Responding to Sex Offenders

• Published date: 01 January 2015
• Date: 01 January 2015
• Author: Heather Y. Bersot,Bruce A. Arrigo
• DOI: 10.1177/0093854814550025
• Subject Matter: Response to Crime

CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR, 2015, Vol. 42, No. 1, January 2015, 32 –44.

DOI: 10.1177/0093854814550025

© 2014 International Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology

32

RESPONDING TO SEX OFFENDERS

Empirical Findings, Judicial Decision Making, and

Legal Moralism

HEATHER Y. BERSOT

BRUCE A. ARRIGO

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

The science examining institutional and community-based responses to sexual offending has been well documented. The

responses to this form of criminal behavior include penal incarceration followed by civil commitment, community notifica-

tion, and sex offender registration. To date, evidence-based findings report that these correctives and/or curatives yield limited

effectiveness sufficient to justify their continued maintenance as statewide or even national criminal justice and mental health

policy prescription. One official systems-level way that policy receives legitimacy is through the Courts. Interestingly, the

precedent-setting sex offender case law indicates that current policy prescriptions are constitutionally permissible and there-

fore justifiable as regulatory practices, notwithstanding the empirical evidence that challenges their soundness. This article

summarizes the science regarding sex offender policy from the point of imprisonment to reentry, recounts the relevant case

law that judicially sanctions such institutional and community practices, and explains how the driver for sex offender law and

policy is legal moralism grounded in and advanced by utilitarian reasoning and duty-based logic. This article concludes by

suggesting how judicial reliance on legal moralism could further the interests of public safety and civil liberties if insights

from virtue jurisprudence informed the analysis.

Keywords: sex offenders; case law; legal moralism; virtue jurisprudence

No other type of predatory criminal elicits such moral disdain and societal revulsion than

those individuals classified as sex offenders. Men accused of perpetuating sexual vio-

lence against others, particularly the most vulnerable segments of society (e.g., women and

children), commonly find themselves rebuked both within their respective communities and

even among their fellow offenders. As a criminal subgroup, the sexually violent individual

may very well be considered among the “worst of the worst” (Tewksbury, Jennings, &

Zgoba, 2012, p. 20). However, confounding the crime control response to sex offending is

the recurring sensationalized depiction of offenders as morally depraved male strangers

with grossly perverse desires, who lurk in wooded areas along a walking trail or wait at the

AUTHORS’ NOTE: Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Bruce A. Arrigo,

Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC

28223; e-mail: barrigo@uncc.edu.

550025CJBXXX10.1177/0093854814550025Criminal Justice and BehaviorBersot, Arrigo / Sex Offenders and Legal Moralism

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