Pain can be alleviated by morphine but the pain of social ostracism cannot be taken away. – Derek Jarman
To a very high degree, modern society is losing its taste for overt violence. As Steven Pinker has pointed out, by any measurable standard we are living in the least violent era in human history, and the level keeps dropping all the time; there is less war, less violent crime, and less collective brutality than ever before. But while modern people are more likely to fight with lawsuits than with knives and states are more likely to impoverish or incarcerate than to execute, there is still plenty of hate, concentrated on an ever-dwindling population of “safe” targets. In the West, maltreatment of sexual minorities has always been popular, and though society has placed race, gender, religion, ethnicity and even homosexuality off-limits, open hatred of most sexual minorities is still deemed acceptable both for individuals and for governments. The diminishing popularity of open barbarism such as beating, branding, maiming or burning alive led to a shift toward incarceration, but overcrowded prisons and skyrocketing costs make permanent caging of the non-violent unfeasible even when it isn’t actually impossible, so what are sadistic moralists to do? Increasingly, the answer is the next best thing to imprisonment: exile.
For most of history, the preferred method for dealing with undesirables was to remove them by pushing them to the fringes of society, banishing them from a jurisdiction altogether, or ejecting them from material existence entirely (often by imaginative and grisly means designed to instill fear into the rest of the populace). Then in the 19th century, all of these were largely supplanted by the one-size-fits-all approach, incarceration; though it was advertised (and still is) as a means of “correcting” errant individuals, it actually serves only two purposes: sequestration and vengeance. But the United States has carried that inhumane experiment almost as far as is economically and socially possible, and even die-hard adherents of the “lock ‘em all up” mentality are beginning to admit that the system is a human rights disaster; since execution is now widely considered distasteful except for the most heinous murders, it isn’t surprising that banishment is coming back into fashion for “sex criminals”.
Though everyone has sexual impulses, a large fraction of humanity (most especially Judeo-Christian humanity) prefers to pretend that it doesn’t. When an “upright, wholesome” man or a “pure, chaste” woman sees a “pervert” or whore, he or she is unpleasantly reminded of his or her own sexual needs and thoughts; the urge to remove “sex offenders” from public view is thus a very strong one. It’s easy for the typical “law-abiding citizen” to pretend he would never steal or kill, so even if a violent criminal remains in the public eye it provokes little discomfort among the righteous; sex “crimes”, however, are a different matter entirely, and require more active and ritualistic “othering” and expulsion. That’s why the physical location of a brothel or escort’s incall is almost invariably mentioned with pretended horror: “within walking distance of [an] Elementary School” or “a building close to [a] Monastery” or “just a few hundred yards from the courthouse.” Given the density of schools, churches and government buildings in any typical city it would be unusual if a whore’s workplace was not close to some such edifice, but these statements serve an incantatory purpose rather than an informational one: they are formulae intended to assure the reader or listener that commercial sex is weird and that the speaker or writer wholly disapproves of it.
Once one understands this, “sex offender” residency restrictions make a lot more psychological sense, despite their complete legal insupportability and practical absurdity; obviously, nobody believes that “sex offenders” are incapable of moving from their declared residences, nor that they are so stupid they would prefer to commit “sex crimes” in their own neighborhoods rather than someplace else where they’re less likely to be identified. The purpose of such laws is to prevent ritual contamination from pariahs, and to remind the citizenry that politicians are courageous defenders of the public morals. How else can we explain petty evil like this:
[Los Angeles] officials are building a small park in Harbor Gateway…[to force] 33 registered sex offenders to move out of a nearby apartment building. State law prohibits sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a park or school. By building the park, officials said, they would effectively force the sex offenders to leave the neighborhood…Los Angeles plans to build a total of three pocket parks with the intent of driving out registered sex offenders; two will be in Wilmington. At one-fifth of an acre, [it] will barely have room for two jungle gyms, some benches and a brick wall…The action marks the latest campaign…to drive sex offenders farther into the fringes of society. The state law already bans offenders from living in huge swaths of urban areas, pushing them into industrial districts and remote towns and into neighborhoods…that lack schools and parks…
Clustering of “sex offenders” is the inevitable result of these draconian residence policies, and Los Angeles isn’t the only place where politicians are now legislating to “solve” a problem they created themselves:
Shiloni Transformation Ministry has taken a stand against…the Anti-Clustering Law being made statewide in Alabama. This law was passed in 2010 for the City of Birmingham…as a “test run” for the entire state to adopt this very damaging piece of legislation…[which] effectively disabled our ministry from being able to take in former sex offenders out of prison…HB 85 does state that there is a provision…for half-way houses that are “state approved”…[but] there is no state approval agency or standard set in place…Bill Grier…of Shiloni…[said] “The State of Alabama has…opposed the assistance of any and all convicted sex offenders…This…supports recidivism because they have no structured environment to…enable them to move forward”…the State of Colorado Department of Corrections Study in 2003…found that residency restrictions had no effect on recidivism of sex offenders, but a positive…environment, such as a halfway house or…supportive family, increases an offender’s likelihood of living a productive, successful life once their sentences have been served.
Grotesquely-unjust government policies nearly always have to get worse before they get better, and “sex criminal” banishment laws have now reached the tipping point; they are so clearly monstrous that even people who are not themselves directly affected are beginning to oppose them, as in the example above. It’s going to be a long time before the victims of these registries are freed from rampant persecution, but perhaps sex workers may be somewhat luckier:
A proposal to banish sex workers from Atlanta has stalled amid growing opposition that includes LGBT activists and gay residents…The…City Council’s Public Safety Committee dropped the proposal…instead looking to convene a Working Group on Prostitution to gather recommendations on how to best deter prostitution. That’s quite a departure from the Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution proposal, which was on a fast track to approval earlier this month…
The vast majority of so-called “sex offenders” are people who were accused of perfectly ordinary human behaviors criminalized by our twisted society; the remainder are far more likely to reoffend if they’re denied normal social interaction. Neither they nor streetwalkers nor anyone else who hasn’t committed mass murder deserve to be driven out of communities as lepers once were; it’s time to consign such atavistims to the same rubbish-heap of obsolete legal penalties where the pillory, the lash and the headsman’s axe are buried.
Brilliant.
Mormon excommunication. Amish/Mennonite shunning. Roman Catholic interdict. Medical Professional restrictive covenant. Public School expulsion. U.S. Navy admin sep. Hospital loss of privileges. U.S. Marine Corps blanket party.
You missed a much larger example: the most common form of punishment in Africa (from the 1550’s to about 1800) was banishment. If the recorded histories on both sides of the Atlantic can be seen as accurate, it can be assumed that at least half of all African slaves were sent to exile (political prisoners, spoils of war turned extra mouths to feed, etc.)
I find it ironic that Atlanta, Georgia, would experiment with exile, as many of the early citizens of the state arrived there as prisoners from England, sentenced to transportation.
Another problem is that punishment has become never ending. Once upon a time, back when record keeping wasn’t so good, a person finished their sentence, and that was it. Business with the state was done. One could cross the mountains, prairies, change their name and start over.Many founding citizens did that.
Now, however, one’s business with the government is never done. After serving one’s term, one is still monitored, harassed, and restricted.
My cousin Jeff understood this; it’s why he left the country. He knew that sooner or later one of his crazy ex’s accusations would stick (the first twelve or so were eventually rejected by prosecutors or grand juries) and that he would then be branded as a felon, almost certainly a “sex criminal”, for life. Getting out of the US also freed him from court-ordered payments for literally more than he had ever made. And I’m sure he’s not alone; this is another kind of de facto banishment of divorced men.
Where did he go, out of curiosity, and how hard was it to get residency elsewhere?
I’ve considered ditching the country myself.
You definitely don’t want to do it the same way he did, considering he went missing (presumed dead) less than a year after leaving the US; the last letter I had from him (September 1997) was postmarked Katmandu, Nepal. Of course, he may have succeeded in starting a new identity elsewhere, but somehow I doubt it.
Nepal, interesting. I would do Thailand but only because I’ve got tons of friends there.
But then, I have people everywhere.
One of the Tahitian Islands … or Fiji.
Now you sound like Mick Jagger. (He loves Fiji.)
You might consider Pitcairn Island, if their are still people there…. the descendants of the Bounty mutineers and their Polynesian wives….
Erk. Sorry to hear that.
Could not agree more.
Local (mostly street-based) sex workers face the city’s boundary laws, which essentially lets police draw arbitrary lines through a map and say “you’re not allowed to be here”. Locations included in such maps are things like support and addiction services, strolls (where they make money) and, if I remember right, courthouses. It’s an overly technocratic way of saying “henceforth, though shalt starve to death in the snow on the outskirts of the city”.
Dicks.
Clearly offenders who comply with restrictions to be let loose into the community are devious predators: those who repent of their crimes would stay in prison.
Originally, the way they sold sex offender lists was, “Look, we know these people (child molesters) are mentally ill and really can’t help themselves. However, as a society we’ve decided to treat them as criminals who need to be punished rather than as mentally ill people who need to be treated. Since we also aren’t giving them life without parole, we are sending them to your neighborhood where they can molest your children. Let us create the sex offender list and that way you’ll know where they live and can keep your kids away from them.”
Of course, it wasn’t long before “sex offender” was expanded to include more people than mentally ill child molesters (not that it was a good way to deal with that group, anyway). It also wasn’t long before the sex offender list was used for NIMBY purposes to send the sex offenders to live under a bridge somewhere.
My daughters are Tweens, which makes me emotionally vulnerable to the popular argument.
But as I discussed with their mother when the school district sent the letter, the lack of information on their offenses makes the list worthless.
Too many consenting activities are a crime. Hell, we went from legal underage partners to rapist/rape victim to illegal cohabitation to married. I think we violated a bunch of sodomy laws in there as well.
“So yeah your mother could have put me on that list if she had wanted to.”. Wasn’t recieved well. But if an actual adult actually attacked my girls, he wouldn’t make it to prison and I would.
Here I found an article on the history of these laws:
http://sex-offender-registry-review.toptenreviews.com/history-of-the-sex-offender-registry.html
For me the key information is “[Megan’s Law] t was inspired by the death of 7-year-old Megan Kanka, who was raped and murdered by a neighbor who was a convicted pedophile in 1994.”
Specifically, a man who had two previous convictions for sexual assaults on small children! “Jesse K. Timmendequas (born April 15, 1961) had two previous convictions for sexually assaulting young girls. In 1979 he pleaded guilty to the attempted aggravated sexual assault of a five-year-old girl in Piscataway Township, New Jersey. ” — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Megan_Kanka
This man should only have been let out of prison if it was to be moved to an Asylum for the Criminally Insane, and should not have been living unsupervised in a nice suburban neighbourhood. Seriously, aggravated sexual assault on a 5 year old girl? Why was he let out of prison, ever?
So, now we can be happy that if he were still alive he’d be on a list along with a girl who who was convicted of sending naked pictures of herself to her boyfriend when she was 15.
But he would still be out of prison, walking around, looking for his chance to rape and smother a little girl.
Exactly. These lists do little to protect children (supposedly the reason the lists exist) and they do great harm.
I would think that the Los Angeles solution could be challenged under a number of legal violations…
The pillory, the lash, and the headman’s axe should be dusted off and brought back out for a lot of these politicians and their puppetmasters. Just sayin’.
^This. Of course it’s usually the case that when you invest people with authority over others(always a bad idea) the ones so invested tend to ensure they themselves are never subject to the same rules.
Anyways great post again Maggie
This describes in part maybe typical US examples of banishment. In the Netherlands at least the legal category “sex offender” does not exist, and I had never heard of it before I came to the US. A few years ago a brand new daycare center was opened, window brothels on both sides, across from the Old Church in the heart of the Amsterdam Red Light District. In the same district, window brothels alternate with upscale apartment living in historic four-storey houses. For sure the city prefers the apartment developments at the expense of the window brothels but that seems to be a matter of the administrators’ well-known coziness with developers and unfair, sneaky treatment of the legal sex trade. Ugh… In a second, smaller Amsterdam red light district that’s not (yet) under the administration’s attacks, a High School is located catty corner of a row of window brothels. From my experience I sense that the European public in general is far more tolerant to the public presence of the sex trade than the general US public and authorities, even in countries where sex work is illegal. Condition: no public nuisance and rowdiness. Regulations try to contain this.
How would the proponents of “Megan’s Law” feel if Megan had lived to adolescence, and then became a sex offender herself for sending lewd photos of herself that older men could masturbate to? After all, that really is a crime worth ruining a young woman’s life.
I imagine there are plenty of people who thought (or think) Megan’s Law was a good idea who ended up on Sex Offender lists.
In the same realm, though a slightly different topic, any thoughts on this?
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/03/12/2351235/european-parliament-decides-not-to-ban-internet-porn
(It’s not as benevolent as it looks.)
It’s the subject of this week’s Cliterati column. 🙂
Good news everybody 😉
Civil libertarians who feel queasy about defending sex offenders should read these two articles from the academic literature:
Rind, B., Yuill, R., (2012). Hebephillia as a mental disorder? A historical, cross-cultural, sociological, cross-species, non-clinical empirical, and evolutionary review. Archives of Sexual Behavior
Malon, A., (2010). Onanism and child sexual abuse: A comparative study of two hypotheses. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 39, 637-652
If you live near a good library, check them out. They’re fascinating stuff.
I just realized that the second article is available for free online. You can find it by searching Agustin Malon on Google scholar and clicking on the articles title. So go read it!
Okay, I’d like to defend the practices of branding and maiming as not being open barbarism but rather a practical and indeed even rational solution to the problem of providing a disincentive to crime.
First, we must stop thinking of these punishments as only happening to children and other people that existed on the margins of society. The problem was people who were making enough money to live reasonably well or were perfectly capable of doing so, but wanted more.
Maiming and branding served as ways of making crime have consequences, but without imposing a massive expense on the rest of the population nor indeed, on the person.
A person with only one hand could still effectively make a living that, while lower than possible with both hands would not cripple him for life.
Compare that to the lengthy prison sentence meted out today. A person could spend ten years or more with far less freedom of movement and choice than a man with one hand and leave prison with any practical skills atrophied and hopelessly out of date.
A branded person would be forced to have everyone know of his crime, but that is hardly different than today, where knowledge of any criminal record is easily acquired and when one is looking for employment, that person is forced to tell of any felony convictions.
And that person would have also had spent a long time in prison, so wow, I don’t think we really made much progress.
Good points, well made.
And thank you for again pointing out that we are less violent than we used to be. With all the nostalgic nonsense out there, it’s hard to point it out too often.