Abstract
The evidence available today indicates that the serious social problem called sex offending does not appear to be resolvable by any of the means currently employed. A large array of procedures are used in the attempt to control this difficult population. These include, to name only the major ones, imprisonment, institutional and community treatment, community monitoring by probation and parole, electronic monitoring, registration as a sex offender, community notification of an offender’s status, strict limits on behavioral movement in the community, and residence restrictions. These constraints on behavior are almost completely a result of public outrage regarding sensational and heinous sex crimes, overreaction of media coverage that produces wildly inaccurate statements of potential community risk, and the efforts of the legal professionals and politicians to quell this anger and foreboding by enacting legislation that supposedly confronts the risk. Thus we have erected a massive edifice of community control that is socially and politically rather than empirically driven, which has largely failed to contain sexual crime.
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Laws, D.R. (2016). Introduction: What This Book Is About. In: Social Control of Sex Offenders. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39126-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39126-1_1
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