Sex Panic and the Punitive State The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the General Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation. Sex Panic and the Punitive State Roger N. Lancaster university of california press Berkeley • Los Angeles • London University of California Press, one of the most distin- guished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www .ucpress .edu . University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, En gland © 2011 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data Lancaster, Roger N. Sex panic and the punitive state / Roger N. Lancaster. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978–0-520–25565–4 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978–0-520–26206–5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Sex— United States. 2. Sexual ethics— United States. 3. Sex customs—United States. 4. United States— Social conditions— 20th century. I. Title. hq18u5l35 2011 306.70973'09045—dc22 2010020837 Manufactured in the United States of America 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post consumer waste, recycled, de- inked fi ber. FSC recycled certifi ed and pro cessed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo certifi ed, and manufactured by BioGas energy. For Ritchie and Joe, who try to live well This page intentionally left blank Present fears are less than horrible imaginings. —William Shakespeare, Macbeth Whoever fi ghts monsters should see to it that in the pro cess he does not become a monster. —Friedrich Nietz sche, Beyond Good and Evil Rome’s life was now an imitation of life: a mere holding on. Security was the watchword—as if life knew any other stability than through constant change, or any form of security except through a constant willingness to take risks. —Lewis Mumford, The Condition of Man This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Fear Eats the Soul 1 part one. sex panic 19 1. Panic: A Guide to the Uses of Fear 23 2. Innocents at Home: How Sex Panics Reshaped American Culture 39 3. To Catch a Predator: New Monsters, Imagined Risks, and the Erosion of Legal Norms 73 4. The Magical Power of the Accusation: How I Became a Sex Criminal and Other True Stories 104 part two. the punitive state 137 5. Zero Tolerance: Crime and Punishment in the Punitive State 141 6. Innocents Abroad: Taboo and Terror in the Global War 167 7. Constructing Victimization: How Americans Learned to Love Trauma 181 8. The Victimology Trap: Capitalism, Liberalism, and Grievance 214 Conclusion: Whither the Punitive State? 227 x | Contents Appendix 1: Race, Incarceration, and Notifi cation 247 Appendix 2: Notes on Method 252 Notes 257 Index 295 Ac know ledg ments Ideas for this book took shape in a series of invited workshop pre sen ta- tions. The fi rst was “The World Looks at Us: Rethinking the U.S. State,” a conference funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Critique of Anthropology, and the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the City University of New York (October 8–10, 2004). The second was “New Landscapes of Social In e qual ity,” a seminar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe or ga nized by Jane Collins, Micaela di Leonardo, and Brett Williams (March 11– 16, 2006). The last was my colloquium pre sen ta tion on March 28, 2007, at the Insti- tuto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades of the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla in Mexico during a year of research sponsored by a Fulbright–García Robles grant. I am grateful to various sponsors and interlocutors for giving me the opportunity to outline arguments and to develop ideas. Many people supplied me with helpful responses to early drafts of portions of this book: Talal Asad, Catherine Besteman, Michelle Boyd, Lisa Breglia, Partha Chatterjee, Melissa Checker, John Clark, Hilary Cunningham, Amal Hassan Fadlalla, Carlos Figueroa Ibarra, Lesley Gill, Hugh Gusterson, Matt Gutmann, Tim Kaposy, Kerwin Kaye, Ann King- solver, Catherine Lutz, Nancy MacLean, Jeff Maskofsky, Sally Engle Merry, Pablo Morales, Sandra Morgen, Gina Pérez, Dan Robotham, Tom Scartz, Nancy Scheper- Hughes, Jane Schneider, Peter Schneider, Ida Susser, and Brett Williams. I would like to express special thanks to xi xii | Ac know ledg ments those who read the entire manuscript at different stages of its develop- ment: Andy Bickford, Jane Collins, Micaela di Leonardo, Marcial Go- doy, Mark Jacobs, and Mark Pedelty. I especially benefi ted from close readings and generous feedback from James Faubion and the three readers who served as outside reviewers for the Press: Dorothy Roberts, Michael Sherry, and Jonathan Simon. My editor, Naomi Schneider, gave helpful, supportive guidance throughout. Special thanks to Kate Warne for attentive production editing and to Do Mi Stauber for thoughtful indexing. George Mason University generously supplied me with faculty study leave that gave me time to research, refl ect, and write. My colleagues there have provided me with lively conversation and helpful exchanges over the years, and those conversations clearly mark these pages. I should especially thank Paul Smith, Dina Copelman, and Denise Alba- nese. Lucas Witman served as my research assistant during much of this project; he proved a thoughtful and indefatigable searcher of libraries and databases. Scott Killen also served as research assistant. Any errors, omissions, or poor word choices are of course my own. Early (and substantially different) versions of some portions of this book have been published in a variety of places: “State of Panic,” in New Landscapes of In e qual ity, ed. Jane Collins, Micaela di Leonardo, and Brett Williams (Santa Fe, N. Mex.: School for Advanced Research Press, 2008), 39– 64. “Panic Attack: Sex and Terror in the Homeland,” in “Terror Incog- nita: Immigrants and the Homeland Security State,” a special issue of NACLA Report on the Americas 41, no. 6 (November– December 2008): 31– 35. “Republic of Fear: The Rise of Punitive Governance in the United States,” in Rethinking America: The Imperial Homeland in the Twenty-fi rst Century, ed. Jeff Maskovsky and Ida Susser (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2009), 201– 12. “Republic of Fear: The Triumph of Punitive Governance in America,” in The Insecure American, ed. Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 63–76. introduction Fear Eats the Soul The most modern aspect of the spectacle is thus also the most archaic. —Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle To him who is in fear, everything rustles. —Sophocles, Acrisius (fragment) I began drafting notes for this book when I found myself near the center of a raging sex panic: a combined police, judiciary, and media frenzy triggered by vague and constantly shifting accusations against a gay male schoolteacher I know. It is one thing to understand, in the abstract, that presumptions of innocence, standards of reasonable doubt, and as- sorted procedures of rational law have been eroded by wave after wave of sex crime hysterias in the United States. It is quite another thing to see scary mug shots of a close friend aired on the eve ning news. Calling the public spectacle I witnessed unfair or prejudicial would understate matters. Credulous journalists related, without qualifi cation, the narra- tives of cops, prosecutors, and victims’ rights advocates. In the pro cess they conveyed outright misinformation about the defendant and the case. Even facts that would normally count in one’s favor—for example, a long and spotless record of employment in the fi eld— were made to sound menacing. Homosexuality, never named, was insinuated— by re- peatedly announcing the home address of the accused. (He lived in the heart of a gay neighborhood.) Sex panics, it suddenly seemed to me, were more or less everywhere, a fi xture in and fi xation of American culture. I started to pay close atten- tion to other sex cases in the news. Some of these news stories involved nightmarish but isolated events: the rape and murder of defenseless 1 2 | Introduction children. Others related serious allegations of serial abuse and system- atic cover- up. However, many stories that clamored for public attention involved nonviolent, noncoercive offenses of various types. Minor in- fractions or petty nuisances were portrayed as ominous threats. In one case I followed, a man in his thirties was spied through win- dow curtains playing ping- pong in the nude with a pubescent boy; the latter was fully clothed. The man’s behavior ought to have raised ques- tions, obviously. But there was nothing nuanced or undecided about the response of law enforcement in this case. The man was arrested, not once but twice, and the result was a lead story on local news stations— a placement that scarcely seems commensurate with any dangers plausibly associated with naked table tennis. Talking heads implored the public to provide “more information” about the arrestee, while self-appointed experts parsed the modus operandi of sexual predators, underscoring the point that there is never any good reason for adults and minors to be nude around each other. No sexual contact of any sort between the man and any minor was ever alleged. And even though the man, who hap- pened to be a police offi cer, had no previous arrests or convictions of any sort, clarion calls were sounded for greater vigilance, for “fi tness evalua- tions” and more extensive background checks for coaches, teachers, and youth counselors.