Constructing Hysteria: Legal Signals as Producers of Siting Conflicts Over Sexually Violent Predator Placements

Abstract

Sexually violent predator (SVP) statutes define some sex offenders as dangerous enough to be segregated from society, but then require their release into local communities. This article examines how decision makers and community members interpret and respond to this inherent contradiction during disputes over SVP placements. The article departs from traditional moral panic explanations of reactions to sex offenders by linking literature on local siting conflicts to insights from legal mobilization studies in order to understand the origins and features of community opposition to sex offenders. Data from three case studies of SVP placements in California suggest that interpretations of what I call legal signals, or implicit messages embedded in state laws, produced these conflicts. The findings shed new light on the role of law in siting conflicts and collective action by explaining how state laws facilitate communities' exclusion from siting decisions, encourage local opposition, and disempower already marginalized communities.

Contextualizing Community Crime Control: Race, Geography, and Configurations of Control in Four Communities*

“…The first project focused on differential community attitudes and responses to living in highcrime communities (Leverentz, 2011(Leverentz, , 2012. The second project focused on community responses to SVP placements in two communities (Williams, 2013(Williams, , 2016. Across the two datasets, we captured urban and rural, predominantly Black and predominantly White, high-and low-crime communities (see table 1 for a summary of the four sites).…”

“…Our analysis is based on data collected for two studies on social control and community responses to crime. The first study focused on how urban communities defined crime and criminals, broadly speaking, and how this was shaped by community context (Leverentz, 2011(Leverentz, , 2012; the second examined how and why urban and rural communities responded to sexually violent predator (SVP) placements in their towns (Williams, 2013(Williams, , 2016. Together, these data allow us to expand existing theories about the processes through which communities and political and legal institutions shape crime-control efforts across demographically and geopolitically different communities.…”

The Politics of Symbolic Laws: State Resistance to the Allure of Sex Offender Residence Restrictions

“…Examining one state in particular, Goodman, Page, and Phelps (2017) found that struggles between activists, bureaucrats, and other low-level actors contributed to changes in criminal justice policies. Their findings reflect increasing calls for scholars to examine the local contexts of policymaking in order to understand how and why policies vary across places (Williams 2018b). Despite this new trend in analyzing policymaking at the state level, few studies have directly examined the policy processes that contribute to the proliferation of residence restriction laws across states.…”

“…Other scholars have found that the instrumental effects of symbolic laws may vary across contexts. One example includes sexually violent predator statutes, which, according to Williams (2018b), affect communities differently based on communities' relationships with political and legal authorities. Similarly, mandatory sentencing laws, while having little impact on punishment practices broadly, have affected some sentences in particular areas for particular cases (Sutton 2013).…”

“…Sociolegal studies that have examined societal reactions to sex offenders suggest that the social construction and stigmatization of sex offenders contributes to public and political support for these types of increasingly punitive sex offender laws (e.g., Jenkins 1998;Lynch 2002;Janus 2006;Leon 2011a;Williams 2018a). These laws may serve the symbolic purpose of placating frightened, angry constituents during times of moral panic over sex offenders by communicating an official response to this socially identified problem (see Jenkins 1998;Kemshall and Maguire 2001;Meloy, Miller, and Curtis 2008;Terry 2011;Douard and Schultz 2013;Socia and Rydberg 2016).…”