Sexual Predators - Civil Commitment And The Criminal Law, Sexual Psychopath Laws, Second Generation Sex Offender Commitment Laws

crime violence entry aspects

This entry addresses laws for the civil commitment of sexually dangerous persons. Beginning in the 1930s, many states expanded the traditional reach of civil commitment to include "sexual psychopaths." By the 1970s these psychopath laws were judged to be a failed experiment. In the 1990s, social forces combined to produce a suite of innovative approaches to sexual violence, including a second generation of sex offender commitment laws. Often born in the white-hot light of public outrage over heinous crime, these laws have been dubbed sexual predator commitments.

This entry begins by situating sex offender commitments in the legal landscape governing the deprivation of liberty. It sketches the rise and fall of the sexual psychopath laws, and then discusses the social forces that led to the resurrection of civil commitment as a tool to address sexual violence. The entry also describes the operation of commitment laws. It then addresses the constitutional controversy concerning these laws, and concludes with a discussion of the critiques of these laws as a tool in the fight against sexual violence.

ERIC S. JANUS

Additional Topics

Sexual Predators - Civil Commitment And The Criminal Law

To understand how sex offender commitment laws are situated in American jurisprudence, one must understand the two sets of intersecting concepts that describe the exercise of governmental power to deprive individuals of their liberty. These concepts describe the sources of the power and the modes in which it is exercised. The sources of governmental power are two: The police power authorizes the s…

Sexual Predators - Sexual Psychopath Laws

In the early twentieth century, the Progressive movement focused on the causes of deviance and emphasized treatment and discretionary responses to individual cases. In the 1930s, newly developed psychiatric explanations of habitual criminality (including sexual deviance) and the influx of psychiatry into the courts laid the groundwork for the sex psychopath statutes, a series of laws that were ena…

Sexual Predators - Second Generation Sex Offender Commitment Laws

Emergence. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a confluence of factors produced a set of innovations that supplemented the traditionally reactive governmental role in addressing sexual violence. The main tools of the new approach were registration, notification, and civil commitment. Underlying notification and civil commitment is a fourth tool, systematic risk assessment. All of these tools recast…

Sexual Predators - Bibliography

American Psychiatric Association. Dangerous Sex Offenders: A Task Force Report of the American Psychiatric Association. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1997. Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry. Psychiatry and Sex Psychopath Legislation: The 30s to the 80s. New York: Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, 1977. Symposium. "Throwing Away the Key: Social and Legal Re…

Citing this material

Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading unbiased, factual, and accurate information.

Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.