Abstract

How to Treat Sex Offenders

From time to time the U.S. gets stirred up about some particular area of crime and resolves to do something about it. Doing something usually consists of passing a law invoking the severest kind of penalties namely death, life imprisonment, twenty-five years without benefit of parole. Spectacular and brutal sex crimes have a special power to inflame public resentment which embraces sex offenders, the harmless as well as the dangerous. Those whose conduct merely offends good taste and moral standards become statistically amalgamated with the far less numerous seriously aggressive, truly menacing "fiends" whose deeds shock and frighten everyone. In the realm of sex crimes, however, the past few years have witnessed a tendency to move away from an enhanced punitive point of view to a so-called medical solution.