Failure to Protect: America's Sexual Predator Laws And the Rise of the Preventive State [Hardcover]

Eric S. Janus (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0801443784 | ISBN-13: 978-0801443787 | Publication Date: July 27, 2006 | Edition: 1

Most crimes of sexual violence are committed by people known to the victim-acquaintances and family members. Yet politicians and the media overemphasize predatory strangers when legislating against and reporting on sexual violence. In this book, Eric S. Janus goes far beyond sensational headlines to expose the reality of the laws designed to prevent sexual crimes. He shows that "sexual predator" laws, which have intense public and political support, are counterproductive. Janus contends that aggressive measures such as civil commitment and Megan's law, which are designed to restrain sex offenders before they can commit another crime, are bad policy and do little to actually reduce sexual violence. Further, these new laws make use of approaches such as preventive detention and actuarial profiling that violate important principles of liberty.

Janus argues that to prevent sexual violence, policymakers must address the deep-seated societal problems that allow it to flourish. In addition to criminal sanctions, he endorses the specific efforts of some advocates, organizations, and social scientists to stop sexual violence by, for example, taking steps to change the attitudes and behaviors of school-age children and adolescents, improving public education, and promoting community treatment and supervision of previous offenders.

Janus also warns that the principles underlying the predator laws may be the early harbingers of a "preventive state" in which the government casts wide nets of surveillance and intervenes to curtail liberty before crimes of any type occur. More than a critique of the status quo, this book discusses serious alternatives and how best to overcome the political obstacles to achieving rational policy.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

"Eric S. Janus explores sexual predator laws from three perspectives: public safety, civil liberties, and effective government. He moves beyond the quick and easy arguments used both to defend and attack these laws, seeking policy solutions that can reduce sexual violence without scarring our constitutional values."--Roxanne Lieb, Director, Washington State Institute for Public Policy

"Failure to Protect is a vitally important book that demonstrates how we have drastically undermined the protections of our Constitution by creating a class of citizens for whom these protections no longer apply. The book raises this question: if one class of citizens can be excluded from the Bill of Rights, what other classes can also be excluded later on? This book should be essential reading for lawyers, law students, and those who care about preserving our liberties."--Charles Reich, Yale Law School, author of The Greening of America --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Eric S. Janus is Vice Dean and Professor of Law at William Mitchell College of Law. He is the author of Law and Mental Health Professionals and Civil Commitment in Minnesota.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 248 pages
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr; 1 edition (July 27, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801443784
• ISBN-13: 978-0801443787
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,043,277 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must-read!, May 27, 2009

By 

Karen Franklin "Forensic Psychologist" (El Cerrito, CA, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Failure to Protect: America's Sexual Predator Laws and the Rise of the Preventive State (Paperback)

In this insightful book, law professor Eric Janus cogently explains why sexual predator legislation, despite its allure of zero tolerance for sexual violence, makes for very bad public policy.

Predator laws will never work, he argues, because they target only a tiny fraction of sexual violence. An empty "cleansing ritual," they require no fundamental societal change. But they are far from harmless. They siphon vast sums of money away from other programs that could do more good for more people. And they reinforce a distorted notion of sexual assailants as mainly stranger rapists with abnormal psychological makeups.

On a potentially more dangerous level, they provide a template for the resurrection of preventive laws on a massive scale. Janus reminds us of the historical struggles that went into dismantling earlier preventive detention laws that locked up outsiders for what they might (or might not) do. These included slave laws, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and eugenic programs to forcibly sterilize and incapacitate "mental defectives." Sexual predator civil commitment laws are especially dangerous because we can all unite around hating the archetypal sexual bogeyman, and the "science" of risk prediction has a scientific and naturalized veneer that makes preventive detention seem more palatable.

One of Janus' most interesting arguments is that - perhaps accidentally - the sexual predator laws have become a powerful force for the politically conservative agenda of dismantling hard-fought feminist rape reforms. The "tabloid model of gender violence" epitomized in these laws favors biological and psychological explanations over sociocultural ones, and supports the patriarchal rape myth that rapists "lack control" over their sexual impulses.

Janus is no newcomer to this topic. He has written and lectured extensively on sex offender civil commitment and psychology-law topics more generally for the past 17 years or so. His knowledge base allows him to back up his arguments with empirical data. In this meticulously researched book, he also offers solutions, such as a public health harm reduction model and the proposition that sex offender risk can be lowered through carefully designed risk management and containment programs.

Everyone who is interested in the prevention of sex offending, as well as the creation of sound, scientifically based public policy, should read this book.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gracefully written and powerfully argued, November 10, 2006

By 

Benjamin G. Cooper (Minneapolis, MN USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Failure to Protect: America's Sexual Predator Laws And the Rise of the Preventive State (Hardcover)

It might not seem an inviting task to try to stem the mounting popular tide in favor of ever longer detention, by any means possible, of convicted sexual predators, but Eric Janus has managed to do so in a book that is carefully argued and evinces clearly both his wisdom and his compassion for the victims of crime. In addition to discussing the merits of extended detention of known predators and public monitoring of released sex offenders, treating both trends in the context of the question of how best to prevent sexual violence, Failure to Protect also takes up two larger social questions: why we are so focused on the "worst of the worst;" and our apparent willingness to trade civil liberties for safety (or the illusion of safety).

The book is astonishingly well written. It is lucidly organized into chapters and sections; you always know where you are in the argument. The prose is as elegant and clear as the reasoning is strong, free of the jargon that might so easily have marred a book on this subject. The punctuation and footnoting deserve commendation, as they unobtrusively guide the flow and document the argument. Rarely these days does any author get every detail of writing so right. Even the production gives evidence of unhurried care, with next to no misprints.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a book for everyone interested in justice for all, October 27, 2006

By 

Dorothy Sauber (Minneapolis, Minnesota) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Failure to Protect: America's Sexual Predator Laws And the Rise of the Preventive State (Hardcover)

Eric Janus, with a clear mind and precise hand, sets out to lead the call for reasonableness in an era of too eager politcally and socially to respond to "sexual predators" without consideration of the long term impacts of our political and legal tendencies to punish without logic and demonize without understanding the true causes of sexual violence in our everyday lives. This book raises questions about the future of us all as we rush to "fix" a problem we don't really understand and certainly don't want to talk about among ourselves.