Nonetheless, these figures sug-
gest that reporting may play a small role.
 Punishing Sex 19

many, “sex offender” is synonymous with “rapist” and “child molester.” In short, he
is the perfect villain for a new theater in the war on crime.

REFERENCES

Ackerman, Alissa R., Andrew J. Harris, Jill S. Levenson, and Kristen Zgoba. 2011. Who Are the
People in Your Neighborhood? A Descriptive Analysis of Individuals on Public Sex Offender
Registries. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 34:149–59.
Agathocleous, Alexis. 2011. Eight Years after Lawrence, Sodomy Laws Are Alive and Kicking.
Bilerico Project February 26. http://www.bilerico.com/2011/02/eight_years_after_lawrence_
sodomy_laws_are_alive_a.php (accessed March 1, 2012).
Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
New York: New Press.
Armstrong, Elizabeth A. 2002. Forging Gay Identities: Organizing Sexuality in San Francisco, 1950–
1994. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Baldus, David C., Charles Pulaski, and George Woodworth. 1983. Comparative Review of Death
Sentences: An Empirical Study of the Georgia Experience. Journal of Criminal Law & Crimi-
nology 74:661–753.
Bernstein, Elizabeth. 2010. Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism: The Politics
of Sex, Rights, and Freedom in Contemporary Antitrafficking Campaigns. Signs: Journal of
Women and Culture in Society 36:45–71.
Bersani, Leo. 1987. Is the Rectum a Grave? October 43:197–222.
Black, Michele C., Kathleen C. Basile, Matthew J. Breiding, Sharon G. Smith, Mikel L. Walters,
Melissa T. Merrick, Jieru Chen, and Mark R. Stevens. 2011. The National Intimate Partner
and Sexual Violence Survey NISVS: 2010 Summary Report. Atlanta, GA: National Center for
Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Bureau of Justice Statistics. 2002. Summary of State Sex Offender Registries, 2001. Washington,
DC: US Department of Justice.
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. 2014. Public Safety Realignment.
http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/realignment/ (accessed January 1, 2015).
California Office of the Attorney General. 2014. Megan’s Law—Sex Offender Registration and
Exclusion Information. http://meganslaw.ca.gov/sexreg.htm (accessed January 1, 2015).
Canaday, Margot. 2011. The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Carrillo, Hector. 2002. The Night is Young: Sexuality in Mexico in the Time of AIDS. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Chauncey, George. 1993. The Postwar Sex Crime Panic. In True Stories from the American Past,
ed. William Graebner, 160–78. New York: McGraw-Hill.
—— 1995. Gay New York. New York: Basic Books.
Cohen, Cathy J. 1999. The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics. Chi-
cago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
—— 2009. Black Sexuality, Indigenous Moral Panics, and Respectability: From Bill Cosby to the
Down Low. In Moral Panics, Sex Panics, ed. Gill Herdt, 104–29. New York: New York Uni-
versity Press.
Crawford, Charles, Ted Chiricos, and Gary Kleck. 2006. Race, Racial Threat, and Sentencing of
Habitual Offenders. Criminology 36:481–512.
De Orio, Scott. Forthcoming. Gay Men, Liberal Politics, and the Transformation of Sex Offender
Registration in California, 1947–1983. In The War on Sex, ed. Trevor Hoppe and David Hal-
perin. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Doerner Jill K., and Stephen Demuth. 2010. The Independent and Joint Effects of Race/Ethnic-
ity, Gender, and Age on Sentencing Outcomes in U.S. Federal Courts. Justice Quarterly 27:
1–27.
20 LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY

Entman, Robert M., and Andrew Rojecki. 2001. The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and
Race in America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Ewert, Stephanie, Bryan L. Sykes, and Becky Pettit. 2014. The Degree of Disadvantage: Incarera-
tion and Inequality in Education. ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science 651:24–43.
Franke, Katherine M. 2004. The Domesticated Liberty of Lawrence v. Texas. Columbia Law Review
104:1399–1426.
Freedman, Estelle B. 1987. “Uncontrolled Desires”: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath,
1920–1960. Journal of American History 74:83–106.
Garland, David. 1990. Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory. Chicago, IL: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.
—— 2001. Mass Imprisonment: Social Causes and Consequences. London: Sage.
Ghaziani, Amin. 2014. There Goes the Gayborhood? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Glaze, Lauren E. 2010. Correctional Populations in the United States, 2009. Washington, DC: US
Department of Justice.
Glaze, Lauren E., and Erinn J. Herberman. 2013. Correctional Populations in the United States,
2012. Washington, DC: US Department of Justice.
Green, Adam I. 2007. Queer Theory and Sociology: Locating the Subject and the Self in Sexual-
ity Studies. Sociological Theory 25:26–45.
—— 2014. Sexual Fields: Towards a Sociology of Collective Sexual Life. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
Halley, Janet. 1993. The Construction of Heterosexuality. In Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer
Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner, 82–103. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
Halperin, David. 2003. The Normalization of Queer Theory. Journal of Homosexuality 45:
339–43.
Holcomb, Jefferson E., Marian R. Williams, and Stephen Demuth. 2004. White Female Victims
and Death Penalty Disparity Research. Justice Quarterly 21:877–902.
Hoppe, Trevor. 2011. Circuits of Power, Circuits of Pleasure: Sexual Scripting in Gay Men’s Bot-
tom Narratives. Sexualities 14:193–217.
—— 2013. Controlling Sex in the Name of “Public Health”: Social Control and Michigan HIV
Law. Social Problems 60:27–49.
—— 2014. From Sickness to Badness: The Criminalization of HIV in Michigan. Social Science &
Medicine 101:139–47.
—— 2015. Disparate Risks of Conviction Under Michigan’s Felony HIV Disclosure Law: An
Observational Analysis of Convictions and HIV Diagnoses, 1992–2010. Punishment & Society
17:78–93.
Irvine, Janice. 2014. Is Sexuality Research “Dirty Work”? Institutionalized Stigma in the Produc-
tion of Sexual Knowledge. Sexualities 17:632–56.
Jackson, Lisa F., and David Feige. 2013. Sex Offender Village. New York Times, May
21. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/22/opinion/sex-offender-village.html (accessed
January 1, 2015).
Joyner, Kara, and Grace Kao. 2005. Interracial Relationships and the Transition to Adulthood.
American Sociological Review 70:563–81.
Kautt, Paula. 2009. Heuristic Influences Over Offense Seriousness Calculations: A Multilevel
Investigation of Racial Disparity Under Sentencing Guidelines. Punishment & Society 11:
191–218.
Kunzel, Regina. Forthcoming. Sex Panic, Psychiatry, and the Expansion of the Carceral State. In
The War on Sex, ed. Trevor Hoppe and David Halperin. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Lancaster, Roger. 2013. Sex Panic and the Punitive State. Oakland, CA: University of California
Press.
Leon, Chrysanthi S. 2011. Sex Fiends, Perverts, and Pedophiles: Understanding Sex Crime Policy in
America. New York: New York University Press.
 Punishing Sex 21

Levine, Judith. Forthcoming. Sympathy for the Devil: Why Progressives Haven’t Helped the Sex
Offender, Why They Should, and How They Can. In The War on Sex, ed. Trevor Hoppe
and David Halperin. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Lynch, Mona. 2002. Pedophiles and Cyber-Predators as Contaminating Forces: The Language of
Disgust, Pollution, and Boundary Invasions in Federal Debates on Sex Offender Legislation.
Law & Social Inquiry 27:529–57.
McIntosh, Mary. 1968. The Homosexual Role. Social Problems 16:182–92.
Mastro, Dana E., and Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz. 2005. Latino Representation on Primetime Tele-
vision. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 82:110–30.
Mauer, Marc, and Ryan S. King. 2007. Uneven Justice: State Rates of Incarceration by Race and Eth-
nicity. Washington, DC: Sentencing Project.
McCreery, Patrick. 1999. Beyond Gay: “Deviant” Sex and the Politics of The ENDA Workplace.
Social Text 61:39–58.
Pettit, Becky. 2012. Invisible Men: Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage.
Pfeffer, Carla. 2014. “I Don’t Like Passing as a Straight Woman”: Queer Negotiations of Identity
and Social Group Membership. American Journal of Sociology 120:1–44.
Phelan, Shane. 2001. Sexual Strangers: Gays, Lesbians, and Dilemmas of Citizenship. Philadelphia,
PA: Temple University Press.
Provine, Doris M. 2011. Race and Inequality in the War on Drugs. Annual Review of Law and
Social Science 7:41–60.
Rios, Victor. 2011. Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys. New York: New York Uni-
versity Press.
Rubin, Gayle. 1984. Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality. In
Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole Vance, 267–319. Boston, MA:
Routledge.
Sample, Lisa L., and Timothy M. Bray. 2003. Are Sex Offenders Dangerous? Journal of Criminol-
ogy and Public Policy 3:59–82.
——. 2006. Are Sex Offenders Different? An Examination of Rearrest Patterns. Criminal Justice
Policy Review 17:83–102.
Seidman, Steven. 1993. Identity and Politics in a “Postmodern” Gay Culture: Some Historical
and Conceptual Notes. In Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed.
Michael Warner, 105–43. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Simon, Jonathan. 2000. Megan’s Law: Crime and Democracy in Late Modern America. Law &
Social Inquiry 25:1111–50.
—— 2007. Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy
and Created a Culture of Fear. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stacey, Judith, and Barrie Thorne. 1985. The Missing Feminist Revolution in Sociology. Social
Problems 32:301–16.
Stein, Arlene, and Ken Plummer. 1994. “I Can’t Even Think Straight”: Queer Theory and the
Missing Sexual Revolution in Sociology. Sociological Theory 12:178–87.
Sutherland, Edwin H. 1950. The Sexual Psychopath Laws. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminol-
ogy 40:543–54.
Tewksbury, Richard, Wesley G. Jennings, and Kristen Zgoba. 2012. A Longitudinal Examination
of Sex Offender Recidivism Prior To and Following the Implementation of SORN. Behav-
ioral Sciences and the Law 30:308–28.
Wacquant, Lo€ıc. 2010. Class, Race & Hyperincarceration in Revanchist America. Daedalus 139:74–90.
Warner, Michael. 1999. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life. New
York: Free Press.
Wheeler, George, and Jennifer Wheeler. 2005. Race and Sexual Offending. In Race, Culture, Psy-
chology, & Law, ed. Kimberly H. Barrett and William H. George, 391–402. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage.
Yung, Corey R. 2009. The Emerging Criminal War on Sex Offenders. Harvard Civil Rights-Civil
Liberties Law Review 45:435–81.
22 LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY

CASES CITED

Kansas v. Hendricks, 521 U.S. 346 (1997).

Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003).
Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. ___ (2015).

STATUTES CITED

Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, 42 U.S.C. § 16911 et seq. (2006).
Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act, 42
U.S.C. § 14,071 (1994).