Beyond Queer Disavowal to Building Abolition

While unlikely actors such as Newt Gingrich, member of the conservative prison reform organization Right on Crime,¹ lobby for sentencing reform and prison closure and herald the “end of mass incarceration” (New York Times 2014), facets of our carceral regime remain untouched. People convicted of sex crimes are, according to political scientist Marie Gottschalk, “the fastest growing segment of state and federal prison populations” due to “tougher sanctions” (Gottschalk 2015, 199). Punishment continues after exiting prison. With more than 800,0000 individuals on sex offender registries, many convicted as minors, surveillance persists after release from prison (Horowitz 2015, Lancaster 2011). In 2014 in New York, as the state pushed to close prisons, the Washington Post reported that dozens of people with convictions for sexual offenses were held after their release date because of their inability to secure housing due to laws that restricted their residences to outside one thousand feet of a school (including state- or non-state-sponsored shelters) (Associated Press 2014). The hyper-vilification and increased criminalization of “sex offenders” stands in stark contrast to the growing bipartisan consensus that the “war on crime” and “war on drugs,” in the words of President Bill Clinton, “sent everybody to jail for too long” (Hunt 2014). As criminal justice reform gains a tenacious foothold, interrogating the function of sex offender registries and community notification laws grows more imperative.

State and federal definitions of what qualifies as a sex offense vary and continue to expand. Gottschalk suggests that as “pedophilia came to be viewed as interchangeable and synonymous with all sex offenders” (198) in the 1980s, this notion fueled the escalating and unique and exceptionally punitive state responses. In Illinois, for example, sex offenses include convictions such as criminal sexual assault, sexual abuse, child pornography, sexual exploitation of a child, and soliciting a child.² Juveniles are particularly vulnerable. A minor who texts a nude selfie, an act done by one in five teenagers, is creating and circulating child pornography (Herman 2010). An adult engaging in this behavior (with other adults) would not be committing a crime. Once convicted, individuals are restricted in where they can live and are required to “register” their location through posted public notices, in online databases, and, in some states such as Louisiana, on state identification cards. Depending on the conviction and jurisdiction, this registration requirement can last for a period of years or for a lifetime.

Notably, research consistently concurs that registries and community notification laws do not reduce child sexual violence, and “stranger danger” sexual violence against children is the least significant risk (Wright 2003, Bureau of Justice Statistics 2000). Available data clearly identify that for all children under eighteen, strangers are consistently the least likely to be the perpetrators of sexual assaults, generally less than 10 percent (Horowitz 2015, Gottschalk 2015). Gottschalk summarizes available research: “friends, acquaintances, and family members are responsible for more than 90 percent of all sexual abuse of children” (Gottschalk 2015, 124). Yet the specter of the “stranger danger” child molester fuels harsher sentencing structures, longer registration requirements, and persistently presents a political roadblock to imagining a world without prisons. Registries and community notification requirements have also failed to prevent child sexual violence—which is still frequently unreported to law enforcement—or produce accountable channels for public safety.

As many scholars have documented, pre–Stonewall era gay (and lesbian) organizing featured anti-prison organizing: “publishing newsletters, investigating and publicizing prison conditions, offer legal counseling, organizing prison ministries, sponsoring pen-pal and outreach projects, and assisting parolees” (Kunzel 2008, 12). As policing and punishment shaped queer lives, liberation movements required prison justice analysis and organizing.³ This roundtable suggests that not only do linkages between queers and “sex offenders” persist and necessitate closer interrogation, but dismantling our investments in a carceral regime requires challenging our queer feelings, disavowals, and investments in the supposedly “worst of the worst.” Solidarities and shared analysis are critical in these moments of rethinking “mass incarceration,” yet mainstream gay and lesbian movements—with an emphasis on legislative and other rights-based agendas—are glaringly...