NCJ Number
178849
Journal
Northwestern University Law Review Volume: 92 Issue: 4 Dated: Summer 1998 Pages: 1317-1413
Date Published
1998
Length
98 pages
Annotation
This article discusses how historical transformation in social and legal perspectives toward sexuality, crime, and the criminal law spurred the creation of the United States' initial sexual psychopath statutes enacted between 1937 and 1957.
Abstract
Part I discusses the primary precursors of the sexual psychopath statutes that encouraged the public's and politicians' acceptance of the concept of sexual psychopathy: the increasing sexualization of American society, changes in gender roles and relations, the valuation of children and the family unit, and the influx of psychiatry. Part II describes how the diagnosis of sexual psychopathy slowly developed as a result of the criminal justice system's increasing tendency to explain criminal behavior in psychoanalytic terms. Part III examines three of the primary influences that scholars have identified concerning how and why sexual psychopath statutes were enacted between 1937 and 1957: the media, citizens' groups, and law enforcement agencies. Part IV discusses the author's study of the relationships among newspaper reports, crime rates, and sexual psychopath legislation. Part V analyzes a number of the other perceived influences behind the sexual psychopath laws, concluding the both men and women apparently were involved in initiating and perpetuating the legislation. Part VI notes that despite the increased funding of psychiatric studies of sex offenders and specialized facilities to threat them from 1950 to 1970, there was a dearth of treatment options available. The author notes that the purpose and ineffectiveness of this medicalization of deviance spurred a series of constitutional challenges that encouraged many States to repeal their sexual psychopath laws during the mid-1970s. Paradoxically, the 1990s have revised sexual psychopath legislation at both the State and Federal levels, even though critiques of the new laws resemble those voiced historically. Once again, concludes the author, politicians have responded to an increasingly retributive public that believes that even minor sex offenders require harsher punishment. 331 footnotes, 12 tables, and 8 figures